Let me know your favourite plugins

Quote from Raoul23

I'm probably going to say lots that's already been mentioned. The secret to excellent mixes, is not what gear you have (a £50 guitar through a £20 amp isn't going to help things much) its all down to arrangement, the players and good decisions in pre production. Put this together with a great mix engineer in a great room with great gear and everything should sound good. Don't go chasing the next best marketed plugin (been there done that) people were making great sounding records on sub par gear to what we have now a days many years ago. I'm still on pro tools 10 HD and have been for years, haven't brought many new plugins for years either. I've go my arsenal of gear that I'm familiar with and know how to use and I'm sticking with it. A well treated room will help your mixes so much, before I mixed in a treated room my mixes where always lacking bass when played anywhere else. The room was adding bass to my mixes which I thought was there in the recording. My advice is get a well treated room, some fairly good studio monitors, a range of plugins and practise, practise, practise. Those great sounding mixes will come trust me.

Rest assured guys, the idea of getting new plugins has flown out of the window!

I find that my bass decisions are alright, but my mid range always sound very ill-defined. Any suggestions on what I can do to "sharpen" it? It sounds great on my monitors but sounds muddy to me when I audition on other devices.

Quote from Raoul23

Sounds like your room is playing tricks on you in the Mid range. NS10's are the key here lol, The saying went if yu could get a mix to sound good on NS10's it would sound good anywhere lol. But hey I just told you not to go buy more gear lol

See!

Couldn't get NS10s, very difficult to find, but I'm picking up a grot box tomorrow. Should help me refine my mid range mixing.

Physical gear in my hands trumps virtual tools, in my eyes at least, ha!

Quote from sambrox

The thing that made NS10s so great for mixing on wasn't their flatness (they are anything but) but their amazing accuracy in the time domain. Transient response and time alignment between the drivers and tweeters was exceptional, mostly to do with them being non-ported. But you already know this @nightlight, as you've read Mixing Secrets

Haha, yes, but you seem to have memorised it! Must be awesome to work with audio for a living, I'm just winging it in the hope of saving money in the long run.

So far the experiment is a failure

Quote from Michael_dk

I'm wondering, @nightlight... How long have you been doing it, and how much+how often?

i am strictly a hobbyist, I don't mix for other people and have no formal training. Heck, I've hardly even sat down with someone professional to see how it's done - the closest I've come to having any formal training is by reading that Mike Senior book that Sambrox is ragging me about haha

I usually spend more time trying to improve my guitar, bass or drumming skills. I play drums in one band, bass in another and all three and sing in my own solo project. Of late, I have been really working toward performing as a solo act, maybe even playing all the instruments using loops and other technology.

That said, I work hard on my mixes. At the same time, I find my mixes are pretty much hit and miss - it takes me several attempts to get them to translate well across multiple audio devices, but by golly, I do nail it sometime.

But what really prompted this thread is the fact that when I play my music over something like my iPhone speakers, it sounds like crap. No definition, just a lot of hissing. About the only thing that cuts through is the synth and the drums, which are VSTs, so no surprise. I really want to get some of the tightness and bounce in my tracks that I hear from other users when I play their tracks over my cellphone speaker.

Something I like to laugh about often is this track that I once liked on soundcloud and I compare my mixes too. It's nothing like my music or even my kind of music, but just listening to the production ethics and the quality makes me feel like my mixes are tiny:

If nothing else because it's 10 times (an exaggeration, or is it) louder than anything I can get out of my dinky studio. But the fidelity, the translation across systems, the liveliness...

If I could get that kind of quality out of my metal demos, I would be happy. I think it would make more people get into this kind of music too, if it was done by more musicians.

I'm not releasing anything commercially, so no Neve consoles or SSL modules for me. But did my freaking speakers have to get messed up?

EDIT: I should probably posting a mix I am doing that I think is quite good, but it's not ready. I shall update this thread with that track in due course!

And then you can tell me what plugins I could buy to improve the results!

Quote from Dean_R

Not that I think the NS10 is the solution, but the Yamaha HS5 Powered Studio Monitor (which is found everywhere) is supposed to be the same thing from what I heard.

Yes, the Yamahas are great, but I hope to avoid changing my monitors for the time being, I hope. Looking at a smaller pair of monitors when I finally get rid of the Dynaudios, I think that would help in the kinds of spaces where I usually am forced to tuck my studio into.

Quote from Michael_dk

Smaller monitors won't always mean you get better results as such. They just don't tell you what is going on in the lower frequencies, which might make it SOUND better without actually BEING better. You could probably get as good results by just cutting the low frequencies across all tracks.

It's more about the size of the space I'm working in. The ported Dynaudios are probably a bit much, especially give the volumes I work at. A smaller pair would have less interaction with the room - won't eliminate it, but definitely mitigate some of the room's characteristics somewhat.