Plugins

My goal when using plugins is mainly to recreate either the live or studio environment that Zeppelin played in, especially Olympic Studios in London. Luckily Universal Audio has enough recreations of gear used at Olympic, where Zeppelin recorded a huge portion of their studio work, to begin to approximate recording there. Good enough for bedroom Olympic anyway!

My plugin chain for Olympic using UA plugins is this:

• Ox Box direct output, after cab sim and sometimes effects.
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• Apollo x4 Unison preamp using the Helios Type 69 Preamp channel strip, to emulate the Helios console they had. This is an essential ingredient in any studio, and having a plugin version that Zeppelin used on so many studio tracks is so cool, and a large part of why I use UA stuff. Being able to use their Unison preamps to load the Helios onto a DSP chip and have basically no latency is super cool as well.
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• One of the many 1176 compressors UA has, set for just a bit of compression if I'm going for a live sound, which I usually am. Still working on my compressor game, and I like dynamics, so I don't go crazy here with compression. Though at some point I want to try for the 2 1176 compressors in series and in “all-buttons” mode to get the studio Black Dog tone.
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• Then it's some plate echo, usually their EMT 140 Classic Plate Reverberator, which, of course, is what they used at Olympic. Sometimes I use their Pure Plate Reverb, as it sounds great as well.
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• Then it's a tape emulation of some kind, to get just a bit of analog flavor. I use it for both live and studio tones, as most (all?) audience or soundboard bootlegs were recorded to some sort of tape or another. I'm still early on in playing with the different tape plugins, but thus far I've used Ampex ATR-102 Mastering Tape and Studer A800 Multichannel. Both are pretty subtle, but still fun to have in the chain.