With BABY Audio launching eight innovative releases in just a few years, it’s time to take a closer look at the company that’s taking the plugin world by storm.
Launching its first plugin in 2019, BABY Audio is still, well, a “baby” in the pro audio world. Starting with I Heart NY — a homage to the Big Apple and its distinct style of parallel compression — BABY Audio has kept its foot on the accelerator, debuting no less than eight new plugins in just a few short years.
Aside from being a precocious upstart in a world of established heavyweights, BABY Audio brings something genuinely new to the table. Its plugins combine unparalleled ease of use (each is strictly limited to a single-screen interface), elegant visual design, and most importantly, a distinctly experimental sonic character.
Let’s dive into the innovative releases that have made this firm a plugin wunderkind.
Dynamics: I Heart NY, Parallel Aggressor, and Smooth Operator
As already mentioned, BABY Audio announced itself to the world by way of the I Heart NY parallel compressor. Almost unnervingly easy to operate, this two-knob, one-fader affair demonstrated to the world that slamming and satisfying parallel compression needn’t be complicated. But this plugin was far from the end of the company’s adventures in dynamic processing.
Parallel Aggressor took this principle to the next level, adding an extra channel of saturation to the dry and compressed signals, and giving users an elegant way to blend all three tones without turning away from the plugin screen.
An even more sophisticated take on the art of dynamics is recently released Smooth Operator. It analyses incoming audio balances the dynamics across the frequency spectrum in real-time. It’s just the kind of plugin you need for subtle, musical balancing, rather than lashings of vintage, lo-fi flavour.
Tape: TAIP and Super VHS
But what if lashings of said vintage, lo-fi flavour are your thing? BABY Audio has got you covered with two radically different interpretations of tape. TAIP is for all the reel-to-reel aficionados, who love to inject their mixes with all the old school analog warmth and glorious harmonic distortion that only tape can provide.
Super VHS is something altogether different. It meticulously cops the tone of the ancient, obsolete, yet culturally significant VHS tape format and invites you to experiment with it in a completely novel, creative context. Crusty, warped, and gorgeously retro, it’s hard not to become addicted.
Ambience: Comeback Kid, Spaced Out, and Crystalline
Need a little space to breathe? As you might’ve guessed by now, BABY Audio has taken an innovative approach to reverb, delay, and modulation.
Comeback Kid was the company’s first foray into this world, delivering a fully-fledged echo machine capable of dubby vintage tape echoes, all the way through to intricate rhythmic textures.
If Comeback Kid is a — dare I say — “conventional” take on delay, Spaced Out brings a new workflow to this category of processing. It’s a “wet” effects all-rounder, combining reverb, delay, and modulation in a way that intuitively encourages experimentation. Plus, with its dice feature, you have all the joys of randomisation built-in!
The newest plugin to grace the BABY Audio family is Crystalline. It’s definitely on the pristine end of the spectrum, with futuristic reverbs and reflections, width, and transient shaping all available at the click of a mouse.
To find out more about BABY Audio, visit the website.
