There are about ten moves I make on every church recording and every client song. Push a preamp. Lift the air and take out the box. Hold a vocal still. Glue a bus. Put the record in a room. For years I made those moves with a pile of plug-ins from different companies, each with its own licence, its own updater and its own idea of where a knob should be. AMB Analog, the Amanorsac Mixing Bundle, is those ten moves as ten plug-ins, built from the ground up and sold for one price.
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What it is
Ten separate processors, each with its own engine, its own faceplate and its own factory presets. Not one plug-in with ten skins. The panels are drawn to the proportions of real hardware and the type is set to be read from across a room.
Heritage EQ is a five-band class-A style equaliser with true shelves, three bells, sweepable filters and four characters from clean to tape. Strike FET is the compressor for attitude, with a microsecond attack, ratios to 20:1 plus all-buttons, a sidechain high pass and an external key. ReelSat is a tape machine with three formulas at 7.5, 15 or 30 ips, head bump, wow and flutter. Silk Passive EQ carves the curve everyone loves, with separate boost and cut networks. Iron Pre is a transformer preamp with three transformers and three input impedances. BusForge VCA is glue in the amount you ask for, with auto release and a sidechain high pass. Plate Four is an electro-mechanical plate with a tension control, pre-delay to 500 ms and decay to 8 seconds. Console One is a console channel in the order a console puts it. Valve Drive chooses triode, pentode or cascade and lets you lean the stage toward even or odd harmonics. Lumen Opto is the optical leveller you leave on the vocal.
There are 187 factory presets, filed by what you are working on: vocals, drums, bass, guitars, keys, strings and horns, the mix bus, the master, creative and utility. Your own presets save as plain XML files you can copy to another computer or send to someone else.
Measured before it ships
An automated audit runs all ten plug-ins at 44.1, 48, 96 and 192 kHz, at buffer sizes from 16 to 2048 samples, with every control at its extremes. It proves every parameter changes the sound, silence in gives silence out, bypass returns exactly what went in, and every factory preset loads and does something. A bank of presets that load but do nothing is the most common problem in a bundle this size, and only a machine will check three hundred times without getting bored.
What else is out there
The big analogue-emulation bundles are excellent and priced like it. Waves Mercury, the largest, listed at $7,599 with retailers selling it around $1,999 at the time of writing, and the subscription bundles from other companies run as a monthly fee for as long as you use them. AMB Analog is not two hundred plug-ins. It is the ten that do the everyday moves, for $39, with a licence that is yours.
Who it is for
Anyone who mixes every week and wants the character moves under one key: church recordings, gospel and worship records, singer-songwriters, podcasts. If you need an AAX version for Pro Tools, this release does not have one.
Price and licence
$39, once. VST3 and standalone on Windows 10 and 11 and on macOS. Sample rates from 44.1 to 192 kHz. One key unlocks all ten on two computers, thirty days offline between check-ins. A year of updates is included and the version you have keeps working after that. AMB Digital, the precision bundle, is a separate purchase with its own key.
Written by Stephen Amanor Sackey — producer, mix engineer and music director, Virginia. More about the studio.