The Tuner, the Analyzer and Nebula's effects

Nebula comes with its own processors: a tuner, an analyzer, dynamics, modulation, colour, delay and reverb. They load like any plug-in, save with the song, render the same in a bounce, and open their own editor.

Inserting a Nebula effect

Click an empty Inserts slot on a channel strip (the inspector or the mixer).
Choose Nebula, then the processor: Tuner, Pitch Correction, Analyzer, Chorus, Phaser, Tremolo, Auto-Filter, Saturation, Vocoder, Ring Modulator, Bitcrusher, Rotary, Pedalboard, Tape Delay, Multi-Tap, Gate, De-Esser, Compressor, and the rest.
Click the slot again to open its window.

Claude can do this for you: ask it to add, say, Nebula Chorus to a track, or to set its controls.

Presets and the plug-in bar

The bar along the top of every plug-in window holds the preset menu with an arrow either side to step through presets. The plug-in's own are the factory presets; Saved are yours. Choose Save Preset… to keep the sound you have under a name. The same bar has the power button for bypass, A and B to compare two settings (the button beside them copies one side's settings to the other), Copy and Paste for settings, the Side Chain menu where the processor takes one, and the latency the plug-in adds.

The Tuner

Nebula Tuner shows the note it hears and lets the sound through unchanged. Put it first on a guitar or bass track and play one note at a time.

The note is shown large with its octave. Beside it, how many cents it is off, and the frequency heard against the note's own ("No note" or "Play a single note" while it hears nothing it can read).
The needle swings across ±50 cents: sharp is right, flat left. Within 3 cents it turns green.
The strobe under it drifts right when sharp and left when flat, and stands still when the note is in tune.
Mute Output silences what comes out while you tune, so nobody hears it. The tuner still hears its input. Turn it off to play.
Reference is the A it tunes to, from 415 to 466 Hz (440 by default).

Its presets set the reference: Concert A 440, Orchestra 442, A 432 and Baroque 415. A preset leaves Mute Output as it is.

The Analyzer

Nebula Analyzer shows what the sound is doing without changing it. Put it on the Stereo Out to watch the whole mix, or on any track or bus.

The spectrum runs from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. The filled line is the level now; the line above it is the held peaks.
Smoothing: 1/6 Octave shows more detail, 1/3 Octave the overall balance.
Slope tilts the spectrum up towards the highs: at 3 dB/oct pink noise reads flat, at 4.5 dB/oct a balanced mix does.
Speed: Fast for transients, Medium, or Slow for the balance of a whole section.
Peak Hold keeps the loudest each frequency reached as a line, until you switch it off or reset.
Beside the spectrum: the stereo picture (vectorscope), the correlation meter, Balance (which side is louder, in dB, or centre), and the loudness: momentary, short-term and integrated in LUFS, and the true peak in dBTP.
Reset starts the integrated loudness, the true peak and the held peaks again.

Presets: Mix, Mastering, Pink Flat and Transients.

Chorus

Nebula Chorus thickens and widens a sound. Voices sets one to four voices; Modern is clean, Vintage darker and softer, like an old bucket-brigade chorus. Knobs: Rate, Depth, Delay, Width and Mix, plus Bypass. Presets include Classic, Lush Ensemble, Vocal Thickener and Vibrato.

Phaser

Nebula Phaser sweeps notches through the sound. Stages is 4, 6, 8 or 12; knobs for Rate, Depth, Feedback, Centre, Stereo Phase and Mix. Presets include Classic Swirl, Funky Guitar, Quarter Pulse and Jet Sweep.

Tremolo and auto-pan

Nebula Tremolo pulses the level, or with Mode set to Auto-Pan moves the sound between left and right. Shape is Sine, Triangle, Square or S&H (a random level each cycle). Knobs: Rate, Depth, Stereo Phase (at 180° the two sides alternate) and Smoothing, which rounds a square's edges so it does not click. Presets include Vintage Amp, Eighth Chop, Slow Pan and Quarter Ping-Pong.

Auto-Filter

Nebula Auto-Filter is a resonant filter moved by an LFO and by the level. Type is Low-Pass, Band-Pass, High-Pass or Notch; Slope 12 dB or 24 dB. Cutoff, Resonance and Mix; the LFO's LFO Depth, Rate, Shape and Stereo Phase; the envelope's Envelope, Attack and Release. Key chooses what the envelope listens to: its own Input, or a Side Chain another track sends (choose one in the bar's Side Chain menu). Presets include Funk Envelope (an auto-wah), Wobble Bass and Ducking Low-Pass.

