Upstage
Inspired by one of our favorite Max for Live plug-ins for sound design, Upstage is a simple tool to help move things around in a stereo field. After switching DAWs we were never able to find a VST alternative to it so in our spare time we programmed this plug-in to fill the gap in our workflow. I hadn’t really imagined I would ever release it into the wild, but maybe someone else out there might also find it useful.
As far as functionality, it's a fairly straight forward affair:
- The dot on the stage is the location of the audio source. The bottom/center of the stage is the closest to the listener. It can be automated with the sliders on the bottom and right side of the stage.
- The Acoustic Dampening knobs adjust how much and what frequencies get attenuated the further away the audio source gets.
- The Stage Size knob controls how large the stage is.
- The Stereo Width knob controls how wide the stereo signal is as it moves away from the stage, this is shown in the Stereo Spread display below the Stage.
- *note the plug-in only works on Stereo Tracks or Busses.
At this time it is Windows VST3 only. It runs smoothly on Cubase Pro 12 and I have done light testing in Reaper, Ableton 10, and Studio One 6 and it seems to work as expected there as well.
I suppose if there ends up being any interest in this, I may explore putting together a Mac version of this as well, down the road sometime.
If you find it useful or use it in a project, please let us know and share it!
If you have any questions, suggestions, bugs you've found, or just wanna chat about the weather, you can find me here: alex@sonicoddities.com
