My favorite Delay - Kjaerhus Classic Delay

Because of todays of good weather, I want to do a a bit shorter feature today. So I want to feature once again a very simple but wonderful VST effect plugin: The Kjaerhus Classic Delay, by the Kjaerhus company which passed away much too early. I personally use this delay in most of my productions, and you will, if you know my music, surely recognize the sound immediately. With few exceptions, I actualy use no other delay effect. This is because of a bit of lazyness and on the other hand it is because of the quality and the sound of this plugin. The Classic Delay is quite easy to use, because, as with all products of the Kjaerhus Classic series, ease of use is a key feature. You really don't have to fiddle around a lot to achieve superior results. However, this delay comes with some surprising functionalities, which are usually only found in commercial products.

From left to right one finds the following:

1. an input level control, which determines the panorama of the input signal. TIP: This is especially important for the Ping-pong mode described under 7.
2. an often-overlooked little button by which you can convert the input signal into a mono signal. Sometimes this is quite a useful thing.
3. a switch for delay simulation types. The are three choices:  tape, analog and digital delay.
4. two numeric fields, which you can change by clicking them with the left mouse button, holding the left mouse button and moving the mouse up and down. The values set here apply only if the sync button described below is set to ON. In this case, the tempo of the VST is synchronized with the host application. The upper field specifies how many beats a cycle of the delay covers. The second field now indicates how many "echoes" are to occur within the period set in the upper field. I want to be honest and say that these very precise and easy to set up parameters are, in combination with the superb sound of that plugin, the cause for making it my favorite delay VST. Below those fields, there is a small button that determines whether the settings made in those fields are determining the effect and the tempo of the VST is synchronized to the VST host application, or whether the tempo of the effect is asynchronously to the host application. In the latter case, everything is determined by the Time(s) control, described under 5.
5. a Time (s) controller, which only works if the sync button, described under 4. is set to off. Then the tempo of the VST is not synchronized with the host applications tempo and the the settings  of the fields described under 4. are absolutely obsolete. The purpose of the Time (s) controller is to set how long a Delaycycle is. If the controller is set to the lowest level, every 0.05 seconds, an echo is generated, which is too fast to hear it at all. It only leads to an amplification of sound. At the highest setting of the controller every 5 seconds an echo is generated. TIP: If you need accurate echoes, make sure the sync button is on and leave the time(s) control alone ;)
6. a feedback controller that indicates how long the delay will be heared. Sorry, I'm not an expert in electronics. Therefore, I can not tell you much about how it all theoretically runs. One thing is clear: At the lowest setting, the effect stops somewhat immediately. At the highest setting, the sound echoes almost forever and will overlap. NOTE: Sometimes very loud signals are generated by setting this control to the highest value. Danger of clipping!
7. a ping-pong button which sets the pingpong mode on and off.
8. a control to set the sampling quality of the effect. If your computer is not too antique, you should set this to "HI", because the Kjaerhus Classic Delay is really programmed to be not too CPU load intensive.
9. a low cut knob that allows you block out low portions of the sound from the effect.
10. a high cut knob that allows you block out high portions of the sound from the effect.
11. a controller that determines how the relationship between the effect signal and the original signal on the output is. Turning the knob to the left, you get the pure original signal, turning it fully clockwise, you get only the output of the effect.
12. a controller for the volume of the output signal. TIP: The Classic Delay makes the sound a little more quiet. Therefore, if one wants to rehash the original volume of the signal, turn the knob a little higher.

Ok, that became somewhat  extensive ;) So we get straight to the quality: The sound is even superb if you set the "Quality" knob to the lowest setting. As with all products made by Kjaerhus, much attention has been paid to resource-friendlyness. The VST has been working, even with multiple instances simultaneously, already on my Pentium II 233 Mhz with 16 MB of RAM back then in 2004. So you really don't have to worry that your computer might be too old. Crashes, freezing the DAW and other problems? NEVER happened since 2004!

