Universal Audio Paradise Guitar Studio

Desertdweller said:
I think we’ve reached a point where any sound you really want is pretty quickly attainable. I’m all for more options. I give my self no excuses for not making awesome music with everything we have available today.
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Exactly. Especially in a mix. It's all about getting something that sounds good quickly and can have some vibe and inspiration. I mean bands were using Amp Farm for years and years after it was considered out of date because it was so easy to use. I had read Stone Temple Pilots were using that stuff even about a decade ago.
 
I tried it out today and like the inspiration the presets offer. In addition to the great sounds, it’s helpful to see how those sounds were created. For me, having no significant exposure to how those sounds came to be, it is fun lesson to learn.
I think Genome has it beat for UI and including NAM but Paradise is a great addition to the tool box.

I have the yearly Spark subscription (same price) and really only use it for what Paradise provides. Since my subscription renews next month I think I’ll just cancel it and buy Paradise. If it could run stand alone and had the other hardware UA pedals included and provided effects units to have presets it would be great.
 
what i liked were

-everything in one package (no hidden purchases)
-transparent design which allows to see what is present in chain
-Fantastic amps and fx selection (both pre and post)
-very well optimized and no CPU hog

I take back my earlier rant re the UAD microtransaction - i have had assumed this is one of UAD plugins that had mini purchases attached.

will try more but am convinced I will buy
 
Cactusprick said:
I take back my earlier rant re the UAD microtransaction - i have had assumed this is one of UAD plugins that had mini purchases attached.

will try more but am convinced I will buy
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I was fully convinced they were going to sell individuals amps too. In James Santiago's video I kept skipping ahead to see where he talks about the store or how to buy the 5150/Recto. I'm not ruling it out though...it's UAD. That's how they make their money.

Also for the record - Paradise like every other newer UAD plugin is native only. Can't run it on your Apollo to save computer DSP. Which is especially annoying because I have UAD Console sitting around eating over 1GB of system memory to passively route my audio inputs and outputs. Like I said, at some point I need to upgrade to a new M4 Mac with 16+ GB of RAM.
 
Installed the demo. Regardless of how much I'd personally wish for something more "ambitioned" (such as in allowing for things going beyond typical guitar sounds), I gotta give UA quite some props.
IMO this is quite easily the most "instant gratification" guitar suite out there. Quality of components and ease of use are just excellent, several presets are sounding great and need very little tweaking.
Within the constraints of the concept, I would however wish there were more drive pedals.
Otherwise, once this comes up in a sale, I may very likely bite.
 
Ok, latency might become an issue. Slapped together a patch with just Compressor, Vintage Fuzz, Showtime amp and 4x12 cab, ended up with 78 samples of additional latency - hence 1.7ms at 44.1kHz.
This is not a good value, it's around half of my general roundtrip latency on top.
 
So, fwiw, some latency numbers:

Dream, Enigmatic, Lion, Showtime amps: 34 samples.
Ruby: 37
Woodrow: 40

RAW, Big Fuzz, Vintage Fuzz: 22
Gold, TS, NVL: 5

Red Comp: 22 (interestingly enough, 0 for the 1176)

Blue Flanger: 11
Phaser, Trem: 5

224 Reverb: 1

Anything else (cabs included, which actually made me wonder a bit - but perhaps that's already accounted for with the amps, who knows...) doesn't add any latency on top.

So, a chain of, say, Compressor, RAW drive, Blue Flanger and Woodrow (not exactly too esoteric) would result in 95 samples of additional latency at 44.1kHz, which is around 2.1ms.

Bypassing any block in your chain will not change the latency it adds, you'll have to remove the block in order to get rid of the additional samples.

And in case someone's interested: The amount of samples scales up with the samplerate set in your DAW. So when you run things in 88.2kHz, there will be the double amount of additional samples, hence the same resulting latency.

