Favorite plug ins, worth buying

Gregg · 2024-12-10T05:55:13.605Z

I’d be up for testing this for sure!

karst · 2024-12-10T22:24:54.661Z

i got curious about the silver bullet plug-in that people were talking about over the summer and just picked it up. i need to dig into all the settings a bit more, but it seems pretty promising.

also you can get it for $20 again

lumena · 2024-12-11T03:08:27.875Z

LLK:

using a plugin released in 2005 and has kept it a constant on every record they make because that would seem like more interesting information relative to how they work beyond novelty effect.

Hard to say just one artist but Omnisphere from 2008 is probably the plugin used by many professional soundtrack and sound designers.
With O. You get quick results - which is great but if you want to shape the quick sound into something more - all the tools are built in. You can even take the finished sound export it and continue from there.
It’s ugly old fashioned and durable. Not cheap but I have gotten free upgrades for 6 years.

Angus · 2024-12-11T08:15:16.974Z

LLK:

I’d be more interested if a superstar’s been using a plugin released in 2005 and has kept it a constant on every record

James Blake only uses Geist for his rhythmics since his very first works – the plugin has also been discontinued a long time ago, and Blake never updated to its v2.

There’s also Hans Zimmer with Zebra that comes to mind.

keykeyeyekit · 2024-12-11T19:29:42.645Z

I want to hear your cocteau twins dreams.

Blueboy · 2024-12-11T19:55:06.041Z

@keykeyeyekit

ish ?

Latest tracks + videos Releases

First go on the new Chord Generator - [- Chord Generator by Mario Nieto World - First Try -]

The mother of my children Liz, her best friends brother was the Cocteau Twins manager, and i spent an afternoon one boxing day many moons ago in Colchester on a sofa with my Liz one side of me and Liz Fraser on the other side, Robin was there as well, cherished memory but no photos, that would have been a bit tacky wouldn’t it?

tekknovator · 2024-12-11T20:08:58.000Z

Redux is amazing, I love it.
Also looking forward to once this is done:

surge-synth-team.org

Shortcircuit XT

Surge Synth Team

Otherwise I would always recommend the stuff we make at work, but I already got enough hate in this thread. It works great inside Reaper and can actually record samples with automatable mapping.

LLK:

stuff like Steinberg’s Backbone (a little underwhelming I thought when I tried it)

Not saying it is perfect, people miss modulation targets for envelopes, among other things. But the Team had a very special use case in mind. It is mainly workflow driven. All about the decomposition, recombination of existing material. We thought very hard about adding a synth into it, but yet another analogue or FM style drum synth felt too boring.
It was lucky that we got into contact with the Sony guys and drum GAN is (was) definitely a new thing. Correct me if I am wrong, but afaik Backbone was the first commercially available synth with “AI” feature. It can also learn from your samples if you drop them into the GAN. You can take a snare and morph it further in the direction of a cymbal, for example. Then render, decompose and go at it with the spectral synth, which was tweaked for transient preservation. It is deliberately not what everyone expects from a drum synth.

LLK · 2024-12-12T00:57:28.856Z

Oh you’ve worked on it? Cool! Yeah I say underwhelming because I probably was expecting it to click much more with me since I loved the promise. I think where I struggled with it is first the UI, that I just didn’t gell with much, and second I realized it actually took me more time to make things sound interesting because I was losing surrendering control over a part of the process to the AI, and surprisingly it often did things that were, in the end, sounding rather traditional or obvious to me and I had to tweak it so much to get anywhere that I deemed interesting that cumulated with the beatmaking aspect of it, I ended up reverting to other workflows. It made me think maybe that part of the process was something I could do.

Even reading your remarks now I want to go back to it and have another go! Because ultimately this notion of plasticity over sounds that wouldn’t just be trim/filter/crush/reverb but that still would have the sonic identity of a sample seems exciting and novel. I definitely see how it could be something that rewards patience, feeding it your own correct corpus of sounds, becoming fluent in how it works etc

Hope my remarks didn’t feel like a criticism of the tool itself, the vast majority of plugins are just not for me and I always end up using just a very select few because my brain’s just wired that way.

glia · 2024-12-12T02:59:54.552Z

Virtual_Flannel:

I just did a search and was surprised to find almost no discussion on the Beatsurfing Random plug ins. I feel like I am hearing this thing on lots of new music, including the new Kendrick?

Where? Been listening nonstop and don’t know enough about Random to place when it might’ve popped up.

I’m kinda interested in Metal but not enough to pull the trigger yet.

keykeyeyekit · 2024-12-12T14:39:52.492Z

This is wonderful. Love the CR78 type drums, and the fade into the tide. Makes me want to try out these plug ins. Thanks for sharing.

