Personally I’m not a huge fan of the “rack” concept and wish the plugins could be loaded on their own. Every time there’s a slightly dull mix, I turn to Revival, which definitely sparkles that lively top end spice on the mix.
Trust me, they all sound great, and the team has put insane amounts of time in meticulously modelling each part, but the very reason I want to mention VMR here is its (free!) Revival module, which works absolute wonders in terms of exciting the sound. VMR offers analog-modeled EQs, compressors, and an exciter. EQ/compressor/exciter: Virtual Mix Rack by Slate Digital.Different phase modes from super light to very demanding so you can get the highest possible sound quality if you wish and if your CPU can take it (and if you can actually hear it, that is…).Super handy if you think you went slightly overboard with your cuts or think you might use a bit more overall boost. With Spectrum Grab, sometimes I end up doing plenty of cuts in the signal (if there are a plenty of freq peaks that need cutting, of course), and Gain Scale lets you adjust the gain of your cuts (or boosts) ranging from 100 (behaves just as you set your cuts/boosts) down to 0 (your cuts/boosts do nothing) and up to 200 (doubling the magnitude of what you did). Try that with a bad drum recording with some annoying whistling resonances and you’ll love it how easy it is. This is a super useful feature in terms of finding offending sounds in the mix and cutting them out you simply grab them with the cursor and pull them down. What this means is if you hover your cursor on the bottom part of the plugin display while audio is running through it, you’ll get a nice graph that draws sharp peaks around the frequencies that are poking out of the mix. Another cool feature is right-clicking on a band, which lets you split it into mid and side, so if you want to create a nice space for a sound in the mix, maybe cut a little bit in the mids and do a boost right there in the side signal…ProQ2 makes it easy. Mid/side mode inside one instance – or left/right, alternatively.It boasts plenty of features, but what I like the most about it are: This is what many consider the king of EQs today. If you like music production and have not been living in a cave for the past year or so, you have heard of this one. Not really light, but easily worth the “weight”. Definitely my go-to tool when I need that really high-end sizzle or sheen…that airy breath of life. The “air” you can get with it is simply great. There’s even been a few mastering cases where I’ve really had to push it to breathe some life into a dull premaster, and it does a really great job at that.
SLATE DIGITAL VMR VS FABFILTER PLUGINS FREE
This one’s free – do not miss it! Got it somewhat recently, and fell in love. You can run as many instances as you wish and your CPU won’t mind that much. It is really, really clean – and super light. I’ve done narrow-Q sniping with it, too, and it sure isn’t bad for that, either, but I have some more specific tools for it. Clear undistorted top”, and I have to agree, as it’s definitely my go-to EQ for high-shelving. The company says it offers “super-high-quality prototypes.
I use it if I need a good high-shelving and/or a boost around sub area or mids. The reason I use this one is that it sounds clean. It’s too bad the EQ can’t handle both of them in one instance, but I got past that quite quickly. This is the first EQ in my mastering chain – there’s actually two instances in the chain: one for mid, one for side. Also, all my blog content is spread on word-of-mouth basis, so you’d do me a massive favor if you shared this post.Ĭheers…now have a sip of that drink and dive right in! This blog post is best enjoyed with quality dark roast coffee, good beer, or, ideally both. I’d love to hear what you were drinking while reading, so please drop a comment below the post re: the drinks OR your thoughts on the post in general. The idea here is not to write an extensive review of any of them or go through all of their features, but to write about what I happen to like them for.
Some of these are used in my mastering chain (which I’ve written about in great detail here), some in mixing, some in both.
– and leave actual instruments for another possible blog post, as they belong in another category and deserve a chapter of their own. I tried to think of the ones I use the most and wouldn’t like to let go of and which have become a part of my steady daily audio diet. I don’t have an absolute massive ton of plugs, and as I’ve become more experienced, I’ve tried to adapt the “less is more” and “learn a few tools inside out” philosophy with plugins, but I suppose still have/had a few too many “waiting to get used” (I actually ended up deleting a few while going thru the list, trying to pick the ones I’d write about).įor this one, I’ll concentrate on the effects – EQs, saturators, reverb, delay, chorus, etc. This one’s been in the air for a while: to write about the plugins I use the most.