Plugins I use the most in audio processing

Alrightly Patreonians!

I get asked about plugins a lot, and I wanted to do a post about some of the plugins I use the most. 

I have and use WAY more plugins than these, but these are the ones I use by far the most in mixing, music production and mastering (this post is less about mastering, though, which’d kind of be a chapter of its own, but mastering-capable plugins are mentioned, too).
I mix and master music for my living every day (Facebook link / rates list) and also make music actively (Bandcamp), and, to be frank, these are the ones that see the most regular use, and most of these I wouldn’t want to let go, as I find them dear to me.
These plugins are for audio processing / mixing / mastering. I had to leave instruments out, as that’d also be a chapter of its own and would warrant its own post (note to self for the future).

Writing this, I definitely felt I want to do posts later on:
• some more special plugins,
• some esoteric ones, and
• great free plugins I love.

PS: Feel free to ask stuff, and I’ll try to reply.
PPS: If you need mixing and mastering or music production help, please contact me at fanusamurai@gmail.com about that (notice that I also have tiers for those, and public mixing and mastering rates list is here).
PPPS: Feel free to mention in the comments what YOU use the most!

Without further ado…here we go!

FABFILTER PRO-Q3

I can’t lie: I haven’t used any other EQ as much as this one (and Pro-Q2) since it came out.
It seems to be the favorite EQ of many producers and engineers, and there’s a reason why.
Sound-wise many other digital EQs would suffice as well, but let me tell you why I like this one.

1) GUI. It just looks good. But it’s not the looks for me: small things like double-clicking to create an EQ node make a massive difference when you work on hundreds of songs per year like I do (one reason why I don’t use Ableton EQs as often: you can’t create an EQ node by double-clicking…may sound small, but it’s annoying when you should use that tool every single workday of the year).

2) Sidechaining. V3 introduced sidechain dynamics, and it just works so well (I’ve done a video on this, so I won’t go deeper on it in writing: https://www.patreon.com/posts/38671166), and it also looks good: I love seeing the incoming trigger signal, which makes very accurate sidechaining in a kick/bass sidechain scenario enjoyable. It doesn’t have time parameters, but I’ve found it always works well.
I use it mostly to:
• make room for main instruments in a mix,

• carve the kick frequency dynamically out of the bass

• any basic EQing needs in both mixing and mastering (it also offers a liner phase mode)

• cutting and massaging the low-mids of a kick drum and sometimes largely re-shaping its sound.

3) Dynamics. It’s such a great tool, as it can act like a compressor (taming a freq range once it exceeds a set threshold) and like an expander (boost a freq range once it exceeds a set threshold).
I use the former to slightly “compress” a snare range in mastering, for example, and also expand the snare range if I find a snare is too quiet in the master. It just works, and you’d be surprised how well the expansion can pull out the midrange energy dynamically.

4) Resonance peak freeze. You get this “freeze” view where the resonant peaks slow down and freeze, and you can literally pull them down. Now, with v3, you can do that dynamically, too, for an even more transparent result! I don’t do this that much anymore, as I use oeksound Soothe for resonances a lot…more about that later!

(Honorable mention: Ableton EQ8. I can’t say it does anything that Pro-Q3 won’t – it does less. But it’s an extremely light bread-and-butter EQ. If it had the same features that Pro-Q3 did, I’d use it way more. Honestly, I’d kill just to have double-clicking create an EQ node, but it doesn’t do it.
Also, it doesn’t have a linear phase mode that’s better for mastering; it’s a minimum phase EQ, just like all other Ableton plugs, and they’re very OK for mixing of course.)

UAD PULTEC EQ

I almost exclusively use this on kicks or drum busses that needs some fattening.

It just works – I’ll be honest, I’ve never compared it to any other EQs, so maybe it’s just a good EQ curve or maybe there is some of that good old analog-emulated mojo at play.

After all, UAD are known for emulating legendary analog gear, and Pultec EQ sure stands among the very classics.

It also offers you a way to attenuate the bass range in addition to boosting, which, I believe, is part of the Pultec charm, but as funny as it may sound, I’ve never used it! 

I’ve also used the high boost that it offers on a drum bus or a kick a few times, and it sounds good, too (TIP: if your kick isn’t cutting thru the mix, try boosting its highs instead of lows!)

Certain elements of IZOTOPE OZONE

I won’t go into everything that Ozone does – you can find plenty of documentation about it online. I do use ALL  of its modules, but these ones are the most special/irreplaceable/amazing.
Ozone is a multi-module mastering plugin that offers a great variety of different plugins.

