Leslie Sanford has released an updated version of his freeware Sanford Bass Tightener effect in VST plugin format for Windows based host applications. The plugin’s source code was fully rewritten and it’s now also compatible with 64-bit digital audio workstations running on Windows (no Mac support yet).
Bass Tightener is a classic stereo-to-mono tool, with an intuitive user interface and a couple of useful additional controls which we don’t often see in plugins of this type. The basic workflow is, well, pretty basic – the user can choose a cutoff frequency and reduce the stereo width of all frequency content below it. This is pretty much all you need in order to tame the stereo width of your bass patches and your mix as a whole. But it’s also possible to do some other useful things with Bass Tightener, such as soloing the bass (or high) frequencies, or boosting the volume of the bass portion of the processed signal. The developer has also included a handy filter slope control, so that the cutoff between the two frequency bands can be more or less steep depending of your needs. In other words, the plugin can also work as a simple low-pass filter and a very basic 2-band equalizer.
We’ve seen quite a few similar freeware plugins released in the past several months, the most recent ones being M/Ster Balance and A1StereoControl. I’m planning to do a little round-up list of these freeware tools, but I’m not sure how to name this specific plugin category. What do you guys think is the best way to describe this type of effect? Bass monoizer, bass stereo controller, or something else?
Anyways, this is the second plugin coming from Leslie Sanford in less than a month (he re-released Sanford Delay a few weeks ago) after a very long break. It’s great to see him back and I’m really looking forward to more of his re-released freebie effects (and secretly hoping for some brand new Sanford plugins as well).
Download
Bass Tightener is available for free download via Leslie Sanford’s website (1,075 KB download size, ZIP archive, 32-bit & 64-bit VST plugin format for Windows).
5 Comments
David
onI really like Leslie Sanford’s delay, his plugins really invite knob twiddling and are very intuitive, and this brings something new too. I would love to see someone develop a full bass bus multi fx with multiband spliting, eq and resonance filter, compression, distortion, chorus and stereo-to-mono.
Tomislav Zlatic
onYeah that would be cool, sort of like a specialized channel strip plugin for bass.
U-o
onThanks. Months ago I tried BassLane (otiumFX) plugin to control the stereo field of lower frequencies, I’ll try this one too. I have a lot of respect to Leslie Sanford plugins – would be nice to see back plugins like PhaserCM, Super Chorus and Cobalt (of course).
Tomislav Zlatic
onDefinitely check this one out, it’s really good. And I’m also hoping to see for stuff from Leslie, great developer!
David
onI think a section for these tools would be good. You already have ‘stereo enhancers’, but perhaps ‘stereo shapers’ would be a better title. My favorites for this section are: A1 Stereo control, dimension expander, GMonobass, Gspace, GStereo, MStereo Expander, Sanford Bass Tightener, and Stereo Touch.
My favorite panning tools are: Dual Panner, GFM Psypan, MAutopan, MVibrato and Pancake2.