Plugin Buyer's Guide
For anyone first getting into the world of audio, it may be overwhelming to enter the world of software. We're here to break it all down for you. First, make sure you've read our beginner's guide. Next, read up on the plugins that came with your DAW recording program. Not all DAWs come with great stock plugins. From here, you've got to decide how much you want to invest and what type of sound you want to achieve. There are hundreds and hundreds of plugins out there. We still have a lot to check out ourselves.
For this company's mission, we wanted to make the classic cutting edge. That means getting analog modeled plugins of the tape, FX, and hardware used on many historically significant albums followed by cutting edge digital tools. Nowadays you can get direct copies of the Weiss DS-1 MK3 $8000 digital mastering hardware, Sony Oxford console(Sonnox), and Neve DFC console channel strip that was used on many big budget movies.
Some classic analog hardware is said to be modeled identically in the software realm such as Softube's Tube Tech MKII, UAD's Distressor, and T-Racks Tape. Users have reported that there are many others that are accurate to analog hardware. But take the claims of accuracy and inaccuracy with a grain of salt. Some plugins upsample when run at 44/48 khz. Many plugins need to upsample even higher than 88/96 khz and will go to 192 khz or 384 khz. Upsampling isn't always necessary, but it's done to minimize sonic problems.
To start you want plugins for EQ, Compression, Saturation(tape, console), FX(reverb, delay, flanging, pitch modulation), De-essing, pitch correcting(like Autotune), Limiting, Dither, re-amping, and rooms. Let's break down a few choices.
First thing, don't grab a bunch of cracked plugins. You have no idea what they've done to the code and how it's going to affect your session. One iffy cracked plugin can slow or crash your sessions. Others will stop working and ask you to buy the plugin after a period of time. Incorrectly cracked plugins have omitted harsh noises that have damaged speakers. The biggest detriment is that you'll have to spend loads of time learning dozens and dozens of new things when you really need to learn fundamentals of audio first.
Where to start? You could do a lot with the Plugin Alliance Mega subscription bundle. Or you could buy some of the highest quality stuff at the lowest prices. Things like SDRR2 by Klanghelm(all their stuff is great though), anything by Tokyo Dawn, Hornet Deelay and Tape, and CLAEffects and/or NLS by Waves. Moving up another price tier, you can grab some Overloud Gems like Tapedesk, Comp 76, and Dopamine. Metaplugin by DDMF is very essential as it allows you to upsample plugins that don't have an upsampling option already. The Lindell 902 from Plugin Alliance is our de-esser of choice. It's a model of a 1980s standard. The developer created the LSR line of plug-ins and makes top notch analog emulations.
If you're using Pro Tools, definitely get the trio of Phoenix II, Ra, and Peacock from Cranesong/Dave Hill. They can be very pricey. We've only ever seen them on sale once and that was during Xmas 2017 at $150 each for US customers of Sweetwater.
Stillwell Audio makes some high quality stuff that's not too expensive. You can try them out full-featured for quite a long time before buying.
Getting to FX, you'll want to take a look at Eventide, Lexicon, Liquid Sonics, and UAD. These are the sounds found on a lot of records you know. You could get by with just a couple of good reverb plugins. Our favorites are the Sonnox Oxford Reverb, Eventide SP2016, UAD Lexicon 224, UAD Lexicon 480, UAD Capitol Chambers, Seventh Heaven Professional, UAD AMS RMX 16, Relab's VSR S24 and Sonsig, and Transatlantic Plate by Rare Signals. The Oxford sticks to a source the best out of all of them.
You'll need a UAD device to use the UAD plugins, such as an Octo satellite. Valhalla has some good reverb and fx plugins for around $50 each. Sometimes you'll be able to find Sonsig for $74, SP2016 for $64, Lexicon MPX or LXP under $60, or regular Seventh Heaven in Valhalla price territory. Most plugin sales happen around black friday. There have been sales of Exponential Audio fx plugins for prices well below Valhalla from time to time as well. If you want the Oxford, you'll probably have to wait til June or November to get it at a reasonable price.
Eventide harmonizers like the H3000 and H910 have been part of popular music since the 70's. These are definitely essential. The stuff they do with pitch is hard to describe, but you'll recognize the sound when you hear it.