I’ll list the ones I use heavily.

• Exciter. Now the low-mid band of this plugin is strictly indispensable in my mastering work, as it allows me to pull out this certain “fullness” in the lower midrange that you just cannot do with an EQ. Getting the rich low-mid tone right is often one of the most critical parts in mastering for me, as I work a lot with bass music, and it helps me to get the low-mid more “audible”: this affects kicks, snares, bass, pads – everything. I know this is very hard to describe with words, but sometimes a slightly wimpy and cold-sounding mix turns into a nicely “fuller” and more pleasant one when you get this up. I literally would not want to let this guy go! I do also use it sometimes to excite the high-mids for energy, and sometimes the very highs for sparkle and sheen (more about this in this very post), but I also have other tools for that...but I don’t have another tool that does what the low-mid excitation does.

• Master Rebalance. This is a fairly new yet super useful and exciting module that allows you to control the bass/vocal/drums levels by several decibels. It’s obviously not 100% as precise as adjusting that in the mix but it does a really good job nevertheless (I’d guess it uses the same algorithm that Izotope RX does). It has definitely made me send out fewer of those emails to producers saying, “Can you turn the drums/bass/vocals up in the mix by 2 dB and resend?” and any plugin that makes me email my clients less is a good one (when I mix and master a song, I don’t have to ask for that, or use this device, as I can set the levels myself when working with separate tracks, while in mastering you work with one file: the master bounce that the producer sent you).
I love this one. Ozone Advanced gives you its modules as separate plugins, and there’s been times I’ve used 2 or 3 of these on a master. The only downside is that it’s very heavy and causes serious latency, but in mastering that is OK (while that’d suck in making music…you couldn’t play and record anything in real-time).

• Maximizer. A mastering engineer needs a good limiter or a few, and this is one of those. I’ll write more about this in the limiter section.

Now let me say that all Ozone modules are GREAT and I use most of them all the time – it’s just these three (especially the first two) are something I find super indispensable.

(Honorable mention: Dynamics module, a great multiband mastering compressor, which I use when needed, but if I get to do the mix, I won’t need it, as I get everything right in the mix).

LIMITERS

These are also called maximizers.

The main reason I need these is I master songs for producers, and the final step in mastering is making the song louder.

Technically speaking, a limiter won’t allow peaks to go above a set threshold, which allows for making the signal louder by raising its level without it distorting (due to the peaks that’d otherwise shoot over zero and cause distortion at digital-to-analog conversion stage). A limiter is technically a compressor that keeps pushing the peaks down very fast.
By the way, don’t confuse this with a clipper, which actually clips off everything that’d go over the set threshold, which can also kind of be used for limiter-type work but it causes distortion more easily. A decent free clipper is in Limiter no6 by VladG, by the way, that I many many years ago I even used as a cheap “limiter” in some experiments, and it sounds surprisingly good, but for the record, I don’t suggest that for any professional song-limiting work!

The limiter I use the most is Izotope Ozone Maximizer, which is a fast limiter that hardly ever requires any messing with its parameters, but I’ve found that out of its several operating modes, IRC III is the only one that works perfectly for me. In a nutshell, the other ones have let me down several times, either by going kind of soft or distorting (even though afaik IRC IV should be the most advanced one).

I also happen to have Invisible Limiter 2 by AOM, which is very similar to Ozone Maximizer sound-wise, and I can fully recommend it, as it can go very loud while being very clean and transparent.

One notable difference between the Ozone and AOM limiter is that the latter does not have a built-in feature for eliminating inter-sample peaks, which, in a nutshell, are very quick short peaks that shoot over zero and may cause distortion especially in some cheaper systems (there are not something your DAW or even audio interface might be able to register and show, so they’re a bit tricky). However, this can be done with Invisible Limiter by setting its ceiling to around -0.3 and Quality setting to 3 (I might have to double-check this, but IIRC this does it).

I also have and use a limiter called Limitless by DMGaudio, which offers a bit of a dynamic, flexible limiting which can be slightly slower than that of Ozone or AOM limiters, but in such way that you can’t tell that it’s any slow. Whenever I run into scenarios that I get a little too much distortion in low-mids in master limiting, I usually pull Limitless out, and it often helps. Limitless can also work in an EQ type way in terms of boosts and cuts and it also has a great clipper, so it’s a true tweaker’s dream in many ways.

For the record, I hardly ever limit the tracks* of a song unless master limiting seems to pose some issues that the master limiter cannot tackle. Kind of relating to this, I highly suggest using several master limiters when mastering loud, bass-heavy music: sharing the heavy lifting between 2–3 limiters allows for a more transparent result, while using one master limiter heavily can often result in either pumping, distortion, or softened transients.

