RoundTrip

RoundTrip

The Plugin You Commit Before You Mix

You want the sound of a full analog signal path, but at the convenience of a plugin. You’ve stacked plugins together but you keep tweaking each one, second‑guessing every move and pulling you further out from the mix. You want to hone in on "your sound," without needing a Jenga tower of plugins all with their own updates, licenses and subscriptions. That’s why I created RoundTrip. Before the first fader moves, the magic of a great mix starts with the recordings. Sometimes a mix falling flat isn't due to talent or taste; it’s option overload. Instead of committing to a sound, modern production makes it far too easy to undo everything. We keep auditioning chains, swapping “better” plugins, and making last-minute changes that undermine yesterday’s choices. This makes mixes feel less intentional. RoundTrip is my answer to that: the end-to-end signal path your audio would have taken in the analog world, gluing your tracks together before you touch a single fader. I’ve been working this way in my own mixes for years, committing a trusted chain of my favourite gear to all my takes and software instruments, adding my own unique, cohesive fingerprint to every record. It worked, but it also meant building and maintaining multiple chains, chasing hardware and software dependencies, licences and insert slots. I wanted a single plugin that could cover all those steps at once, so I could move faster without sacrificing quality. RoundTrip brings the unmistakable sound of of some of the world's most coveted hardware into the digital world. But unlike individual tools, it presents the full path meticulously modelled from preamp to final tape print. I designed it to live at the front of the workflow as the first plugin printed directly to your takes, just as all your favourite classic records did. Commitment is Freeing Built on years of multi-Platinum mix experience and a hybrid engineering workflow, RoundTrip is a curated collection of my go-to preamps, timeless channel strips, iconic mix desks, classic tape machines and a unique, bonus "smile" exciter, all of which are gain-matched* for easy A/B testing. 1 Mic Preamp: Pick between a Funky V76 pre inspired by 60's European tube amplification or the unmistakeable sound of a British N73 pre right out of the gate, imparting the sound of countless classic records at the very start of the chain. 2 Console Channel: Either a punchy, American mid-forward console or the snap and clarity of a Solid 4E inline desk. The upfront nonlinearities of two of my favourite time-tested channel strips. 3 Summing Bus: A British broadcast 6B tube console, revered Brit 8048 summing, or era-defining 4000 series VCA summing. Genre-defining consoles spanning multiple decades of recording technology. 4 Shine: A dedicated parallel harmonic stage specifically tuned for high-end excitement and low-end bloom: a tone box that dynamically reacts to your source audio and adds that inevitable high-end you know you were going to add later anyways. 5 Tape Machine: Either the ubiquitous Amped 102 multitrack workhorse on GP9 tape or a Sturdy A800 on 456 tape formula, emulating the custom-calibrated settings I've settled on after years of tweaking. RoundTrip doesn’t stop there. For extra realism, you can skip the Summing stage after recording, add it to the mix bus and recreate the final pass: hitting the Summing console, and printing the final mixdown back to tape. In hardware, every component shapes the audio in subtle, musical ways. Transients are tamed, harmonics add thrust and naturally 'compress' the signal, lower fundamentals start gaining octaves, and mixes start to glue together before processing even begins. But the main difference is the mindset: no infinite undo, no plugin flipflop and no choice paralysis. That’s the mindset I built into RoundTrip. It’s not just an amazing library of classic emulations set to time-tested settings. It’s a philosophy to speed up your workflow by choosing a trademark sound, printing into it, and moving forward.** RoundTrip: The plugin you commit before you mix. *Gain-matched to pink noise and 1kz tone at -20 dB. Not all sources react the same way to non-linear processing, but as I want the end result to come out at relatively the same LUFS for my own work, I did my best to even out each module. That said, some gain mismatch is to be expected. **Unless you're just starting out in your mixing journey or have serious commitment problems you can start with the plugin as the first insert, just don't let me catch you doing this. I will be displeased.