Delays essentially make a copy of the sound and play it back later. There's a lot out there. Our favorites are usually the McDSP EC-300, Line 6 Echo Farm, Waves H-Delay, Fuse Audio Bucket 500, and UAD Precision Delay. For starting out, you could use an inexpensive plugin like Deelay by Hornet. Your DAW's included delay may also be perfectly serviceable.
Consoles and Tape have been a big part of music for decades. It doesn't hurt to have a lot of options here. U-he Satin is probably the most comprehensive tape emulation. However, it's not always going to be what you need and upsampling to 384khz uses a good bit of cpu cycles. It's definitely an essential though. Hornet Tape is really useful and very inexpensive. Cranesong Phoenix is usually what we use on tracks, but that's a Pro Tools exclusive. Overloud Tapedesk is also a good choice for tracks due to its low cpu usage. With tape plugins we generally follow them with an instance of Overloud Dopamine. It aims to replicate the Dolby trick of tape engineers of the past.
Maybe the most famous tape sound people know is from the Studer A800. Once we got this from UAD and started using it, it really changed our mixes for the better. You don't want to just slap it on everything. Sometimes it dulls the source too much. A lot of the times we'll use Phoenix on tracks and Studer on busses. And then slap Dopamine after both of those depending on the track.
Compressors have seemingly infinite options. So we're just going to mention our favorites. Stuff that sounds big and can control the peaks without creating a mess. Fast FET compressors have been a staple for many years. The best options at this time would be the Plugin Alliance MC77, Overloud Comp 76 V2, Molot GE, and UAD 1176. You could also maybe toss the UAD 176 in here too. One of the most knowledgeable forum posters out there recommends the Molot GE. The UAD Distressor can also do the fast FET thing. Kush Novatron is another versatile choice like a Distressor can be.
But it really depends on the source material again. Some voices have sounded better with a UAD 1176 blue on them or Comp 76 V2 then when we've swapped them out for Molot GE on insane mode. This is a reason we don't really sell plugins. What might not work on one track or song will work tremendously on another.
Getting into other types of compression, you have stuff like Vari-Mu and Opto. It's something the engineer really has to experiment with. Fuse Audio comes highly recommended by the same very knowledgeable forum poster mentioned above. MJUC from Klanghelm is an excellent choice that is very inexpensive to own.
SSL is a company with a very unique sound known for providing "glue and snap" with their compressors. We strongly encourage you to try out the Duende Bus Comp and the X-Valve compressor.
Tone Projects Unisum and the Weiss DS-1 MK3 by Softube are the most coveted buss compressors out there for mastering. These have highly complex options where you can hone in on things with exact settings. A bus compressor goes across a bus, which is to say an aux track that other tracks are routed into. You'll find that different plug-ins are more to your liking than others on different busses.
You can route your vocals into an aux track (Vocal Bus) and then route your Vocal Bus into a pre-master fader aux (Mix Bus) where it will combine with aux tracks for various instruments (Drum Bus, Guitar Bus, etc.) before the Mix Bus is routed into the Master Fader.
For controlling sibilance in a vocal track, you'll want a de-esser. You can go the classic hardware route and use something like the Lindell 902 that is simple and works with its own sound. Or you can get into digital tweaking with something like Essence by DMG Audio. Fabfilter Pro-DS is another favorite out there.
Console plugins generally consist of stuff like Sonimus Satson or Britson, Waves NLS, Slate VCC, the various models by Plugin Alliance, and SDRR2 by Klanghelm. The idea being that you put a console plugin across all your tracks and auxes as to emulate one of those giant mixing consoles you see in the cd booklets of many albums. These all work to some degree. Crosstalk can help glue a mix, but too much can be detrimental. Klanghelm's SDRR2 across a Mix Bus can be really nice. Try them out and see if you think you need them. Slapping a Plugin Alliance SSL E after FX with just the default dynamics section on, top filters disabled, and the eq section with no moves can really help clean up a mix while letting the FX kinda glue things. You can increase the levels of the FX a lot by putting this console emulation after each reverb, delay, etc.
