Let me know your favourite plugins

  • Balance can be achieved solely through your faders and fader automation, with well-recorded instrumentation that had the mix in mind at the time. Otherwise, you'll have to use eq and/or compression to fix things.


    I would just like to chip in again here.
    In my experience, (making major label records for 30 years) the best way to arrive at a great end result, is to get it right at the beginning of the process. I'm a big believer in "fix it in the mic" if you don't start with a well recorded source, it will be much more difficult to get the end result you're looking for.
    A good quality microphone and preamp (preferably a channel strip) will teach you more about sound than any plugin can achieve. You need to have the finished product in your head before you put up the first mic. That way, when you are recording an instrument, you can reject anything that doesn't match the sound in your head. Learning mic choice and placement is where you start to train your ears and learn about sound.
    I've only been lucky once or twice in my time to pull up the faders to mix a track and find that I'd got the tracking so "right" that it was pretty much just a matter of balancing the levels to end up with the mix I'd envisioned at the start of the process.

    Indeed!

  • I would just like to chip in again here.
    In my experience, (making major label records for 30 years) the best way to arrive at a great end result, is to get it right at the beginning of the process. I'm a big believer in "fix it in the mic" if you don't start with a well recorded source, it will be much more difficult to get the end result you're looking for.
    A good quality microphone and preamp (preferably a channel strip) will teach you more about sound than any plugin can achieve. You need to have the finished product in your head before you put up the first mic. That way, when you are recording an instrument, you can reject anything that doesn't match the sound in your head. Learning mic choice and placement is where you start to train your ears and learn about sound.
    I've only been lucky once or twice in my time to pull up the faders to mix a track and find that I'd got the tracking so "right" that it was pretty much just a matter of balancing the levels to end up with the mix I'd envisioned at the start of the process.


    Cool, thanks for the advice! Things are very simple with the Kemper, the tones are pretty much where I want them to be when I lay them down. I have a lot more trouble with getting drums and the synth (both VSTs) to fit right in the mix, always too easy to make them too loud or too soft. And vocals are probably the hardest thing to do, I just bought a VoiceLive that I'm using as a channel strip, but I am still getting used to it. The new sE 2200II mic I bought hasn't panned out either, I find I get a very nasal quality when I sing into it, possibly because I try to sing too loud. Need to really get this stuff sorted out before I worry about plugins, I guess!

  • Lots of great help in this thread and at this point you might be better off fixing the recording issues first. But nevertheless I want to highly recommend you to have a look at www.fabfilter.com ... especially Pro-Q 2 and MB. They are amazing tools! Also I would like to add that you should also try the Kemper Profiler for vocals. It might not seem to be the first choice for vocals but I can tell you it's really really good. Take some time and explore its capabilities, it's amazing! :)

  • I would just like to chip in again here.
    In my experience, (making major label records for 30 years) the best way to arrive at a great end result, is to get it right at the beginning of the process. I'm a big believer in "fix it in the mic" if you don't start with a well recorded source, it will be much more difficult to get the end result you're looking for.
    A good quality microphone and preamp (preferably a channel strip) will teach you more about sound than any plugin can achieve. You need to have the finished product in your head before you put up the first mic. That way, when you are recording an instrument, you can reject anything that doesn't match the sound in your head. Learning mic choice and placement is where you start to train your ears and learn about sound.
    I've only been lucky once or twice in my time to pull up the faders to mix a track and find that I'd got the tracking so "right" that it was pretty much just a matter of balancing the levels to end up with the mix I'd envisioned at the start of the process.



    ^^^ This 100%.

  • I have a good anecdote about gear obsession. My friend was working on a project with Andy Johns (RIP) about 10 years back. They were micing up the drum kit when Andy poked his head into the mic closet and pulled out a mic that caught his eye. "Young Eric" he said to my friend, a man in his 40's. "Is this a condenser mic?" After confirming it was, he instructed my friend where to place it on the kit without asking anything else about it. As the session progressed, they never revisited that mic again, second guessing the choice. Instead, Andy fired the drummer and flew in a replacement. I guess the lesson here is that sometimes we look in the wrong places for problems, and the big picture gets lost.

