EQ before or after compression, and a PLL synth — Sunday Loop #013
Why Sunday Loop exists
The week moves fast. Between work, sessions, and everything else, the good reads get lost in the noise.
Every Sunday evening I share a few links — things I found worth reading during the week. Logic Pro, sound design, sampling, the occasional curveball. No algorithms, no filler. Just a few things I’d genuinely recommend to a friend.
Grab a coffee. It won’t take long.
— Ewald
This Week
1. EQ Before or After Compression? Logic Pro Signal-Chain Decisions
Category: Logic Pro
An old mixing question with an actually useful answer: it depends on what the compressor should react to. Corrective EQ first when rumble or proximity boom is triggering the gain reduction; tonal EQ after when the sound needs shaping without touching the detector’s decisions. The level-matching advice for A/B tests alone is worth the read.
2. Phaseburn One, a multi-engine synth plugin built around a phase-locked loop
Category: Sound Design
A control circuit from radio engineering turned into a synth voice: the PLL oscillator constantly chases its reference, and the character comes from the moments where the loop loses lock and pulls itself back in. Around it sit a 12-mode morphing oscillator, a vector phase-shaping oscillator, a sub, and a node-based patchbay. Beta now, full release October 15 at €149.
3. Osterhouse Sounds Note Sampler turns every key of your keyboard into a MIDI looper
Category: Workflow
Ben Osterhouse puts a loop station on every single key: record a MIDI clip onto a key, trigger it like a note, overdub it, then resample several running loops into a new clip. Cascade mode stacks up to three of these keyboards. At $29, one of the most original MIDI ideas this year.
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