Saturation and tape

Nebula Saturation adds warmth or distortion. Mode is Tape, Tube, Transistor or Soft Clip. Knobs: Drive, Tone (darker or brighter), Output and Mix (lower it for parallel saturation). Auto Gain matches the loudness out to the loudness in, so switching it on and off compares like with like. Oversampling is 2× or 4×; the Filter is Linear Phase (a little latency, compensated) or Minimum Phase (none). Presets include Tape Warmth, Hot Tape, Tube Vocal and Soft Clip Master.

Tempo sync

Phaser, Tremolo and Auto-Filter have a Sync menu that locks the movement to the song's tempo: 4 Bars, 2 Bars, 1 Bar, 1/2 down to 1/32, with dotted (D) and triplet (T) values. Off runs at the Rate knob in hertz. Chorus always runs at its Rate.

Gate

Nebula Gate cuts the spill and noise between hits; with a low Ratio it is a gentle expander. Knobs: Threshold, Hysteresis, Range, Ratio, Attack, Hold, Release, Lookahead, and the key's High-Pass and Low-Pass so a kick cannot open a snare's gate. Key is Input or Side Chain. Listen plays what the gate hears, for setting the filters. The lamp shows OPEN or CLOSED. Presets: Kick Tight, Snare Gate, Tom Clean, Vocal Expander and Noise Floor.

De-Esser

Nebula De-Esser turns down harsh "s" sounds. Frequency is where the sibilance is, Threshold how loud it must get, Range the most it turns down. Split turns down only the band above the frequency; Wide turns the whole signal down. Listen plays the band it hears, to find the esses. Presets: Gentle, Female Vocal, Male Vocal and Bright Hi-Hats.

Pitch Correction

Nebula Pitch Correction tunes a voice as it is sung and as it plays back: one voice at a time, a lead vocal or a solo instrument. Put it first on the vocal track. To fix single notes by hand after recording, use Flex Pitch in the audio editor instead.

Key is Follow Song at first: the song's key, with each chord's own notes added where the chord track has one, so a chord from outside the key keeps its notes. Or choose a key from C to B.
Scale is the scale on that key: Major, Minor, Harmonic Minor, Melodic Minor, Dorian, Mixolydian, Major and Minor Pentatonic, Blues, or Chromatic, which makes all twelve notes targets in any key.
The keys show an octave with the scale's notes lit. Click a key to switch that note off or on: a voice near a note that is off goes to the nearest note that is on.
Response is how quickly a note is pulled in tune. 0 ms is the hard-tuned effect, with its steps between notes; 20 to 60 ms is a tight pop vocal; 100 ms and more is barely heard.
Humanise leaves a held note's vibrato and drift alone and corrects only where the note sits. At 0 every held note is held still.
Detune moves every target by cents, to sing with a record that is not at A 440.
Keep Formants keeps a voice's character on big corrections and adds 25 ms. Off, the correction adds only 2.5 ms, so a singer can hear themselves through it while recording. Either way the session compensates for it on playback.
Mix blends the corrected voice with the dry one.

The meter shows the note it pulls to, how many cents the sung pitch is from it, and how far it is moving it now. Breaths, consonants, noise and silence pass through untouched. Presets: Natural Vocal, Tight Pop, Hard Tune and Off-Key Scale.

Claude can add it and set it for you: ask it to tune the vocal to the song's key, or for a hard-tuned effect.

Vocoder

Nebula Vocoder makes one sound speak with another's voice: the voice's spectrum, band by band, laid onto a carrier.

Put Nebula Vocoder on the track that should speak — a pad or a synth.
In the slot's menu, choose Side Chain and the vocal's track. Side Chain Is in the vocoder's window becomes Voice, the vocal's track is named beside it, and the track's own sound is the carrier.

Or let it play its own carrier: set Carrier to Synth, put the vocoder on an instrument track, and write the chord in that track's MIDI region; the synth plays those notes (Synth Wave Saw, Pulse or Noise). With Side Chain Is set to Carrier, the routed track is the carrier and the track's own sound is the voice.

Bands: 8 for the crude robot, up to 32 for clear speech. Low and High are the lowest and highest bands' centres.
Formant moves the voice's character up or down without changing the pitch, which is the carrier's: smaller or larger.
Resonance sharpens each band; Attack and Release set how closely the bands follow the voice.
Sibilance lets the voice's own esses and tees through, which a carrier cannot speak; Noise adds breath to the carrier for the consonants.

The window shows each band's level as the voice moves it. Presets include Classic Robot, Daft Choir, Whisper and Talking Pad.

