The Trident A-Range is a legendary piece of equipment. As only thirteen A-Range consoles were ever made, it remains a holy grail for sound engineers and producers around the world that hope to create works of art equal to those that were originally recorded on the A-Range — David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust, Queen, Elton John, the list goes on...

The A-Range plug-in from Softube is the first and only native and TDM plug-in that has been fully endorsed by original designer Malcolm Toft and Trident Audio.

The plug-in is a model of a channel on one of the original 13 Trident A-Range consoles. We chose to model channel 15 from the console at Sweet Silence Studio 'B' in Denmark, producer Flemming Rasmussen's favorite channel for recording lead vocals. Flemming also used it for the solo and rhythm guitars on Metallica's "Ride The Lightning" and "Master of Puppets", and Ritchie Blackmore's guitar on the Rainbow albums "Difficult to Cure" and "Bent out of Shape".

The A-Range channel features four bands of equalization and high and low pass filters. The sound of the bands is often referred to as "colorful" and "musical". When running a hot enough signal through the original unit and boosting the bands, it is possible to get it to distort, the result is a hairy and effective saturation that is just right in some situations, and just wrong in others!

In Short

• Created together with original designer Malcolm Toft
• Each and every component carefully modeled
• Same sweet sounding EQ filters that made the original legendary
• Interaction between the different bands, making this equalizer one of its kind
• Saturation control
• Very CPU friendly

Controls

Authentic User Interface An authentic aubergine color (well, as good as it gets on a computer screen...) and the exact same controls as the real thing (okay, we added the Saturation and the Output volume). And then we removed a couple of controls that weren't relevant for computer recording. All right, we changed a few things — but it still looks good! This is a photo of the real channel 15 from the desk at Sweet Silence Studios. They changed the original fader handles from dark gray to bright yellow and replaced the original mute flip switch with a big red button. For more nostalgia pictures, please see this page with lots of pictures of the original desk...

Saturation The distortion of the original desks is of course captured by the plug-in. Instead of using an input volume to drive the signal, we chose to use a Saturation knob instead — so that you don't have to compensate the Output volume all the time. Just set the Saturation to OFF if you don't need it, which will also make the native version more CPU efficient.

Four bands of equalization Four extremely musical bands of equalization. Each band has four selectable frequencies carefully chosen by well renowned producer and designer Malcolm Toft for the consoles at legendary Trident studios in London. Top and bottom bands have shelving character while the mid filters are bell shaped.

Developed by Softube and Trident The Trident A-Range plug-in was developed by Softube in co-operation with Malcolm Toft and Trident.

Low and High Pass filters The ultimate problem solver. Make sure to use these a lot. If you need even more filtering, just press multiple buttons.

ALL VISUAL AND AURAL REFERENCES TO THE TRIDENT A-RANGE EQ TRADEMARK ARE BEING MADE WITH WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM PMI AUDIO. THE TRIDENT, A-RANGE AND TRIANGLE LOGO ARE TRADEMARKS OF PMI AUDIO GROUP, USED UNDER LICENSE.