If you have tried all buttons in on an 1176 but you don’t use it often, and never on anything apart from drums, maybe 2 button compression would be more useful. You can do this on a hardware 1176, but did you know you can also do it on the UAD 1176 plug-ins?
The ‘All Buttons In’ setting on the 1176 is a well-known production trick. Whether you know is as “Brit mode” or “Nuke mode”, the idea is that by pressing in all the ratio buttons on an 1176 at the same time, something it’s not designed to allow, you get a wild compression effect which is popular when used in parallel with the uncompressed version. This technique has also been available to plug-in users for a long time. Even the venerable BF76 from Avid allowed you to engage all buttons in mode by holding Shift and clicking on the Ratio buttons. The current 1176 Classic Limiter Collection from UAD also allows different multi-button combinations. Hold Shift and you can engage as many of the Ratio buttons as you like.
Secret 1176 Setting?
This isn’t a secret, It’s in the manual and even on the product page on the UA site but it is something that wasn’t possible in previous versions - The Legacy 1176 plug-in only offers All Buttons In. Speaking to other UAD users, it seems this new feature isn’t as well known as it might be, possibly because if you’ve been using an 1176 for a long time do you read the manual? Probably not!
In this video, Julian demonstrates his favourite multi-button setting on the 1176 LN, using buttons 4 and 8 together to add some fizz to a vocal on the track “I Can’t See The Lightning” by Anique, recently recorded by James in his video Universal Audio Apollo X Series Interfaces - From Rough Demo To Mix And Master - Part 1.