(* = sometimes I clip bass sounds purely for a more aggressive bass tone – think of “Metalheadz type” bass. For this, for example the clipper of Limitless is great)

SLATE DIGITAL REVIVAL

This is a great “very high frequency amazingizer”!
I find this ridiculously good in getting that contemporary high sheen right…indispensable in last stages of mixing/mastering and getting that very high frequency energy there.
Think hihat tops, shakers, drum tops, etc.

EQs don’t do what this guy does. The best thing? It’s free. It’s ridiculous that a plugin this good doesn’t have a price tag.

I use this in literally hundreds of songs per year. Love all other Slate stuff too.

The Exciter module of Izotope Ozone can do similar stuff, but I still find this better and somehow sharper.

SLATE DIGITAL VIRTUAL TAPE MACHINE

This is literally always on on the master track when mastering, so I run hundreds of songs thru it every year.

It can be very subtle, but you can also push it harder if you want more saturation in the mix. It can even shave off crazy transients if need be (see section on Oeksound Spiff) in a nice, musical way.

I use it in a subtle way in mastering (mastering is more subtle than mixing) in such way that it adds a bit of “girth”, which is literally impossible to describe in words. I remember the first time I tested the tape, I realized I want it, as the “size” it adds is very classy.
You can also use it to add a bit of bass (TIP: by default it adds around 3 dB of bass, so make sure to make it -3 in its settings to have it add no bass).

It has a few different tape model settings; some sound a bit more hi-fi, and some slightly less bright. 

Technically a tape adds this musical harmonic saturation which is often perceived as very pleasant, and that’s where the tape magic lies. It’s definitely more subtle than a “whoaaahh” effect, but it does make a difference. 

I’ve found that some models distort more easily than some others, so gotta watch out for low/low-mid distortion; especially in a kind of sparse but bass heavy music (like bassy house) the added distortion is easy to perceive, so gotta hone things carefully not to make it too roasted, as good as it sounds!

FABFILTER SATURN

Favorite tool for bass distortion needs (NEXT VIDEO WILL BE ABOUT THIS).

When mixing bass and feeling it’s going to need a little help in its harmonics, this is the key.

This plugin allows you to create several bands and saturate them independently of each other, and the bands have an EQ, too.

This is a godsend in making a fairly subby bass with not enough harmonics cut thru the mix and also making it nice and audible from smaller speakers. I always then check the bass from my iMac speaker and Mixcube, and if I can hear it from them, boom, job done.

The recent v2 also brought some transformer models, which are suitable in bringing in some desired harmonics in mastering. I've already used those a few times. As a mastering engineer, I feel that there IS such thing a a song that's a bit too clean, and a hint of that vibe can work as the slight spice the song needs.

I absolutely love doing this; I won’t write more in length about this, as a video will come very soon!

I use Ableton Live’s Saturator in a similar way, but I use Multiband Dynamics to create three bands, so I can leave sub unprocessed.

OEKSOUND SOOTHE

This is from the website: soothe2 is a dynamic resonance suppressor. It identifies problematic resonances on the fly and applies matching reduction automatically. This results in a smoother, more balanced sound and saves you from having to notch out the frequencies by hand. The reduction kicks in only when and where needed without affecting the nearby frequency areas. This preserves the timbre of the original sound source and results in transparent treatment with minimal artefacts.

And I agree: it’s like an intelligent dynamic EQ that does a lot of the harshness-cutting work for you. You can use it to emphasize frequency ranges as you wish.
I use this in both mixing and mastering, as it works so well. What’s super useful is its Delta mode, which lets you hear only what it’s taking out.
I mostly use it for mids and high-mids, where it excels.

It’s already saved me a ton of time, and I sure don’t miss dynamic EQ notching anymore (I still do it a little bit every now and then, but not often)! It used to be h*ll in vocal mixing to automate complex dynamic notches here and there, and while I still may do a bit of that to be super-nerdy, Soothe handles 80-100% of that work for me.

Examples: resonant snare in mastering, shrill vocal in mixing, harsh cymbal in drumloops or masters (cymbals are often too loud and bright in many mixes), a pokey trap hihat (trap hihats are always too loud in mixes) etc.

Want to sing high praise for this one!