    I hate emojis, but I hate being misunderstood more. :)

  • I can recommend reading this thread from Reaper's forum:


    http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=29283



    I made a kindle version for my phone without all the (in my personal view) irrelevant discussions that inevitably crop up on internet forums. I can make that available to anybody interested.



    But most importantly: If you can't trust your monitoring, you can't trust your decisions.
    A very big part of the monitoring is the room. The room includes treatment, size, placement of you, the monitors, other stuff etc etc.


    It can also be thought of your ability to LISTEN (discriminate between similar but not identical sounds), and your ability to get closer to what you want to hear (technical ability, craft, handiwork, familiarity with your tools/plugins).
    I also include proper gain staging when comparing settings / plugin active vs. bypassed in the "monitoring" part. ALSO extremely important


    As has been said, using reference tracks are also very important (but compare at equal loudness!).


    Mind you that NONE of these are addressed by buying new plugins :)


    If you take care of the above list of things, you WILL get results. If you don't take care of all the above, you will NOT get the results you want no matter how many plugins you buy (it's at least unlikely)

  • Thumbs up to Michael's suggestion, which reminds me of something I forgot to mention. There is one plug-in that I wouldn't mix without, and that's IK Multimedia's ARC2 room corrector. While it isn't a do-all magic solution, when combined with good room acoustics it makes a major improvement in my monitoring. I suppose many might dismiss this approach for purist reasons, but that would be a "perfection as the enemy of the good" case. It improves both EQ and phase issues without any magic hype. I'm sure Masterdisk doesn't use this plug, but then again, I don't have Masterdisk's setup.


    Did you ever A/B a pair of nice monitors and have it always sound worse when you switched because you got used to the previous monitor? Withe the ARC2, it always sounds better when switching on and worse when switching off on my rig.

    I hate emojis, but I hate being misunderstood more. :)

  • couple of random thoughts about the topic:


    - I sometimes wonder myself, if all those resources invested in the "mixing-side" of things were all that well spent. Sure, if you know something about mixing, production will get more focused. However, most of the amateur stuff I come by often lack on the "composing-side"... My personal music today would probably have been better, if I would have sourced out more of the "mixing-work". If I would in retrospect make a spreadsheet of just that money that went into all that studio-gear, it would have most probably also been cheaper ... and resources not just being money... time is a huge factor, and I find at least for me, that keeping the creative, inspiring side separate from the technical side helps my music a LOT. I think that the learning curve also benefits from seeing what pros do with YOUR music... quite hard to be good at everything yourself... I don’t know how good a mix engineer SRV was ;) And besides: most mix engineers I have met, also work with a client on site and that way you also learn a lot...


    - less is more… in every aspect. Knowing a few tools well is better than a lot of them superficially... I only use 3 rigs on my Kemper, trying to follow my own paradigm ;) Also I find really impressive the sheer number of track count, "modern producers" are able to fit in the final stereo mix, with actually still hearing something meaningful, but I have to say... more and more as I get older: I personally don't enjoy that stuff all that much, albeit it being quite impressive. I feel that I can open up to the music a lot better, when the act of listenig is not made so hard by too much stuff going on. A lot of the stuff I take home from band rehearsal (Behringer XR18, onboard EQ, COMP, VERB on the vocals-> straight into DAW) actually sounds a lot better, and most importantly carries a lot more emotion, than the stuff that was done in countless hours by layering different tracks recorded a different times with different feelings...

  • Ok! Change of tack! You guys are not helping! And neither is the Links to your Music section. Everytime I go in there, I wind up getting depressed.


