CHANNEV by Analog Obsession is a completely free channel strip that I’m honestly embarrassed I didn’t try sooner, because it sounds really, really good. In this video I run it on a vocal and walk through the whole strip: mic pre, de-esser, EQ, compressor, limiter, and tape saturation. And even if you already have CHANNEV, I found a couple of “hidden” behaviors that change how you should use it—especially if you’re expecting it to behave like hardware. The big mystery is the mic pre section: the mic gain, trim, and pad don’t really change your output level the way you’d expect. Instead, they change character by adding harmonics (I show it with a sine wave and a spectrum analyzer), so you can push warmth or aggression without playing the gain-staging game. From there I do the usual home-studio vocal cleanup: low cut until the mud goes away, then back off (I often land around ~170 Hz), a simple de-esser using threshold and a softer mode, and then EQ for “air” by choosing a better frequency than the fixed 10 kHz shelf in the pre. For dynamics, I start gentle with the compressor (around 2:1) and use threshold to control loud sections, then explain why the limiter is the “more sausage-like” option for aggressive control. I finish with subtle tape drive, mention external sidechain support, and do a clear before/after—because this is one of those plugins where the character just makes you want to reach for it, even over expensive stuff.