Tone Projects Hendyamps Michelangelo

Tone Projects’ range may not include many plug‑ins yet — but they’re all up there with the very best.

Back in 2004 Rune Lund‑Hermansen gave us Otium FX’s Basslane, one of the first low‑frequency stereo width plug‑ins, and I got a lot of use out of it! Two decades on, his company is now Tone Projects and they offer just a few plug‑ins, but they’re some of the very best analogue‑modelling processors I’ve used. In our SOS October 2020 review, Eric James described their Unisum as a “unique, stellar‑sounding compressor”. Then came their Kelvin ‘tone shaper’, which we’ve not reviewed but I can confirm is a wonderfully versatile, great‑sounding dual‑stage saturation processor with a neat pre‑/post‑emphasis EQ. They’ve also reworked Basslane, giving it lots more features. But for their latest plug‑in, they’ve taken on something very special — and they’ve done a cracking job!

Tone Projects’ Hendyamps Michelangelo is officially endorsed by Hendyamps, whose hardware is a very high‑quality stereo valve EQ and saturation processor. I had the pleasure of playing with one for a day or two and enjoyed it immensely. There aren’t many controls, but using it isn’t always straightforward because the bands interact and the saturation can be seductive (it’s easy to overcook things). But used judiciously, it’s a wonderful thing indeed. This plug‑in mimics the hardware in obsessive detail, and it’s one of the most convincingly analogue‑sounding plug‑ins I’ve used to date — but compared with the hardware, its functionality has been beefed up considerably. It’s available for Mac and Windows hosts that support AAX, AU or VST3 plug‑ins. Authorisation is by serial number, and installation quick and easy.

The top part of the GUI, which resembles the hardware, is all you see on first opening this plug‑in, and you can do a lot with that. But pop open the control pane and you can do so much more — there are some really thoughtful features here.

A Chip Off The Old Block

The default GUI resembles the hardware, but a pop‑out ‘advanced’ panel offers many more options. More on that later, but there are useful extras on the basic GUI too. Typical facilities including undo/redo, presets, bypass and A/B comparison buttons are joined by an EQ scale control: you can exaggerate a curve, scale it back, invert it and even exaggerate that inversion; the range is ±200%. Input and output level controls allow you to get the incoming signal in the sweet spot and set the output accordingly. You can also set the processing quality from Low Latency (a decent approximation for tracking) to Pristine and, whatever the playback quality, you can set the plug‑in to render at Pristine.

To preserve CPU without sacrificing quality, you can set the plug‑in to run at different quality settings during playback, yet still render offline at the highest quality.A real‑time Autogain facility is convenient, but more accurate is the Match button. Hit this, play audio through the plug‑in, and it calculates a more precise adjustment. It’s a very helpful feature for mastering and stereo bus work. I don’t normally use gain‑matched EQ when working on individual tracks in a mix (if I want to nudge up the meat of a snare, I probably don’t want the higher frequencies pulling down!) but it can certainly be helpful when judging saturation, which this plug‑in offers in spades.

Further handy features include Alt/Option‑ or...