Ring Modulator

Nebula Ring Modulator is a ring modulator and a frequency shifter. Ring multiplies the sound by a tone at Frequency: every partial becomes two, for bells and robots. Shift moves every partial by the same number of hertz — Up, Down or Both — which a pitch shifter cannot do: harmonics stop being harmonic. A few hertz is a slow, swirling phase; a hundred and up, metallic. An LFO moves the frequency (LFO Rate or LFO Sync, LFO Depth); Feedback with Shift climbs or falls like a barber's pole; Stereo Phase widens it. The window shows what becomes of a partial at 1 kHz.

Bitcrusher

Nebula Bitcrusher lowers the bits and the sample rate on purpose. Bits runs from 24 down to 1 and glides between whole numbers, so a lane can sweep it; at 4 bits a sample has sixteen levels. Rate holds each sample until the next tick of a slower clock: what is above half that rate folds back down as new, unrelated tones, the sound of an early sampler. Anti-Alias filters those away first, for a darker, cleaner crush. Drive pushes the sound into a soft clip before it is crushed; Dither trades the rounding's buzz for hiss (TPDF), or moves the hiss up (Shaped). The window draws a sine as it comes out.

Rotary

Nebula Rotary is a rotating speaker cabinet, for an organ, an electric piano or a guitar. Speed is Slow (the chorale), Fast (the tremolo) or Stop; the horn changes speed in about a second and the heavy drum in several, as a real cabinet's motors do — Acceleration sets how quickly. Draw Speed on a lane for the classic speed-up at a chorus. Horn/Drum balances the top against the bottom, Mic Distance sets how strong the swirl is, Mic Angle how wide, and Drive pushes its preamp. It adds 1 ms, which the session compensates. The window shows the rotors turning from above.

Pedalboard

Nebula Pedalboard is six stomp boxes in one insert, in the order a guitarist would chain them: Gate, Wah, Octaver, Fuzz, Overdrive and Chorus. Each has its own switch and knobs; a pedal that is off costs nothing.

The sound meets the pedals left to right. To change the order, drag a pedal by the grip at its top onto another: it takes that one's place, and the others close up. A fuzz before the wah is a different sound from a wah into the fuzz. Undo puts the order back, and the order is kept with the song and in a preset. With VoiceOver, each pedal has Move Earlier and Move Later actions.

Wah: Auto opens it as you play harder; Manual parks it where Position is; Pedal follows Position closely — draw Position on a lane, or assign a controller to it, to play the wah through the song.
Octaver: one and two octaves down, following one note at a time.
Fuzz and Overdrive run at four times the rate, each curve smoothed as it clips, so their harmonics do not fold back: a high note through a hard fuzz folds back 60 dB under itself or more.

Presets include Blues Crunch, Seventies Fuzz, Funk Auto-Wah and Octave Bass.

Tape Delay and Multi-Tap

Nebula Tape Delay is an echo machine's loop of tape. Time, or Sync to repeat on a division of the tempo; Feedback (past 100 % it builds into its own howl, held by the tape); Wow and Flutter make the repeats' pitch wander; Saturation, Low Cut and High Cut wear each repeat down a little more. Freeze stops taking the input and holds what is on the tape, playing it round until you switch it off. Moving Time while it plays makes the echoes swoop, as moving a real head does.

Nebula Multi-Tap places up to eight echoes by hand. Taps says how many play; choose a tap by its number beside the knobs to set its Time, Level, Pan and Filter (below 0 darker, above 0 thinner). Sync puts every tap on the nearest sixteenth note of the tempo; Feedback repeats the whole pattern. The window shows every tap along the seconds the pattern spans.

Claude can add and set any of these: ask for a robot voice on the pad, a slapback on the vocal, or a rotary speed-up at the chorus.

Channel EQ

Nebula Channel EQ is the mixer's EQ, the curve at the top of every strip: Low Cut and High Cut (6 to 48 dB an octave), a Low Shelf, four Peaks and a High Shelf. Drag a band's handle across for its frequency, up and down for its gain; its fields are below it.

Dynamic bands. Every band but the cuts can move by how loud its own part of the sound is. Press DYN under a band to show its dynamics in the row along the bottom:

Dynamic: Off keeps the band where it is set. Cut takes it further down, Boost further up, while its sound is over the Threshold.
Threshold is how loud the band's own part of the sound must be — band-passed at its frequency and Q; low-passed for the Low Shelf, high-passed for the High Shelf — before the band moves. Under it, the band is exactly as set.
Ratio is how far it moves for each decibel over: at 4:1, three quarters of a decibel. It never moves more than 24 dB.
Attack and Release are how quickly it moves and how slowly it comes back.
Listens To: Band hears this track. Side Chain hears the same band of the track routed to the EQ's side chain — duck a bass's 60 Hz under the kick, and only there.

