We’ve got a specially tailored version of Acustica Audio’s one-knob Neve tribute this month, here’s how you can get the best from it

>Free software

Acustica Audio has an impressive record for developing plugin emulations of classic and rare hardware, delivering plugins that not only sound great but also prioritise the user experience with intuitive and expanded controls with fantastic visuals. This month we’re excited to offer an exclusive new Computer Music-branded Acustica plugin. Acustica’s Fire: The CM Comp uses the same Acqua Engine found in their regular plugins. It therefore benefits from Acustica’s proprietary VVK (Vectorial Volterra Kernels) tech to deliver a highly accurate representation of nonlinear analogue behaviour. It also uses their latest Hyper system to give the best performance with a low CPU hit.

Fire: The CM Comp is a single-knob plugin in the same style as Acustica’s other 10 Fire plugins such as Fire The Bus+ and the excellent freebie Fire The Pump saturator. The Neveinspired plugin combines compression, clipping, saturation and EQ, with a focused set of controls and single large threshold knob.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to claim your personal plugin code and get up and running. We’ll then work through the basic operational aspects of the plugin. It’s easy to write off single-knob plugins as inflexible, but this is often not the case, and in the following walkthrough pages, we’ll show you a bunch of uses for this excellent processor.

Finally, Acustica’s stable has some great plugins including the Urei-inspired Nickel compressor, Neve-style Gold 5 channel strip, as well as Lava, which is a mic emulation plugin, and Sienna, their headphone mixing system. So, if you like Fire: The CM Comp and want to find out what else Acustica has to offer why not head over to www.acustica-audio.com.