Following up the bass guitar-focused ToneSpot Bass, the second in Audified’s series of all-in-one “Swiss army knife” instrument processors aims to provide everything required to make acoustic stringed instrument recordings - from guitar and banjo to violin and piano - stand out in the mix.
ToneSpot Acoustic is available in Pro (which we’re looking at here) and Express versions, the latter priced $49 and serving more as a preset library, with less by way of user editing.
Acoustic Pro’s eight modules put an impressive amount of control at your fingertips, starting with the Character section, where you select from three broad tonal flavours (Natural, Vintage and Modern) and three more specific alterations (Bright, Scoop and Lo-Fi). Valve-style saturation is then applied, followed by a superb 8-band EQ, with its various gentle peaking, shelving and filtering bands given ‘musical’ names - Body, Paper, Wood, Sparkle, etc.
Apart from the high- and low-pass filters, every band has two preset centre/corner frequencies and up to+/-9dB of gain. A compressor with a choice of 50ms or 500ms Attack, and dry/wet Mix for parallel processing, follows; then two high-Q ‘surgical‘ EQ bands with up to 50dB of targeted attenuation or 20dB of gain. Next comes a second, faster compressor for levelling, four effects (Tremolo, Modulation, Delay and Reverb), and a Finalizer section housing four switchable EQ profiles for instantly adding air, fatness and more.
Acoustic Pro makes improvement and shaping of acoustic instruments intuitive, and sounds superb doing it - we particularly like the well-judged Shaping EQ, and the effectiveness of the Character and Finalizer modules. With the current ‘mono input only’ limitation due to be fixed in an imminent update, our only real issue is that there’s no way to change the signal flow, which could be an annoyance with regard to the position of the EQ and dynamics sections.