While a band moves, the curve shows it live: a dashed line for the curve this moment and a bar at each moving band, from where it is set to where it has gone. Uses: a harsh 3.5 kHz pulled back only on loud notes, mud cut only when it builds up, a de-esser shaped like a bell.

Phase. Minimum has no latency and turns the phase around each band as an analogue EQ does. Linear shifts no frequency in time — for a bus or the master, where several EQs in parallel must stay together — at the cost of latency the session compensates for:

Sample rate	Filter length	Latency
44.1 kHz	8,192 taps	4,096 samples, 92.9 ms
48 kHz	8,192 taps	4,096 samples, 85.3 ms
88.2 or 96 kHz	16,384 taps	8,192 samples, 92.9 or 85.3 ms

Switching crosses over without a click; the session plans the new latency at the next stop. In Linear, a dynamic band still moves, as a section after the linear-phase curve, timed to the sound that made it move. Presets: Flat, Vocal Presence, Kick Punch, Bright Acoustic, Bass Clean-Up, Telephone, Mix Air, Dynamic De-Mud, Dynamic De-Harsh, Bass Under Kick and Linear Master Air.

Match EQ

Nebula Match EQ gives one recording another's tone: an overdub made to sit like the original take, a mix moved toward a reference. It learns two spectra and applies the difference as a linear-phase EQ — no phase shift, 85 to 93 ms of latency the session compensates for.

Learn the Reference, what it should sound like: From Region (any audio region in the song), From File…, or Learn while the song plays — it hears the track routed to its side chain, or this track when none is.
Learn the Source, what it sounds like now: Learn while the track plays, or a region or file.
Set Amount (100 % is the whole match), Smoothing (1/12 octave follows every resonance, 2 octaves only the overall tilt) and Max Gain, the most it lifts or cuts anywhere.

The graph shows both spectra and, filled, the correction. It is centred, so the level stays where it was: it matches the tone, not the loudness. Each learning is one undo step, and both spectra are kept with the song. Clear forgets one; with either missing the correction is flat. Presets: Full Match, Gentle Tilt, Detailed, Mastering Reference and Tone Swap.

Restore

Nebula Restore repairs a damaged recording: hum, clicks and steady noise. It is made for Process with Plug-in: choose the regions, then Edit ▸ Region ▸ Process with Plug-in… and choose Nebula Restore (see Process with Plug-in in the bounce chapter). It works on an insert too.

De-Hum notches out mains hum and its Harmonics, each notch Width hertz wide. Auto finds whether it is 50 or 60 Hz, to a thousandth of a hertz, within the first second, and notches nothing when it hears no hum. A 440 Hz note beside the 450 Hz harmonic moves less than half a decibel.
De-Click finds clicks and crackle and redraws the sound across each one, up to 2 ms, from what comes before and after it. Sensitivity sets how small a click it repairs.
De-Noise holds steady noise down by Reduction wherever the sound is not louder than the noise by Threshold. It needs to know the noise: play a stretch of noise alone with Learn Noise on, then stop; or press From Selection, which learns from the quietest second of the regions — within the cycle when the cycle is on.

The latency is 56 ms at 48 kHz, whatever is switched on, and compensated. The noise profile is kept with the song. Presets: General Clean-Up, Vinyl, Hum and Buzz, Hiss Only and Dialogue.

Claude can add these and set their controls by name; Match EQ's and Restore's learning are yours, in their panels.

Nebula's other processors

Compressor: Threshold, Ratio, Attack, Release, Knee, Make-up and Mix, with a Peak or RMS detector.
Limiter: Input, Ceiling, Release and Lookahead, with an optional clip stage.
Clipper: Drive, Ceiling, Softness, Output and Oversampling.
Stereo: width overall and in four bands, and Mono Below for the lows.
Punch: a transient shaper.
Multiband: four bands, each a compressor.
Exciter: harmonics in three bands, and the sub's own.
Delay: a stereo delay with Phrase, which replays the bars just played.
Reverb: Nebula's reverb.
Cosmos: the reverb's engine with a climbing shimmer, a four-scene morph pad, Freeze Shift, Dust and Key Focus.
Flanger: a stereo flanger with a Sweep Window and Through-Zero.

The EQ picture at the top of every strip is Nebula EQ: click it to open it, or, on a channel without one, to put one first in the chain.