Favorite plug ins, worth buying 🙂

[jlmitch5]

i’ve been really enjoying the saturation on the elektron heat as I’ve been working on mixing this local band’s punk record. but I’m getting annoyed with the workflow of having to record and freeze as I go…it’s definitely the most sluggish part.

I started seeing what else is out there and came across the fab filter saturn 2. I really like the pro-q 3 so I downloaded the trial and have been attempting to replace the use of the heat throughout some of the mixes with it. So far I’m really impressed with it. one of my more heavy-handed uses of the heat–saturation on the vocals for this particularly loud song I was able to get really close. I sent a (blind) a/b of the mixes and the singer (very slightly) preferred the saturn.

If anyone is curious, I’d be happy to share the experiments and get your take on it, just don’t wanna do it in a public forum…just direct message me

[LLK]

I’ve heard a lot of praise from sound designer friends (who are usually pretty unimpressed with new plugins because efficiency is often most important to them so they stick with what works best) about Saturn 2 as a powerhouse distortion FX, and I think a few of them are gonna replace Trash 2 with it in their rotation whenever they can, I’d definitely want to try it out and see how much use I’d get out of it, it’s always a bit complicated for me with saturation / drive plugins.

[jlmitch5]

Yeah for sure. There are a couple quirks with it. I believe some of the circuits in the heat are not full 20-20k (they’ll have rounding on the upper and lower bounds…imo to great effect, sounds more “natural” to me), so I’ve had to do a bit of spectrum analysis to get the eq curves close.

I’ve also been running the digital mixes out to my teac 1/4" reel, that’s gonna be an interesting test to see if I can recreate that vibe too (very skeptical on that one though, I’ve never heard an emulation that gets all the nonlinearities and things that happen with tape “right”)

EDIT: also don’t wanna to diss the heat too much. It really is great, they’ve tuned the circuits extremely well so the interface is very pleasant and easy to dial cool stuff in. And overbridge 2 is rock solid for me…I did have some issues when I was trying to run it in my pedal setup a while back, but I think that was noise introduced by some other part, not the heat.

[xidnpnlss]

I don’t think it would cover all the ground you’re looking for as it is a compressor but I was extremely impressed by the sound of the Kush Silka. And all the stuff I’ve heard of theirs has always sounded very good so they might have something you’re looking for.

SILIKA - Dual Diode Compressor

[Smapti]

Saturn 2 is exceptional. One thing that puts it above other distortion effects is that it’s also a capable mixer and compressor - you can get a lot of functionality out of it that other distortion effects don’t have, especially given its deep modulation possibilities. That said, it’s intentionally geared towards the more mixing/mastering side of distortion; it isn’t the first place to go if you want distortion as a sound design/creative effect. For that, something like Thermal or Dent 2 is better. (Trash 2 is good but imo there are better options nowadays.)

[iggy.labs]

I have Saturn 2 and it’s great, but I’m still really drawn in by Thermal for more creative effects. Would you recommend it if I also like the workflow of Portal? (Assuming you’ve tried it. )

[Smapti]

Yes, definitely! I have both Thermal and Portal and their workflows are very similar, down to the way the macros are set up, the modulation system, and the general structure of the interface. If you like the workflow in Portal then I’d highly recommend Thermal. I’m a distortion effect addict and Thermal is the best creative distortion effect I’ve ever used.

[iggy.labs]

Awesome, thanks! I might just spring for it then!

[Starthief]

I’ve been thinking about Saturn 2 for a while, never quite jumped on it. Maybe if it shows up in the October charity auction or a Black Friday sale…

I like the saturation in Wavesfactory Spectre (and Cassette, but that’s more “part of the whole package” sort of thing), and NI Supercharger GT. FXpansion Maul is also good for some things, but sadly discontinued.