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Are these really bad numbers? It absolutely depends but I'd tend to say yes, especially as others don't suffer from this (and for comparisons sake: My entire floor pedal with 4 full ADDA cycles only kicks in at a tad over 3ms).
Personally, I think they should add a "zero latency mode" that you could switch to (such as, say, Acustica Audio do). That'd cause higher CPU usage, but would allow you to always stay within the latency values determined by the buffer settings you're using in your DAW.
 
Sascha Franck said:
So, fwiw, some latency numbers:

Dream, Enigmatic, Lion, Showtime amps: 34 samples.
Ruby: 37
Woodrow: 40

RAW, Big Fuzz, Vintage Fuzz: 22
Gold, TS, NVL: 5

Red Comp: 22 (interestingly enough, 0 for the 1176)

Blue Flanger: 11
Phaser, Trem: 5

224 Reverb: 1

Anything else (cabs included, which actually made me wonder a bit - but perhaps that's already accounted for with the amps, who knows...) doesn't add any latency on top.

So, a chain of, say, Compressor, RAW drive, Blue Flanger and Woodrow (not exactly too esoteric) would result in 95 samples of additional latency at 44.1kHz, which is around 2.1ms.

Bypassing any block in your chain will not change the latency it adds, you'll have to remove the block in order to get rid of the additional samples.

And in case someone's interested: The amount of samples scales up with the samplerate set in your DAW. So when you run things in 88.2kHz, there will be the double amount of additional samples, hence the same resulting latency.

---

Are these really bad numbers? It absolutely depends but I'd tend to say yes, especially as others don't suffer from this (and for comparisons sake: My entire floor pedal with 4 full ADDA cycles only kicks in at a tad over 3ms).
Personally, I think they should add a "zero latency mode" that you could switch to (such as, say, Acustica Audio do). That'd cause higher CPU usage, but would allow you to always stay within the latency values determined by the buffer settings you're using in your DAW.
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Obviously you just need to run a UA audio interface with 12 cores of processing. Duh.

Though I'm guessing this doesn't come as a UA plugin, just Spark-type.

Its almost as if all those years making plugins designed to run on dsp has UA a little behind the ball in coding plugins to run extremely low latency on CPU.
 
Boudoir Guitar said:
Its almost as if all those years making plugins designed to run on dsp has UA a little behind the ball in coding plugins to run extremely low latency on CPU.
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At least partially it looks like.

To give them a little credit, though, at least they report the additional latencies to the host properly. This isn't happening with quite some other plugins where only the "baseline" latency is reported - but once you're adding anything latency introducing within the plugin, this isn't taken into account and stays unreported. Which, fwiw, sometimes isn't all that bad, either - as the player may compensate for additional latency manually, so there's no need for any double compensation. As usual, latency is a lot of grey area.

However, regardless of how we look at it, 2ms of additional latency for a guitar suite *is* a lot.
 
On my lunch break I briefly used my Tele and went through the factory presets and tried a few tweaks.

Overall it sounds good...but I felt I noticed differences in latency depending on what you had in the chain. I'm not super latency sensitive, but it was enough to be noticeable at times.

I like the user interface, and a lot of it sounds good...but I feel like this is another product I don't necessarily need. When scrolling through the presets, every time I landed on one that used the Lion I was happier than when it used any of the other amps. Didn't like the Woodrow presets most of the time, and I'd have to build an Enigmatic preset from scratch.

I have to admit I have this very one-track mind for tonal preference. Marshall style amps, tape delays, plate reverbs.
 
laxu said:
On my lunch break I briefly used my Tele and went through the factory presets and tried a few tweaks.

Overall it sounds good...but I felt I noticed differences in latency depending on what you had in the chain. I'm not super latency sensitive, but it was enough to be noticeable at times.

I like the user interface, and a lot of it sounds good...but I feel like this is another product I don't necessarily need. When scrolling through the presets, every time I landed on one that used the Lion I was happier than when it used any of the other amps. Didn't like the Woodrow presets most of the time, and I'd have to build an Enigmatic preset from scratch.

