The UAD Manley Massive Passive emulates the Manley Massive Passive (you have to be quick to figure that out!) and brings all the tone along with it.
The interface is pretty straightforward but you have to pay real attention to the controls, there are a lot of non-intuitive things going on. (Generally, every change interacts with every other change.)There are no interactive graphs or other visual clues to what changes you are making. This is for someone who wants to listen their way through cleanly touching up a sound. It’s also beautifully subtle. (Or musical. People always use that term—not really sure what it means except that nothing extreme ever happens.)
Check out the “passive” harmonics and the slight gain in the high frequencies. Notice though the MST (mastering) version has an almost flat response. There is a reason the Massive Passive is so highly thought of as far as helping to polish (but not necessary drastically change) a sound.
Hints:
- The Bandwidth (Q) controls make quite a difference honing in on a frequency. Although not surgical by any means, they increase the amount of EQ in proportion to the amount of focus.
- One of my favorite things to do with the Massive Passive is to simply use the low pass and high pass. Set the high pass to 22 and the low pass to 18k and you get a nice analog-type eq curve with a sweet airy bump (not so analog) on the high end. [See the last chart.]
- So easy to make a smooth “smiley-face” with this.
- Also easy to make a slight curve to reduce 2.5K to 4K harshness. (Just my opinion, but there is where most of what sounds “digital” lives.) Take out a bit of that wretched 500Hz and you’ve got it made (again, my opinion).
- A really good way to learn the controls is to pass some pink noise through, and examine your changes on some kind of frequency analyzer plugin (Span, for instance). Like I mentioned, they all interact.
