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I stopped myself before it was too late...


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Hey all,

 

Big sales are hard to pass up and Fathers Day is fast approaching. UAD has their summer sale going on and some of their flagship products are really cheap right now. I thought I might pick up their Distressor plugin along with the Lexicon 480L reverb.

 

But then I tried the demos, and that was enough of a pause for me to realize that neither purchase would help me close the mountain of unfinished projects I'm sitting on. I already own several UAD reverbs, some Waves reverbs, and of course the bundled Cubase reverbs, and other than some mix glue, I'm not even a big fan of reverb right now. I'm more inclined to use short, panned delays if I need to call attention to something.

 

As for the Distressor, I'm sure UA did a great job modeling it but I'm a home studio hobbyist keyboard player. I'm not mic'ing a drum kit or recording guitars right now. And frankly, I'm not even a big fan of that ultra-compressed drum sound anyway. I've got the UAD 1176, LA2A, and LA3A plugins (and the Waves counterparts), and none of my projects are in need of a Distressor.

 

So short story long, it's amazing how you can convince yourself you need something (just because everyone else uses it). I find that asking that critical follow-up question usually grounds me: Is this device going to help me finish projects?

 

Todd

Sundown

 

Working on: The Jupiter Bluff; Driven Away

Main axes: Kawai MP11 and Kurz PC361

DAW Platform: Cubase

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Good thoughts!

Lately my main consideration is consolidation, or something truly unique that will benefit me in multiple ways.

 

I have all the bread and butter plugins long since covered and then some. It is time to go through them all and start deleting redundant options.

A big part of that decision will be based on ease of use of the gui, I am not a fan of "knobs" on gui since a mouse has no thunbs. Give me something I can use for the sound and I'll tolerate knobs.

 

All that said, I just picked up another Eventide plugin a few days ago. MicroPitch consolidates several seperate plugins that I do use but adds extra functionallity that takes it well beyond the results I was getting with the tools I had and liked. I like the sound of de-tuning, it is useful in many cases. The system included Apple AU NewPitch plugin was my go-to but you need 2 instances - one flat and one sharp - these need to be on seperate tracks. MicroPitch offers both flat and sharp in stereo with a mix option so one instance on the original track is all you need. Eventide added a seperate Modulation interface, a Delay interface and a simple way to create 2 different "scenes" that can be controlled by using the "ribbon" along the bottom or the pitch wheel of a MIDI controller, in real time.

 

That will be in my Most Used folder all the time since it wears so many hats and sounds really good. At 39.99 instead of 99.99, I considered the efficiency of consolidation and it's a winner.

 

A while ago I added Eventide Physion, which seperates the transients and the rest of the sound. Very tweakable, from subtle adjustments of the attack on acoustic guitars or sibilence on vocals to way crazy. I like removing the transients from a 12 string acoustic guitar and adding a Leslie plugin, that will serve nicely for "organ" effects and nobody would ever guess it was a guitar. The sound quality is high and it's another versatile plugin with lots of uses. Another sale deal and well worth having, it makes some important clean up jobs very easy and also allows powerful creative options.

 

Just gotta start in with clearing out the "extras"!!! I'd love to only need a few plugins but I've got a long ways to go.

It has become much more difficult to sell me plugins than it used to be. I would love a compressor plugin that had 6 great compressors built in, all different and all tweakable. I'd toss all of my other dynamics plugins if it was good enough and reasonably priced. Swiss Army Knife plugins are about all I am now interested in having.

It took a chunk of my life to get here and I am still not sure where "here" is.
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I have an embarrassingly large number of plug-ins but use an embarrassingly small number of them. I try to use plug-ins that are bundled with programs as often as possible. But, there are specialty plug-ins from Waves, IK, and UA I find very useful.

 

Still, I'm finding that the vocal is more important than the dynamics control or reverb I put on it. For dynamics control, I'm mostly doing manual gain control and a touch of limiting; for reverbs, it's impulses I may that I can use with any convolution reverb.

 

Easy is good :)

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I often seem to find myself buying upgrades/plugins for no particular reason other than I like the software and want to help support their ability to stay in business. Propellerhead is a good example where I was floored by the program way back when I first discovered it, really got involved and used it a lot......for a while. I haven't had the time or call to be using it much for the last few years but I sure would be upset if it wasn't there when I was ready to get back to it. I recently bought/updated a huge package of Arturia synth/keyboard emulations. So far I've spend all of 15 minutes checking some of them out but I'm real happy to have them there!
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Well this isn't about music, but I pulled the $70/year trigger on a subscription to OneDrive Premium. Gotta admit I love having 1 TB of Cloud storage, and all the Microsoft Office apps. Well worth it...should have done this a long time ago.
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My current temptation is East-West's Composer Cloud. $199 subscription for a year's access to ALL of their virtural instruments and effects. That's "a lot" of instruments and effects in the sense that there are "a lot" of trees in Canada.

 

And of course I haven't plumbed the depths of the instruments and effects I already own.

 

Am I this illogical all of the time? Geez, I hope not. But it would explain a lot....

 

nat

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My current temptation is East-West's Composer Cloud. $199 subscription for a year's access to ALL of their virtural instruments and effects. That's "a lot" of instruments and effects in the sense that there are "a lot" of trees in Canada.

 

And of course I haven't plumbed the depths of the instruments and effects I already own.

 

Am I this illogical all of the time? Geez, I hope not. But it would explain a lot....

 

nat

 

Yep. I just added Eventide Physion and MicroPitch to my plugin stash and the sound variations avaialble from a simple acoustic guitar track are infinite.

I have tons of soft synths and samples and never use them.

It took a chunk of my life to get here and I am still not sure where "here" is.
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