In April of 2011, I posted about Nebula’s basic setup and usage. It is consistently one of the highest sources of traffic on the page and I like to think that it helped a few people make sense of what can be a very confusing tool. In that post, while explaining how to get started, I also made it abundantly clear that I drank the kool-aid and was a dedicated Nebula acolyte, worshipping before its altar. I just read the post for the first time in at least a year so I thought it might be worth a followup, since my views on Nebula and the recording process in general have changed quite a bit.

To cut right to the chase, I use Nebula in a very basic role now. In the post, every other sentence seems to be a statement about how great it is, how wonderful the consoles and EQs are, how it turns every signal into gold and makes you way more attractive than you actually are. This is not true. Nebula is fantastic: the EQs do sound stellar, the reverbs are fantastic, the tape saturation is unbelievable, the consoles are pretty cool… but I don’t use much other than reverb and tape now. Here are some things that I feel every new user to Nebula needs to know before considering a large investment in it.

Everything you do will take longer. Every project you open, every plugin you insert, every time you bounce a song. On a reasonably modern, powerful system, a song that exports at 3x playback speed is likely to run at 1x if you are heavily using Nebula. If you were applying consoles or tapes to every track, you also spent a lot of time bouncing stems. If you want three bands of EQ, you need to insert the plugin three times, and that takes time. Over the course of an entire album, you will spend exponentially longer waiting for things to happen. Yes, it sounds great… but will you notice? Will your listeners? Will your clients? That is up to you.

Weird bugs are common. Libraries will sometimes need updates because the stereo channels aren’t balanced. Some will be optimized better than others, which means that to get peak performance, you’ll need to tweak your settings. You’ll get strange artifacts. People on the message board discover stuff like this with alarming frequency.

Weird bugs that render it unusable without support happen. This is possible with any software program but I feel like it’s more common with Nebula than I’m comfortable with. Earlier this year, people started reporting their software suddenly became unregistered. It happened to one of my two computers — just one. A patch was offered quickly, but the whole thing was just weird.

Updating it may break your saved projects. This is true of any plugin but I felt like it happened with Nebula more than others. I got to a point where I was backing up all my Nebula files before updating anything, just in case.

The developer and support staff are not native English speakers. Answers to questions are often vague. This by itself should not be a deal-breaker for you but you should be aware of it. When you need support — and you will need support if you’re going to use this a lot — you can expect weird answers that don’t always make sense.

The documentation is fucking awful. The fact that I had to write a blog post that gets 30-50 hits daily on how to setup and use the thing should tell you something. I still do not understand most of the parameters and I work with technology professionally. This is, like… what I do.

At any time, you may discover you’ve been doing things wrong and compromising the quality of your output. Months ago, I found a thread on the message board where users were discussing ways to get the most out of Nebula. They got deep into the differences between the engines it uses to process sound, explaining that if you adjust one it will use more CPU but things will sound better, while the other one doesn’t quite sound as good and changes the way things sound rather dramatically. This left me feeling as though I had been using it incorrectly. I wondered how many of my songs suffered as a result, how many were held back because of decisions someone else made… Or maybe decisions I made to not fully understand how to use the tool? Credit where credit’s due. I thought back to my early days of using it when the sample rates weren’t matched, when I knew for a fact that fucked up things here and there because the developers decided it was OK to leave things complex and awkward.

This was the final straw for me. I’m glad that it sounds great in some cases but I can’t deal with the idea that there may be something fucking up the attack on my drums in particular. That combined with everything else, particularly how it destroyed my ability to work at a speed that would keep up with my creative process, was too much.

These days, I still use Nebula a bit. I love the work that Michael Angel of CD SoundMaster does. His R2R and TB+ are invaluable, but I use them sparingly, mostly on the master. There are a number of reverbs that I’ve fallen in love with, like VNXT, Henry Olonga’s stuff. And… that’s about it. There are other tape libraries I like, I think that the consoles really do sound great, the EQs sound great… but I’ve upgraded all of my preamps and I’m using more outboard EQ. I don’t need that stuff, but really, I never did.

The conclusion I reached was that the pursuit of the perfect plugins encouraged me to overuse effects instead of focusing on what I wanted to achieve and why, and that was the biggest problem I had with Nebula and the plugin-obsessed (gear-obsessed?) culture that surrounds it. A lot of discussions on message boards seems to present the idea that with a certain plugin used a certain way, you can make something that you recorded sound like something else. As an engineer, you need to be prepared to mix the album you recorded, which may not be the album you want. Nebula, by cloning the “mojo” of hardware devices, takes this to a whole other level and actually lets you apply these sounds to your tracks. What so many people, myself most definitely included, seem to misunderstand is that amazing plugins will not make bad recordings sound like good ones. Plugins alone are not the answer. Mic placement, your room, your instruments, your performances, your signal chain coming in… This matters so much more than the best plugins.

If you cannot recording something and use your DAW’s no-frills EQ to make it sound good, Nebula is not going to help you and neither will all the crazy Waves plugins you pirated. Everything has its place and Nebula is a fantastic tool, but don’t lose sight of what you’re trying to achieve and how you want to get there. Use the right tools for the job. Choose wisely.