OEKSOUND SPIFF

This is by the same company that made Soothe (they’re Finnish like me, yay).
This is a transient tool. If you don’t know what a transient is, it’s the very short initial “snap” of a sound. Technically not all sounds have transients: think of a slow ambient pad – there’s no snap or click. Transients are not quite the same thing as “punch”, although I find that term is more vague than transient. Transients are not as much a part of the body of the sound, which I feel comes after the transients. Anyways, I’m nerding! (what can you expect of an audio engineer, though)

I mostly use this for drumsounds, but have used it in mixes for stuff like guitars etc for a few times. E.g., sometimes when drumsounds feel a bit “soft” or “loose”, emphasizing their transients helps to make them a bit more “snappy” and they can cut thru the mix a bit better, which also contributes to the energy a little bit.

I literally don’t use other transient plugins anymore: this is all I need. What’s great about this is that it can also shave transients off, which is nothing short of a godsend when dealing with overly transient-emphasized songs or tracks.

TIP: if, when working on your song, you run it into a master limiter and you use transient boosts, make sure to flick the master limiter off every now and then to hear it’s not all overdone. Flicking the limiter off easily reveals if you’re overcooking it. This is sometimes an issue when a producer sends me his mix to be mastered, and prior to exporting it, he disables master limiter without listening, and I get the super-snappy version. I can kind of smash the super transients most of the time, but I wish I didn’t have to. There’s been times where Spiff has taken care of it all.
Sometimes I also get, for example, kick tracks in mixing, where it’s just too snappy (too much is too much, trust me – think about an overcooked EDM-type kick) and it can ruin the mix. Spiff usually shaves as much of the snappiness off as is needed.

A truly great plugin.

VALHALLA VINTAGEVERB

My most often used reverb for sure: it’s the mainstay of my default Ableton Live project (I’ll do a video about Ableton Live default set considerations…hold tight, it’s coming!) and has been that for as long as this plugin has been available.

I’ve found that with long reverbs, it’s more lush and somehow classier than for example Ableton Reverb (more about it below).

The plugin offers several different models, and the GUI shows you nice info on how the different models sound.

Most of the time I use this as a 7–8-second reverb for general ambience, with predelay set to 20 ms, lowcut around 800 Hz and highcut at 8000 Hz.

I’ll be honest: I’m not a reverb nerd as much as I’m a nerd with many other things. But this is definitely a great all-rounder, and the price really makes it a no-brainer.

UAD Lexicon 224

Now when I want LONG lush ambience reverbs, there really isn’t anything like this. The feedback of the tail is just divine and thick, and there’s this special something that I’d call resonance or something that really brings the sound to life. Think fat chords or ambience sounds you want to fade for a really long time…this adds something unique to them. I’ve never even tried to use this as a short reverb, while I bet it’s great at that.
There’s definitely something special in the Lexicon sauce; this is modeled after a highly-coveted hardware reverb (which is all digital, so I assume modeling has been easier than hardware modeling).

ABLETON REVERB

Somehow I only use this for drums, while this obviously could be used on anything, but as the two reverbs listed above tell you, I’m quite covered.
I find this is AMAZING for drums – especially when you need this short “filler” reverb for a drumsound (e.g., a snare) that is a little too short. I absolutely love making this one quite thick (don’t cut too much out of the lows), keeping it 100% mono, finding the perfect dry/wet ratio, and then finding the perfect “added length”. It’s just so good, you really won’t realize it’s there, but when you flick it off, you’ll feel “Oh wow that drumsound got too short”.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t like long washy snares, no, but sometimes when I mix songs, especially sparse mixes, a thin/short snare may feel too short, and this reverb is just the ticket for adding a little bit of short thickess to it.
It actually works very well as a short, wide reverb, too: think of trap with a clap that has to be wide but not long. Like a client of mine said, “I can’t stand a clap that’s too dry or mono”. Ableton Reverb FTW!

(Honorable reverb mention: Aegean Spirit Reverb. A VERY "springy" spring reverb.
I never have it on, but absolutely love doing dubby "throws" into it.)

ABLETON COMPRESSORS: standard COMPRESSOR and GLUE

I won’t go into compression in detail here; I’ve done some videos (you’ll find one here on my Patreon, and another one on my Youtube channel, and if you need personal compression tuition, please do get in touch).

These are great bread-and-butter compressors that do most of your everyday standard compression needs, to be honest, so don’t let their simple GUI fool you. 

It’s easier for me to say what they do NOT do, actually: they don’t do very slow opto compression (I do this when very slowly controlling some section levels in mastering, for example, and for this I use UAD Shadow Hills and Manley Vari-Mu comps) and this very punchy FET compression (designed to keep more transients and emphasize punch – think classic 1176). They also don’t really add much character, but even Ableton Live alone offers you great tools for that (actually that right there is a good topic for the future).

