I’ve never used Heat and probably won’t now as it’s usage has been extended to Vanilla PT with prices set to rise when the principals of supply & demand kick in. Everything I’ve seen about heat is that it’s a distortion/harmonic type plugin to make digital sound more like analog tape. I have used other plugins with good success to achieve similar results. I use Wave’s Kramer Tape and sometimes the Pie Compressor with one customer paying the best compliment of “Now that sounds like a record!” after tweakin’ them a little. As it probably is with Heat a little goes a long way sometimes, any effect type plugin is the same.
I started my professional audio career over 40 yrs ago mastering vinyl for major labels and within two yrs I was running a 16 track studio along with it with me being the maintenance tech also. I was 18-20 yrs old through this period, a full plate indeed. I kinda knew what I was doing as I had been doing it since I was 15 and at 18 I had joined the US Navy and was offered entry into their Nuclear Program choosing Cryptology Technician Maintenance instead (badazz electronics training fer’ a year & a half), but was injured on active duty and discharged within two months of entering.
One of the things I learned during this period was setting up my Scully 2” 16 track was that properly biased Scotch 250 at 15 ips, +3 over 185 nW/m and let it “Spank” a little sounded record ready with little EQ or compression when it came time to mix. The only thing was Memphis was an Ampex 456 town with all the studios sharing the same Ampex rep (if one studio got in a bind and needed a roll or two of 2” or 1/4” in a pinch, no problem and no re-biasing needed). Just too hard to re-bias a 16 track dinosaur for local and sometimes low budget projects, but when something out of town came in on 250 I liked it! Some of these plugins offer behind the panel adjustments offer bias, hi/lo EQ adjustments also. Again, just a little is all that’s needed sometimes to make something shine.
Thing is it’s all just another color on yer’ palette, there are so many others out there now and just because you got it don’t mean you gotta use it. Train yer’ ears to listen to the “Small” differences an effect makes before going whole hog on it. Sometimes doing this you may or may not like what it does, but remember what it does ‘cause it might be just what you need on something else and with 384 voices available there’s always something else.