I have to admit I have this very one-track mind for tonal preference. Marshall style amps, tape delays, plate reverbs.
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Yeah I like the suite but the amps just aren’t for me. If they do a version with all the high gain amps I’ll grab it for sure
 
laxu said:
but I felt I noticed differences in latency depending on what you had in the chain. I'm not super latency sensitive, but it was enough to be noticeable at times.
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I didn't really notice it much until I slapped that compressor in front of one of the fuzzes. Still not so much it couldn't play through it (as said, my overall RTL is at 3.5ms, so those additional 2ms took me to roughly 5.5, which I still consider very playable), but there's always the moment when you might want to add something else introducing some bits of additional latency - and that might take you over the tipping point.
Anyhow, I think it should be possible to come up with some HQ modeling plugin that doesn't introduce that much latency, especially given that this very thing here isn't particularly CPU hungry.

[Nathan] said:
If they do a version with all the high gain amps I’ll grab it for sure
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The problem with their high gain models very possibly is that they're licensed stuff from other vendors - which is likely why you can only get the versions requiring UA hardware directly from them, the native versions are only available from Brainworx and Softtube, so UA can't just slap them into this suite.
 
Sascha Franck said:
I didn't really notice it much until I slapped that compressor in front of one of the fuzzes. Still not so much it couldn't play through it (as said, my overall RTL is at 3.5ms, so those additional 2ms took me to roughly 5.5, which I still consider very playable), but there's always the moment when you might want to add something else introducing some bits of additional latency - and that might take you over the tipping point.
Anyhow, I think it should be possible to come up with some HQ modeling plugin that doesn't introduce that much latency, especially given that this very thing here isn't particularly CPU hungry.
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TBF those latency issues can easily be solved by using something else while recording. It's a little bit annoying but if you're recording and mixing a song, the performance side is relatively short compared to the time you spend on the rest of the track. For something aimed purely at live performance, where the playback system is likely to change often (and there may be additional latency beyond your control) I think low latency is more of an issue. There's enough workarounds I think to make it work.


Sascha Franck said:
The problem with their high gain models very possibly is that they're licensed stuff from other vendors - which is likely why you can only get the versions requiring UA hardware directly from them, the native versions are only available from Brainworx and Softtube, so UA can't just slap them into this suite.
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if UA do a high gain plugin, it absolutely will not feature anything from BX or Softube (and its unlikely to feature any official branding from anyone based off things so far). The recent amp sims are 100% UA's own products. Woodrow removed any official branding from the previous DSP Fender plugin that UA made, and they removed the Ibanez branding from their tubescreamer quite a while back. It seems like the pedals have been totally remodelled for Paradise anyway. Those products were made by UA completely, the Softube Marshall and Brainworx products are entirely their own doing and don't have any involvement from UA (besides running on their platform). Softube and Brainworx have made those products native anyway.

I think the main issue for a High Gain Suite is so far they've only released the 5150 and Rectifier pedals. I'm sure if they don't already have other amps waiting in the pipeline they won't be far off. They just seem to have a model that involves drip feeding things so users have the opportunity to buy much of the same thing over and over again.
 
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MirrorProfiles said:
TBF those latency issues can easily be solved by using something else while recording.
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That's actually one of the no-gos for me. I want to play with the sound that is actually used (even if I fool around with it later on). It's also a matter of how I play, which can be considerably different when the amps feel different.

MirrorProfiles said:
if UA do a high gain plugin, it absolutely will not feature anything from BX or Softube (and its unlikely to feature any official branding from anyone based off things so far). The recent amp sims are 100% UA's own products.
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I'm absolutely aware of that - but there's been people kinda requesting UA to put "their" high gain offerings in as well - just that they don't have any of their own, at least not in plugin versions.
Anyhow, I'm pretty sure the highgain pedals will find their way into Paradise - but not for free.
 
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