Softube Flow Mixing Suite

Can Softube’s Flow Mixing Suite cover all your mix processing needs within a single plug‑in collection?

Just over a year ago, Softube entered the world of plug‑in subscription bundles with their Flow Mastering Suite (see the separate box), and now they’ve added an option aimed at different users: Flow Mixing Suite. Despite the name, Flow Mixing Suite is more than a collection of mixing‑focused plug‑ins...

Let It Flow

But that’s where I’ll begin! The plug‑in collection is comprehensive, spanning EQs, compressors, channel strips, reverbs, delays, guitar amps/cabs, saturation, modulation, stereo width/spatial, vocoder, clipping and lo‑fi categories. At the time of writing, the Suite added 78 plug‑ins (VST, AU or AAX formats) to my computer, so if I tried to detail all of them here, I’d fill the magazine! Softube’s website includes an up‑to‑date list, though, and suffice it to say that you’ll find modern takes on core processing tasks, a number of the plug‑ins designed for close integration to Softube’s Console 1 control surface, and plenty of emulated classics here.

The second element of the package is the dedicated Flow Mixing Suite plug‑in. As with Flow Mastering Suite’s similar plug‑in, it’s a ‘mothership’ plug‑in, supplied with a collection of presets Softube call Flows. Each Flow comprises a plug‑in signal chain that’s designed to handle a specific mixing task — they’re helpfully categorised for common duties such as Drums, Vocals, Guitars, Keys, Creative, MixBus and Sends — and when you load a Flow preset, you can control and/or edit the individual plug‑in settings and the signal chain from the single GUI. Softube aim to update the list of Flows regularly, with free‑to‑download artist‑created Flow Packs, but at the time of writing three Packs were available: Lo‑Fi Chill, MixbusTv Modern Production, and RAFFER Vocal Styles.

All of the plug‑ins can be used individually if you prefer that workflow and, whether used within the host or outside it, each includes its own set of useful presets.

As a further sweetener for those still on the fence with the subscription model is that it’s a ‘subscribe to own’ model. For each month of subscription, the user earns credits towards purchasing your favourite plug‑ins on a perpetual basis. Each credit is about double the value of the monthly subscription, so it would take a while to be able to acquire all 78 plug‑ins this way, but if you eventually decide to dispense with the subscription, you have the chance to keep a select few favourites in perpetuity. To my mind, it’s a welcome feature.

Perfect...