New Software Review: Goldplate by Kush Audio

Based off of the storied EMT 140 and 240 plate reverbs, Kush Audio and Relab aim to put the classic sound of these units into the hands of a new generation of music makers.

Kush Audio and Relab have recently joined forces in an effort to emulate the vintage sound of an old EMT 140 steel plate reverb, along with a shinier EMT 240, all within the same plugin.

The result is Goldplate, a unique tool that allows you to apply harmonic distortion pre-reverb and a thick pumping compression post-reverb. The 240 that they modeled has a goldfoil plate, which makes it quite a rare piece of equipment, and also explains the name of the plugin.

Vintage plate reverbs are typically very desirable for the dense, highly diffuse, and midrange-focused sound they provide. The downside to these old devices is that they are extremely limited in the number of controls they offer. By creating a plugin emulation of vintage gear, manufacturers aren’t limited in the number of parameters they can pack into a device. Kush pinpointed a weak point in two old school analog reverbs, supercharged them with new features, and revived them in the digital world.

Features

The software designers at Kush have included some useful controls in Goldplate. The Drive knob can apply either gentle tube harmonics, or when driven, heavy distortion. The Blend knob acts as a dry/wet control and allows you to blend the reverb in parallel with the unprocessed input signal. There’s also a Gain knob that will enable you to apply +/- 18 dB of gain to your output signal.

A slider labeled Material allows you to control the resonant character and reverberant response of the metal plate. You can select between a steel plate that provides a broad, relaxed resonance, or a gold plate that provides a bright, shiny resonance. Additionally, you’re able to blend these sounds together to varying degrees.

Another exciting feature of Goldplate is the Squish control. It resembles the Squish compressor found on the UBK-1 plugin by Kush, and is designed to thicken the reverb at low intensity, increase the reverb’s sustain at medium intensity, and apply a pumping effect and distortion at high-intensity settings. The Squish control produces three very distinct sounds depending on where you set the knob.

There are also the typical controls you would expect to find on a modern plugin reverb. These controls include reverb time, a high pass filter, low pass filter, width control, as well as a pre-delay knob. Going a step further, Goldplate provides an oversampling feature that manipulates instances of the plugin session-wide and is very useful for freeing up CPU. There’s also a convenient polarity control that essentially inverts the reverb’s phase.

Goldplate includes a preset manager where you can save and call on presets. It comes with a fair number of patches that will be more than enough to get you started. Each preset is labeled to either describe the space it emulates, the element in your mix it is intended for, or the feeling it aims to invoke in your listener.

In Use

The Squish control is one of my favorite features found in Goldplate. I didn’t fully understand what it was doing at first because it produces a range of effects, so I recommend you crank the Blend knob to 100% to get a good idea of the effect it has. Once you’re happy with how your reverb sounds, dial back the Blend control. This is a useful method for finding optimal settings on any reverb.

The most unique control in Goldplate is the Material slider. Just pushing this slider over to “Gold” can open up your entire track. I found that setting this slider to somewhere between “Steel” and “Gold” was often the most appropriate choice. “Steel” on its own produces a sound that is a bit darker than what I’m typically looking for, while “Gold” on its own produces a sound that has a significant amount of high-end resonance. This is a testament to the wide range of tones this single slider provides, and being able to pick a point between these two extremes makes Goldplate very versatile within the world of plate reverbs.

I typically apply reverb using an aux track so that I can process it further on its own. The nice thing about Goldplate is that it allows you to apply compression, distortion, as well as a high pass and low pass filter. In my opinion, the fewer plugins I have to use the better, so it’s a big plus that all this extra functionality is packed into one device.

One of the things that I particularly like about Goldplate, but that is perhaps subjective, is that regardless of how you set the controls, it will almost always produce the characteristic sound of a plate reverb. It has an inherently shiny tone, even when you pull the cutoff frequency of the low pass filter right down to a minimum value of 500 Hz. There’s something about the tone Goldplate produces that is very metallic, and that would lend itself incredibly well to a bright Pop mix, or even a lot of current EDM.

To Be Critical

If you like applying reverb in parallel, that’s great—but you need to keep your eye on the level of the signal that you’re feeding into Goldplate. This plugin is input level dependent and is equipped with a VU meter that will allow you to target an optimal input level. While I wouldn’t consider the device being input level dependent an issue, it’s definitely something you should keep in mind when applying parallel processing. Multiple sends can sum together and peak well above 0 VU.

In addition, the preset manager slightly confused me at first. There are two menus that you need to select from; the first menu has you choose a preset author, and the second menu has you select the preset itself. Although this layout provides obvious credit to the authors of the presets, I didn’t find it to be very useful. Kush actually informed me after running into this snag that the preset manager “…doesn’t have to be used like that. Typically, you’d select a bank like “Tight” and then all of the presets in the next menu represent shorter/faster reverbs.” If you run into the same issue that I did, just be aware that you can sort the presets differently than how they’re sorted by default.

Summing it Up

Goldplate is a strong contender in the world of plate reverbs, thanks to the number of features it offers. Regardless of what you do to the settings, it’s still going to sound like a plate reverb, but that’s what I love about this plugin. Kush took two classic studio reverbs, identified what they were lacking, and re-packaged them into a powerful plugin that produces a dynamic range of tones, characteristic of classic plate reverbs.

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