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 right‑clicking any parameter to toggle between its current and previous states, and the ability to inversely link the input/output levels and the Aggression and Trim controls by Shift‑dragging on Aggression or Input. Also, holding down Alt/Option gives you much finer control with the mouse. All nice touches that help to make life easier.

The four EQ bands on the default GUI have gain knobs marked 0‑10, the centre position (I hesitate to say ‘neutral’, as the curve is never perfectly flat) being 5. Not a decibel in sight, and it’s an ethos borrowed from the hardware to encourage you to use your ears before your eyes. Each band also has a two‑position switch.

A low shelf has 80Hz and 150Hz settings that change the curve: 80Hz seems a little more resonant, with a dip just above the turnover frequency when boosting, while 150Hz offers a smoother slope. The curves seem not to be symmetrical, with cuts on both settings smoother than the boosts (80Hz has no ‘bump’ when cutting, for example). Mid is a bell whose switch toggles between Flat and Full. Set to the former, it applies a very broad mid boost, centred somewhere around 200Hz (the bell shifts up to that frequency from a little lower down as you increase the gain), while the cut focuses on the 500‑600 Hz region. Switching to Full, you get a 500‑700 Hz boost (again shifting with gain) and a narrower 700‑ish Hz cut.

The high band is a shelf and has Smooth and Sharp settings. The former has a slightly more ‘scooped’ curve than the latter, whose gentler slope has a more audible effect lower down the spectrum. Finally, the Air band is another shelf, but it operates higher up. Like the other bands this defaults to 5, but it’s actually a boost‑only band, with the neutral position at 0. This has an Air Shift switch that can be set to on or off. A boost when on lifts the sound up from about 5kHz, rising as you go higher up the spectrum (well beyond 20kHz), and with a broad but shallow dip around 3kHz. Switch to off and the dip pretty much disappears, resulting in a more linear slope.

The outer two knobs, coloured red, control the saturation. In the hardware, Aggression drives the valves harder when turned clockwise — potentially very hard, sacrificing valve longevity for character. In the plug‑in, this defaults to zero, and as you turn the knob clockwise the frequency balance and amount and nature of harmonic content changes. It’s easy to overcook this — there’s plenty of saturation on tap for more creative recording and mixing treatments, and way more than you’d ever need in a mastering context — but subtle treatments are possible too. A small Calibration control allows you to increase or tame the harmonic complexity, and the auto gain or Match facility, or the inversely linked controls help you rein in the level changes, even before you reach for EQ.

Popping Out

Poptastic: in the pop‑out control pane, you can pop out another window that gives you yet more control over the dynamic EQ.

What I’ve written above describes various functions in isolation, and only the controls in the default GUI view. But two things makes this EQ particularly special. First, it captures the interaction between the different controls and EQ/valve amp stages. This has pros and cons, in that you can find sounds with the Michelangelo very quickly that would be hard or time‑consuming to achieve with other processors, but sometimes when you try to achieve something specific you can find it a little tricky to get the balance right. Second is something that mitigates that ‘con’ considerably: the pop‑out control panel enables you to refine the behaviour of the controls in a way you couldn’t dream of with the hardware, as well as delivering considerable extra functionality.

With this pane open, controls beneath the Aggression knob adjust the contribution of the modelled valves: a Tube Comp knob sets the amount of valve compression (0 to 400%) and a Tube Blend knob sets the balance between triode (as on the hardware) and pentode valves, the latter sounding somewhat brighter. These make that Aggression control so much more versatile: you can control quite precisely just how softened or not transients will sound, and how smooth or brash the distortion character is. Two more knobs set the amount of crosstalk and ‘spread’, which determines how matched/different the modelled left and right channels are. In the default preset, there’s a significant difference, which can be perceived as a lovely, subtle widening, but you can turn that off here, and you can swap the left and right models too.

There’s a range of very usable presets created by professional engineers — while EQ presets rarely work straight off the bat, they can make good starting points, and can be a great way to learn what you can achieve with this plug‑in.

Beneath the EQ controls, each band has an array of useful controls. You can adjust the centre frequency and there’s generous overlap between adjacent bands. Each band is given its own Drive knob too — boosts in particular will behave differently with more drive, as they hit the valve stages harder, and you can dial things right back for a cleaner sound than the default, extending your control over the bigger saturation picture considerably. It gets better: sliders set to what degree each band acts on the Mid and Sides, or the transients and body of a sound ‑ a wonderful facility for mastering or, say, EQ’ing an intricate picked acoustic guitar part to tame the ‘boom’.

The tooltips go into much more detail than most, yet the explanations are clear and easy to follow — and they can, of course, be switched off!Each band also has threshold and range controls that transform it into a dynamic EQ. This doesn’t negate your static EQ setting, but rather uses that as its starting point, its action indicated by a circle of virtual LEDs around the gain knob. This can expand or compress, and a neat touch is that you can invert the threshold, so that it boosts when the signal drops. A Shift‑click links the threshold and range knobs of all bands. A triangle above brings up a small pop‑out window where you can set the duration of and sensitivity to transients, and specify the attack and release times. I can’t stress just how useful it is to have access this sort of facility while you’re making your broad‑brush moves above: if a boost does nice things but also raises something annoying, it’s easy to attend to that side‑effect.

Finally, high‑ and low‑pass filters (1‑700 Hz and 1‑30 kHz, respectively) each have a choice of slopes, and a conventional digital EQ has two bands with frequency (20Hz to 20kHz) and gain (±12dB) knobs. There’s no Q setting, but you can set each band as a high or low shelf, or a wide or narrow bell. These have the same transient, M‑S and dynamic EQ controls as the others, and while they’re ‘vanilla’ EQs, note that they still feed the modelled output valve circuitry, which will respond to changes in signal level.

...invest a little time in learning how to get the best from it and it could very quickly become your go‑to ‘vibe EQ’.

Chiselled Features

Michelangelo, the great sculptor, reportedly said of his statue of David that he “saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free”. To my mind, that describes the way Tone Projects have approached modelling this wonderful hardware EQ: they’ve not only captured its essential beauty in what I have to say is a stunning‑sounding model but, in delivering all the thoughtful extras, they’ve also revealed to us a vision of what that device might have been, were it not for the inherent limitations faced by all those who design hardware. Meanwhile, the GUI has been skilfully conceived to make the user experience simple, despite the underlying complexity of this superb tone‑shaping tool — we users might think of it as a better chisel with which to sculpt our mixes and masters! In short, the Michelangelo plug‑in is an equaliser like no other: invest a little time in learning how to get the best from it and it could very quickly become your go‑to ‘vibe EQ’.