For your everyday “utilitarian” compression needs, these are all you need. They even do sidechaining (I love it how easy it is to set up in Live), and the basic Compressor gives you visual info on what’s happening gain-reduction-wise. 

A very typical compression scenario (out of many) where these comps just shine: a speech track. Typical speech tends to vary a lot in level, and especially when it’s mixed with music, there’s going to be parts that are either too loud or too quiet. As a starting point, try 5-10 ms attack, 50 ms release, 2:1 – 5:1 ratio, feel free to do quite a few dB of compression (you’ll hear it when it’s overcooked), and you’ll find that the speech track becomes way easier and nicer to hear.

Glue is a more simplified compressor with controls that only have a few positions, which, in all honesty, can sometimes help (so you don’t get too nerdy). It’s based on an SSL bus compressor, and works very well in a lively drum bus, for example, where you need to keep the levels in check – try 10–30 ms attack time, release as fast as it goes, ratio either 2 or 4, and bring the threshold down to get around 5 dB worth of compression: this can nicely “unify” the levels of all drums in the drum bus. Also feel free to experiment with numbers! Use your ears as your guide, as always in audio stuff.

UAD LA2 and LA-3a compressors

Very briefly put, I find these excel in vocal compression, and I often have them both in my vocal mixing chain, never hammering either heavily, and the result is extra smooth.

I mix vocal music regularly, and I need some staples, and I can’t remember the last time I used something else for compressing vocals. 
As much as I love nerding out, I can still appreciate efficient one-knob plugins, and these guys are classics for a reason: in vocal compression, they're amazing – not too fast, not too slow, and they truly do the job.

I’ve found that especially LA-3a can offer some more aggressive character if you run the signal loud into it. There’s been a few cases where it’s been needed – e.g., if some trap vocals have sounded a bit too tame, this has often been the cure. It’s slightly “radio-soundish” when pushed, for a lack of a better term (if you run safe levels, you don’t get it, so have to run the signal hotter into it to get some vibe).

Voxengo MSED

There's a lot of nice and wide sounds that can't take monoing very well, and I face those in my work all the time, literally.
What do I mean by this? When you play the sounds in mono, you notice its level drops a lot. This is because of poor mono compatibility / phase correlation.
Always get the mono power/level right first: play the sound in mono, and if it loses level, raise its mid gain – that’s all you need to do. Voxengo MSED allows you to do this.
Every now and then I get premasters where I notice this.
I can fix this entirely when I'm mixing a song, but when I'm only mastering it, I cannot.
To address/fix mono compatibility issues in the mix is easy, though; plugins such as (free) Voxengo MSED allow you to control the mid and side levels independently.
Play the song/sound in mono, raise the mid gain for sounds till they're loud enough in mono. After that, flick it back to stereo, and set stereo width to taste.
That’s it: you’ve improved the mono compatibility of the sound.
TIP: Voxengo SPAN, a free analyzer, has a phase correlation meter for seeing this. In a nutshell, the more the meter leans to the right (listen to the sound soloed and not the whole song), the better it plays in mono (you can test this of course), while if it leans more to the left, it means phase correlation is poor, and it most likely drops in level in mono.

PHEW. If you made it this far, I salute you!

Looking at this list, it looks so short, considering how many plugins I actually use and even a quick look at my plugin list makes me think I gotta mention this and that and at least 20 more plugins. But I gotta limit this somehow and stop it somewhere, as I don’t want you guys to fall asleep, have you run away screaming, or  faint.

I hope some of this is useful.

Till the next time!

PS: Next video coming soon, along the lines of "How to roast basses with Fabfilter Saturn 2 and make them more audible on audio systems with poor bass".

PPS: I MASSIVELY appreciate all you paying members…you totally rock and encourage me to do even more of this. I’ve been supported WAY better than I anticipated in the beginning.
I was thinking of making this post a paid post, but I feel somehow that free content reaches people, and at least I’ve seen that people like supporting me even based on the free content. It warms me up inside hearing "I've been enjoying your content for years and want to support you". I truly do appreciate ya’ll.

PPPS: I’ve also truly enjoyed helping those who are paying for a music production help tier. Music production / mixing / mastering is literally my life and I do it every day, and I really just love to help, talk with people about songs, nerdy audio stuff etc…so keep it coming.
(TBVH, I’ll soon have to limit the capacity of some of the production help tiers not to get too much work as I’m fairly booked with all I do as it is)

Now, time for a well-earned Finnish craft beer…keep on musicizing ya’ll!