Acustica Audio is touted by many as the best plug-in company for accuracy. But at times one or two instances of their plugins can cripple a session by using a ton of cpu cyles. That said, they do make a lot of great stuff and often sell new releases for low prices. Magenta is really great for mastering once you have a feel for it.
Equalizers are those things that adjust your bass and treble on your listening devices. They all have their own approaches and it's a more complex and unique process than you would think. What you're going to do here is use them to balance your mixes. You'll want to use them for smoothing things out and creating excitement. The Tokyo Dawn Slick Eq can do a lot and avoid the limitations of using a 44/48 khz sample rate. You could also try something unique like the Vertigo VSE-2 to clear out mud and excite things without sounding brittle. Generally if you want to bring voices out they say to boost at 3 khz and if you want "air", boost at around 8-10 khz. You just have to learn how your eqs sound boosting and subtracting and become a master at utilizing them. The Q setting decides how much the changes will apply to frequencies surrounding the selected one.
Dynamic equalizers are another essential tool. They work by kicking in only when a frequency range meets a certain threshold. That's to say that they can be set to only subtract 50hz when it becomes obtrusive to the song. This is an overly simplistic way of explaining it. We recommend you try the Sonnox Dynamic Eq as it has pop-up tips that make using its complex possibilities simpler. Most Sonnox plug-ins provide pop-up tips.
A good, natural room sound can be incredibly important to run all your tracks through. The premier plugins for this purpose are Tverb by Eventide and Ocean Way by UAD. Though you can try something else like Seventh Heaven Pro in either of their places. Tverb and Ocean Way are very easy to setup and integrate. Your mixes will sound bigger and more dynamic. It's a different type of echo than something like a Lexicon reverb. These are more natural, more integrated with the source.
Generally, we don't send instrument and vocal tracks to the same fx plugins. Lately we've been using Capitol Chambers instead of Ocean Way for a natural room sound on vocal tracks. But it's not always necessary. It usually ends up being much more necessary when you have 5 instrument tracks and one vocal track as opposed to sessions where you have 40 instrument tracks and 10 vocal tracks.
If you want to create a Led Zepplin Kashmir type drum effect or fake vibrato that sounds real, you'll want flangers and phasers. They manipulate sounds to make them sound otherworldly. A lot of pitch fluctuations. Give Softube's Fix line a try. We'll be posting the real-sounding fake vibrato settings for Fix Phaser.
Auto-tune may be the most famous plugin ever made. But it's not a cure all for bad singing. You don't just slap it on and have someone sounding great instantly. A lot of times it can make things worse by taking out the expression. That's been helped by the Flextune mode added in Auto-Tune 8 and Pro. You can fine tune things using Flextune in a way that makes complex editing in graphic mode much less necessary. Graphic mode is where you can really tweak the pitch in excruciating detail. You can even warp notes to make them a different length. This is one of the more difficult and time-intensive tasks in all of music.
Thankfully, you can make a voice sound good without even needing to tune. You can use your compressors and fx to really get the vocal focused and more in tune without it sounding obvious. Zplane elastique pitch is easy to slap on and use in a way that seems to know how much to alter the time of the notes by. Serato Pitch 'N' Time Pro is really nice to use for spot correcting individual notes using the Audiosuite mode in Pro Tools and similar for other DAWs. Where Auto-tune can really be helpful is where you have a session where someone had to quickly record a lot of vocal harmonies. You can use it as sort of a creative pitch plugin to find which alterations help the harmonies blend.
Speaking of which, this is what Revoice Pro is famous for. Copying audio tracks and then allowing you to align them inside its program window. This won't necessarily represent how they'll sound in the mix though. So you'll need to do some trial and error. Revoice can create fake backup vocals that are altered enough to sound just about real. Then you can manually edit them millisecond by millisecond for timing. You will probably need to do that when it tries to line up harmonies too. There's also a pitch correction ability in Revoice we've yet to explore.
Vacuum tubes have been a big deal for decades. There are many tube plugins that are great. LSR, Wave Arts, Slate, UAD, Overload, Nomad Factory, Acustica, almost every company has a good tube plugin. At the moment, we're using Plugin Alliance Black Box HG-2 MS on busses and mastering. Just very, very easy to work with and fits well in the existing plugin chains we use.