AudioThing Speakers has kind of a similar role for me… usually if I run through that, it’s because I want to bruise the sound a little

[darylc]

My list from a few years of exploring and mixing…

Fabfilter
Overall probably the best suite of plugins I’ve used and own.
In particular, Pro-Q 3, Pro-R (close to actual reverb) Pro-C 2 and Pro-L 2
These are typically my go to workhorse plugins.

Valhalla
Delay, Supermassive (free), Space modulator (free) - Amazing must haves really…
Plate, Room, Vintageverb - Fantastic for the price, but more an effect reverb than any kind of “actual” reverb

Pluginalliance
Shadowhills compressor - Lovely glue
Black Box HG-2 - More lovely glue, saturator or full distortion.

Oeksound
Soothe2 - Try it anyway

Waves
Abbey Road TG Mastering Chain - Lovely EQ & Filter sections
Reel ADT - Amazing on so many things, piano in particular.
Abbey Road Saturator - Fantastic & flexible saturator
EMI TG12345 Channel Strip - Ballys compression & saturation for drums in particular, sucks out some mids which usually helps alot of the time.
SSL G-Channel / SSL G-Equalizer - Just excellent

Klanghelm
MJUC - great very warm tubey compressor, will take the edge off anything.

[mattlowery]

Anyone have experience with any of the Sonic Lab plug-ins? I’m going to give EnvBot a whirl. I’ve been looking for a way to do double andore style wavetable envelopes in the daw, and this might just be the ticket.

Also interested in the desktop version of Fundamental.

[Smapti]

Yep – I have all of them except for Fundamental. The Cosmosf plugins are immensely powerful and there’s nothing else like them out there, but they are also very complicated and the interface takes a lot of getting used to.

Envbot and Volbot are both great and a lot more straightforward than Cosmosf; I recommend getting the bot bundle. (I don’t use Passbot much since I don’t have much use for filter banks, but if that’s something you’re interested in then you’ll probably like it.) Because of the stochastic functions you can get really wild sounds which range from weird fluttery envelopes to audio rate ring mod decimation. The clients can be distributed across multiple DAW tracks to get related but different random volume shaping, which is a great feature.

[Starthief]

Personally I found Passbot utterly confusing and the GUI was almost unreadable on my display. I do like Fundamental quite a lot, despite some things I’d want done differently in the UI.

Wavesfactory just released Echo Cat, an emulation of the Watkins Copicat tape echo with some additional features. I love their tape modeling in Cassette, and it’s excellent here too – I wound up buying it after a few minutes of demoing. The 50% intro price lasts until December 3 so there should be plenty of time to check it out

[jlmitch5]

I like the ui on that… always funny to me they decided to name their plugin company wavesfactory. Definitely not confusing at all

[corpusjonsey]

Not exactly a plugin, but a suite of M4L devices : Smartphones

Creative and complex note and control routing. I use the gridControl and arcControl devices with grid and arc to interface with the smartphones stuff with great results.

[jacobino]

+1 on Smartphones, got to discover them thanks to @dan_derks! They are awesome.

[Joseph]

The most realistic sounding line amp saturation I’ve heard is the drive in Soundtoys Sie-Q.

[blacklodgeal]

The hi frequency control on the Sie-Q is pretty special too! I’ve gotten pretty deep into reamping for saturation, but plugin wise I really like the new Kush Silka, it really has something special to it!

[Dogma]

Nebula is currently 80% and at that price is a bit crazy - instabuy

The best thing with nebula is it’s utterly authentic as it is the equipment, it’s not modelling
the very specific programs available and the cheap prices (mostly) from Tim p (and Henry Olga was a fantastic resource) are brilliant and the only ones able to time based effects as flangers with their sampling tech

It used to be pretty horrible to use but much better now, on,y thing is it will bring literally any modern computer to it’s knees so it’s to be used sparingly

[Senorakubra]

I’d love to hear more views on Nebula. I trialled it a long time ago, but didn’t enjoy the workflow or user interactions. Another overwhelming library is also a concern. Do we have other lines folk who use it today? What libraries and workflow?