What a particularly memorable boxing day that must have been. Best to enjoy the moment rather than spoil the mood with fan pics for sure. Sorely missed band. I’ve been on a recent deep dive, leaning heavily into the Mark Clifford (Seefeel) remixes on the Otherness EP, and the Victorialand/Treasure albums. I missed Liz (Fraser, not the mother of your children) sing with Massive Attack earlier this year due to illness. My colleagues all thoughtfully sent me videos.

hermbot · 2024-12-12T15:11:18.508Z

I’m glad to hear ShortCircuit is coming back. Shortcircuit v1 was the first soft-sampler tool I used, it was a real “aha” moment for a younger me.

Virtual_Flannel · 2024-12-12T17:59:17.693Z

The main metallic percussive sound in Hey Now, and also the other woodish perc sound could also be Random (metal). The small variations in each hit making it sound “alive” is kind if in my mind at least the sound if the Random plugs, and it just jumped out to me this is kind of a hyper specific sound. It could literally just be created with a sampler and lots of modulation of course.

douglas · 2024-12-12T18:17:17.149Z

It’s not a new plugin, but I recently purchased Panpot from Goodhertz, and all of the sudden I love panning.

goodhertz-panpot-3.11-full-en_shadow1460×932 53.2 KB

As I’ve gotten more experienced with mixing my music, I’ve never really grasped how to do it effectively and usually just convince myself that whatever changes I’ve made sound better, but I’ve always felt like something wasn’t right, or that panning anything more than ever so subtly sounded hokey to me.

Then I learned from Goodhertz that you can pan more than just the full sound/level of a track – and that you can give tracks what Goodhertz calls ‘a strong sense of sideness’ (that’s just good writing) without altering the stereo balance by panning specific elements. More great writing: You can think of level panning as panning in black & white; while you can convey some sense of light and dark, you don’t have access to the same depth, nuance, and range that you would if you were working in color.

Yeah, sign me up.

Anyways, I feel like a pro now and I’m excited to mix more music with this plugin.

goodhertz.com

Panpot, by Goodhertz

New directions in panning.

pandafish · 2024-12-12T20:54:04.548Z

Virtual_Flannel:

The main metallic percussive sound in Hey Now, and also the other woodish perc sound could also be Random (metal). The small variations in each hit making it sound “alive” is kind if in my mind at least the sound if the Random plugs, and it just jumped out to me this is kind of a hyper specific sound. It could literally just be created with a sampler and lots of modulation of course.

Feels like a lot of what I’ve heard from Random is reminiscent of long macro-tuned Ableton chains using Corpus and the vocoder - the plugin seems great but it also made me hyped on digging in to the stock effects.

Prof_lofi · 2024-12-15T08:44:05.101Z

Looking forward to it too. I love Ableton’s Sampler/Simpler duo but ShortCircuit had some real charm that I was into c2005 etc…

papernoise · 2024-12-17T13:32:54.636Z

Development seems rather slow and the last nightly build is from 2022. But development is happening, so I guess we’ll see this reach a more mature state one day. Would really love a modernized version of Shortcircuit!

hermbot · 2024-12-17T15:57:46.239Z

In the meantime, I picked up TAL-Drum and now I’m interested in TAL-Sampler, which looks like it achieves its design goals of being a lighter weight, straightforward sample engine in the vein of Shortcircuit. And TAL just makes good stuff.

I really like TAL-Drum, being able to scale the UI makes it so much more fun to use than Battery which is still stuck as a postage stamp. Battery has been my main drum sampler for years but at this point I’m just gradually moving away from NI tools.

Since Battery = Kontakt with a different GUI, I imagine it will get the rescale-able interface at some point in the future like Kontakt did. But… I don’t think I want or need it anymore.

LLK · 2024-12-17T16:41:33.523Z

hermbot:

Since Battery = Kontakt with a different GUI, I imagine it will get the rescale-able interface at some point in the future like Kontakt did. But… I don’t think I want or need it anymore.

FYI Kontakt still doesn’t have rescalable GUI. It doesn’t even really have high dpi support or any of that stuff. I still need it for legacy tools I really like and I’m fine dealing with blurred rescaled UI, but yeah at this point I too am glad to move away from anything NI puts out. And I’d be surprised if we ever get a Battery update, that software much like most things NI is more or less abandonware at that point.

hermbot · 2024-12-17T16:48:50.828Z

Huh, maybe I misunderstood. I thought Kontakt 8 started the long road of updating to high DPI and scaling for new stuff.

I have Guitar Rig 7 and it is fully vectorized/scaling, it’s a very welcome upgrade!

bphenix · 2024-12-17T17:14:13.068Z

LLK:

I too am glad to move away from anything NI puts out. And I’d be surprised if we ever get a Battery update, that software much like most things NI is more or less abandonware at that point.

NI’s approach to development and upgrades put me off so much that I when I was looking for noise removal and dialog tools I crossed RX off the list. It may be limping along with some updates for now but I just don’t trust NI to invest into their ecosystem again.