Compress To Impress with the FG-2A from Slate Digital

When you sit down to mix your freshly tracked vocals there are infinite possibilities. EQ, reverb, compression, vocoders, distortion, delays, pitch correction, and the list never ends.

If you have hung around professional music studios in any capacity you are sure to have seen one of the famous LA-2A compressors in a rack. Almost every plugin company has emulated this compressor, and for good reason. It’s limited selection of knobs and levers is deceptively simple but adds so much secret sauce to your audio chain. You can find a model of it from every plugin vendor, so when Steven Slate announced the addition of their take on the LA-2A, I was immediately excited to try it out.

The FG-2A is the latest collaboration with Fabrice Gabriel and brings the famous opto-compressor into my own toolkit.

What’s So Special?

I will keep it short. You are able to apply massive amounts of compression and somehow it sounds natural. There is a buttery smooth quality that is instantly recognizable because it is sonically engrained into the last 50 years of music. The attack and release settings are not configurable and is partially dependent on the sound source. Check out UAs background and history on the LA-2A to get into the weeds of this military tool turned audio legend.

Use It

In practice it can be applied to any audio chain, but is known for the way it works magic on vocals and drums. Sources that are particularly jumpy and aggressive come to life as you crank up the peak reduction. You can pull out your digital screwdriver to adjust the high pass and like most slate plugins you get a mix knob to adjust the wet/dry signal. You can slam the gain reduction but mix it at 30% and have the best of both worlds. What are you waiting for? If you haven’t downloaded the latest update, get out of here and start using the FG-2A on your current projects!