In March of 2020 just as Covid was starting to wreak havoc on the world all of my work turned remote, and I was unable to go into my studio for weeks. I had quite a bit of mixing to do and was feeling pretty uncomfortable about having to do it entirely in the box without some of my key pieces of gear. Searching for inspiration I somehow stumbled on a new plugin company called Baby Audio they had a deal to get all their plugins for $120. All of their plugins are one of a kind, they all felt like new innovations the likes of which I hadn’t seen before. It really feels like they take the approach of creating new tools instead of just recreating “clones” of classic gear. At the time I got the bundle I had just started mixing an EP for the amazing artist Laura, Laura! and the new plugins that I had just got made it on every single song on the EP. I feel they had a huge impact on my creativity in the mixing process. Recently they released a plugin called Taip which they’ve coined as an AI powered tape plugin. I love using tape emulators on my mixes, I tend to use them to saturate and compress groups as opposed to individual elements. With Taip I’ve found it’s extremely useful on individual elements in place of a compressor or eq. I love using the glue feature and drive features to compress and control dynamics and the presence and the high/low shape knobs to eq. It’s really nice to see a tape emulation plugin that doesn’t use the words bias or ips. Most people that are going to be using these plugins have never worked on tape and have no idea what these things mean, Baby Audio has done away with those terms and labeled things simply as they are.