    I am Super impressed by guys that can mix their own music. I am so familiar with my own material, it's as though my ears fill in or remove material in order to process the music. i think that boils down to a bad pair of ears, with no formal mix training. I haven't even seen someone professional mix, other than YouTube videos, which aren't very helpful.


    to TOP it all, as others mentioned, if you have a bad acoustic environment, nothing can save you. And the room I am crammed into is very bad. Desk in one corner, no acoustic foam or bass traps, stuff like cymbals right begin my seat.


    So as I was saying, fantastic! Haha you guys saved me a few hundreds! I'm not going to buy myself a bundle of plugins, no siree! I am going to get myself a gun! Perhaps working under the threat of self execution will improve my mixes.

  • Nah, guns are even more expensive and messy than plugins :D


    There are lots of fulltimers out there who will mix at least one of your songs or work up to an entire day for the price of that next cubase update :thumbup:

  • If your listening environment is so bad, you'd be well advised to invest in a decent set of headphones. AKG k712 (or 240 if you can't afford them), Beyer Dynamic DT880 Pro, Sennheiser HD650 etc. etc.
    Once you get used to how commercial mixes sound on them, you'll probably find it a lot easier to get a fair balance, though I'd still recommend hearing the resulting mix through as many different speakers in different rooms as possible. It's easier to over do things in cans.

  • The Izotope plugins are fantastic, too, and their site is full of useful information.


    Here are two essential guides, one for mixing and one for mastering, pdf & e-book. Highly recommended, as the author takes you by the hand and really gets you into things. He uses Alloy and Ozone as examples, and this works fine, as these use common terminology. Give it a try!


    Mixing guide:


    https://www.izotope.com/en/com…-guide-now-available.html


    Mastering guide:


    https://www.izotope.com/en/sup…mastering-with-ozone.html

    Gear: Strats & KPA. Plug Ins: Cubase, NI, iZotope, Slate, XLN, Spectrasonics.
    Music: Song from my former band: vimeo.com/10419626[/media][/media][/media] Something new on the way...

    Edited once, last by Fireloogie ().

  • If your listening environment is so bad, you'd be well advised to invest in a decent set of headphones. AKG k712 (or 240 if you can't afford them), Beyer Dynamic DT880 Pro, Sennheiser HD650 etc. etc.
    Once you get used to how commercial mixes sound on them, you'll probably find it a lot easier to get a fair balance, though I'd still recommend hearing the resulting mix through as many different speakers in different rooms as possible. It's easier to over do things in cans.


    Good call. In lieu of proper treatment, a good quality set of headphones is the way to go.


    On that note, check out Sonarworks.com - they have a plugin that corrects the frequency response of headphones, and it has gotten very good reviews. You can buy headphones directly from them (fairly decent prices) where they measure them thoroughly and give you a calibration file for that specific set, which you then load into the plugin. Just got a set of HD600s and they are great :) Although that model is already very flat.


    I think the biggest missing piece for you might be referencing "professional" mixes during the mixing process (by professional, I really just mean "mixes you think are really good").

  • Yeah, that Sonarworks plugin is actually very good. I tried the trial last month, and although I didn't do any real in-depth testing, it works! Even with the averaged calibration file for my DT880 Pros

  • Yes, thanks for the tip about that plugin!


    I also noticed they have a correction kit for monitors. That would be a cheaper way to tailor my speakers to my room peculiarities. But I've heard such solutions aren't very reliable. Likely to be better than an untreated room though.


    Can someone tell me what it means by one instance and two instance? Does it mean I can only use the software once, for one room? Or does it mean on one computer?

  • Nah, guns are even more expensive and messy than plugins :D


    There are lots of fulltimers out there who will mix at least one of your songs or work up to an entire day for the price of that next cubase update :thumbup:


    It'd be a one-time fix of my problems though. :D


    I have considered going to a professional for help. But just seeing everybody do such great recordings at home nowadays, I am eager to achieve similar results. So I keep persisting!