boz Digital Labs | Big Beautiful Door Plug-in boz Digital Labs

If M.C. Escher* built a house, it would have a Big Beautiful Door—one that lets you in at the same time it lets you out. In musical terms, Big Beautiful Door is a uniquely useful tool for both problem-solving and creative applications. BBD combines two equalizers with a gate and advanced sidechain capabilities that enable you to equalize different portions of a sound separately. Imagine being able to cut harsh consonants only as they occur while bringing out the air in vocals without increasing sibilance. That becomes the reality you enter through the Big Beautiful Door. But that’s just one place it can take you. Not only is the BBD the most powerful vocal EQ available, but it also gives you the ability to remove guitar-amp hiss from power chord decays, clean up the low end, manage bass and kick frequencies via ducking, add both rhythmic and tonal movement to pads, and more. Big Beautiful Door is easy to use and gives you results that multiple plug-in chains can’t achieve.

Big Beautiful Door—Just the Facts:

• Combines a gate with two 3-band equalizers
• Equalize loud and quiet sounds separately
• Selectable internal/external sidechain and sidechain listen function
• Equalizers feature selectable slopes, along with gain, frequency, and variable resonance controls
• Individual solo for each EQ section
• Dual-mode sidechain filters for accurate triggering
• A/B bank comparison mode
• Factory presets and user preset save and recall
• Supports VST2, VST3, AU (Mac only), RTAS, AAX Native on Mac and Windows

*M.C. Escher is one of the world’s most famous graphic artists, known for his “impossible” constructions, such as Ascending and Descending and Relativity. Escher once said, “Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it’s in my basement… let me go upstairs and check.”

Big Beautiful Door—Cracking the Code

Like all Boz Digital plug-ins, BBD is the result of trying to achieve real-world audio goals after attempts with existing plug-ins failed to produce the desired results. As such, Big Beautiful Door takes a novel approach to dynamics and EQ processing not found in any other plug-in. Neither a gate, compressor, or dynamic equalizer, it can act like all three. Plus, it has a few unexpected tricks up its sleeve. Its most unique feature is that you can EQ your opened and closed gate separately.

The Controls

The BBD has a threshold slider that controls the level at which the gate opens and closes. To prevent gate chatter, there’s a 3dB hysteresis set into the threshold. However, there’s also a variable hysteresis control if you require additional control. (Hysteresis keeps the gate open below the threshold by the set amount.) There are also buttons that let you hide the EQ controls and display input-level history and the state of the envelope, which helps you dial in threshold and view how your sound is being affected.

Along with standard envelope controls, including attack, release, hold, and ratio, the gate has a look-ahead feature. Look-ahead lets you step through Big Beautiful Door into the future. It opens the gate before the level crosses the threshold, which enables it to pass transients unaffected. This feature comes in handy for gating drums. Using look-ahead in concert with a slow attack provides much smoother gating results.

Applications

Using its advanced side-chaining, which controls the way Big Beautiful Door reacts to the input signal, you can EQ out the low end of your bass when a kick drum hits or attenuate the midrange of backing tracks when the vocals come in—easily and without automation.

Big Beautiful Door lets you isolate consonants from vowels and EQ them separately, which makes it arguably the worlds most powerful vocal processor. For example, if you’ve ever spent an inordinate amount of time trying to tame sibilant buildup in background vocals, which can sound like a leaking steam vent, BBD can eliminate it across multiple tracks while maintaining a natural sound. Plus, you can boost the highs of background vocals to make them stand out in the mix without affecting sibilance.

Big Beautiful Door can also clean up noisy guitars and low end, remove drum bleed in the form of cymbals or singing toms, and add rhythmic and timbral interest to pads—and that’s just for starters.

Available Formats