Conclusion: One of the truly essential and most used VST effects in my arsenal. Especially for dub reggae this VST is absolutely wonderful. A must have!

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE Kjaerhus Classic Delay!

Kjaerhus Master Limiter - One knob, much fun!

Today I want to feature a VST Effects Plugin after featuring sound generators only in my recent posts. And as the first VST effects plugin, I want to feature a tool for which it would be an understatement to call it essential. It is the Master Limiter of the free Classic Series by the company Kjaerhus. It seems like Kjaerhus is no longer existant, which is a pitty, because all products by Kjaerhus were allways top notch. So let's have a minute of silence for a company which passed away long before it was time.

What does the Master Limiter? It limits, easy as that! ;) This means, it prevents the output signal from getting too loud and thus prevents clipping and distortion. It simply eliminates those ugly red peaks in the levelmeter. The Kjaerhus Master Limiter does a very great job here, because it doesn't cut everything above a certain level away in rude way, but in a quite soft way, so that most of the times you dont even recognize it. With other limiters I experienced most of the time, that it felt like the sound was bashed against a concrete ceiling. This may be intended by some folks some times, but most of the times it is not wanted.

But that's not all: Der Kjaerhus Master Limiter also has a builtin Compressor, which will pump up sounds, which would otherwise drown in the mix, to a good level. One can pump up the whole mix using the Master Limiter, so it gets more punch. The plugin is, as the name says, mainly intended for usage in the master channel of the DAWs mixer, but it also does a good job in single instruments channels. An unleashed monsterbass, for example, can be tamed by the Master Limiters, so it does not peak. And you can controll the overall level of that monsterbass, so other mixer channels get a chance to be heared. If you do a filter-o-rama with loads of cutoff/resonance craziness, it takes care of that the sound doesn't clip at extreme parts and that the ears and speakers of the audience stay intact. That's one side: The avoidance of too loud signals. But it also works in the opposite way: It happens, that this particular synthesizer sound, which has most of the time just the real punch, certainly drowns in the mix. If the dynamics of that synthesizer sound are not too essential, one simply puts a Kjaerhus Master Limiter on the mixer channel of the synthesizer, and voila: A good level all the time.

Great! A panacea for all sound problems, which turns everybody into an audio mastering genius, right? No, that's NOT true! The disadvantage of using an All-In-One compressor/limiter combination is, that the dynamics of the mix are going more or less down the drain. What is great for Techno, Dub, Dubstep and other rather loud music styles, is not that good for classical music, orchestral music and rather celestial music and flushes the dynamics completely down the toilet. It is therefore advisable to think twice, before one puts a Master Limiter with treshold turned up to the max on each and every mixer channel. That makes only sense if you want to blast your audience away. The compressor takes care of the punch and the limiter prevents the levelmeter from sticking in a always red state.

The operating of the Kjaerhus Master Limiter is grandiosely simple. There is JUST ONE KNOB, which defines the limiting treshold, at which limiting should kick in. Then there is a VU Meter which shows quite precisely how much work the limiter has to do eg. how much loudness was cut off. If this VU Meter is allways half or even fully lit, then one has done something awfully and fundamentally wrong with the mix. One should carefully check all mixer channels then, because something is MUCH TOO LOUD!!! From this point of view, the Kjaerhus Master Limiter is not just a tool to improve the final mix, but also teaches one to avoid limiting by clever mixing. Because limiting is in most cases the result of a bad mix.

Quality: Like with the previosly featured plugins, I can say only one thing for the stability and ressource hungryness: Everything fine here! No problems of any kind. I never experienced problems when using large numbers of instances of that plugin.

Conclusion: Absolutely indispensable! Most of the times it is enough to use the default preset of the Kjaerhus Master Limiter. That one knob has to be tweaked just occasionally. So to work with the Master Limiter, one has just to put it into the mixer channel, and that's it. The software is rocksolid and ressource friendly. If the Kjaerhus Master Limiter did not exist, it had to be invented.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE KJAERHUS MASTER LIMITER!