Softsynths & FX Thread

#309

You should for sure. I don’t ever see or hear electronic musicians talk about Brainworx, but their plug ins are excellent. Whenever Plugin Alliance has a no-brainer deal on one I usually buy it if its something I’d use.

#310

The Brainworx stuff I have so far is nice and to date has been very stable.

#311

What all do you have from them (if it isn’t a crazy long list)? I regularly use their Saturator and Shredspread, I love that so many of their plugins give you frequency based stereo/mono mix control.

#312

Cleansweep, Digital v3, Solo, Subfilter, Subsynth and as of today’s freebie, Masterdesk Classic.

Subsynth and Digital v3 I find are particularly good.

#313

Before anybody says, I wholeheartedly agree that Waves’ model of paying updates is shitty. Their latest version allows for GUI resizing (finally) but I’m not paying to update my Waves plugins just for that… Bit like Reason, making your customers pay for GUI resizing and marketing it as why you should buy the latest version is in pretty poor taste. Eh.

With that said, should anybody need a lot of additional toys, that’s quite the deal: $99 for 60 plugins.

https://www.waves.com/bundles/platinum

#314

I see I am a bit late to the party about Bitwig, but since I was tagged:

I still use it, but not much. When I have time for electric music, I am leaning towards the HW side these days. I do use it to record the hardware, and it is good for that. I am trying to figure out a good setup with a Launchpad to integrate BW into the hardware, but with no mousing about. For sequencing and, if it works well, looping.

As for the DAW itself as a DAW, I like it, but the updates are expensive. I bought one round of updates since it came out, and that expired 2 years ago. I feel like it is trying to do soooo much…not hard to use per-se, but it has a learning curve. For fiddling with sounds on a PC, it is probably the best DAW around. For getting shit done and recording tracks…dunno. I use Mixbus for my mixing and (attempts at) mastering. It has a much better setup for that kind of work for me.

#315

So between black friday sales, my loyalty discounts with izotope, and my bonus bucks at pluginboutique, I got the Tonal Balance 2 bundle for $140. That’s the maxed out versions of Ozone9, Nectar3, and Neutron3 with the tonal balance EQ guide thingy that links them all together to get your tracks in the zone.

I noticed that my stuff has been a little bass-heavy on other systems lately, and this seemed like a good opportunity to get a few extra mix tools and try to sort that out all in one go. I was eyeing an upgrade to Ozone9 Advanced anyways for the bass module, and this was like 20 dollars more for me.

#316

Look into Sonarworks!!!

Game changer

#317

I’ve been looking at demos of that and a few of the other correction softwares. It almost feels like which demo I see whether it sounds good or not. I know Benn Jordan just showed Sonarworks in his new studio and I was impressed by the difference. But then I’ve seen a few others where it didn’t really sound like it was doing anything or it sounded like a sidegrade. And I’ve seen Realphones too - actually I almost bought that one on sale, but then I checked a demo one last time before pulling the trigger and decided against it - thought I could get most of what I wanted by checking my mix bandpassed (which I do now and it definitely helps).

I should mention I’m on headphones here as well (Audeze LCD-X) if that has any further bearing on your recommendation.

#318

Well I’m going to have to eat my words, they have a demo for their headphone correction on their website. The difference is… dramatic. I’m hesitant to call it better because it’s such a vastly different experience. Once I get in the zone with this new Izotope stuff (just finished updating my DAW templates) I’ll at least be demoing it. And I’m sure someone will get desperate for gift ideas and give me money next month (I have birthday and christmas about 3 weeks apart :wink: )

#319

I’m not too keen on headphone correction, I’ve been trying out a 50% corrected curve for my travel Sennheissers and it seems to be helping things translate but I really only use cans when I’m on the road.

#320

Anybody here tried Eventide SplitEQ and compared it to other stuff like entropyEQ, spiff or Boz transgressor? I don’t like that they don’t offer a discount for users of Elevate or Physion (looks like it could have been kind of an upgrade/extra to Physion imho), but it looks good and I love Transient shaper stuff…

#321

I think it’s on introductory sale, but yeah an upgrade offer would be nice. I think Eventide will get there but I feel like they’re still new to plugins relative to some of the bigger players.

I also asked in a youtube comment about the splitting algorithm and one of the Eventide guys responded to say the splitting algorithm is pretty much the same as Phsyion (their words were “the same algorithm as Phsyion with some modest fidelity improvements”). So basically unless you were using Phsyion and your one wish was for deeper EQ features, keep using Phsyion.

#322

Thanks @White_Noise! Good to know that it’s the same algo, but I’m still a bit conflicted… I don’t use Physion that much and like the simple Neutron Transient Shaper (the old version without the additional clicking) and Punctuate better in general, but I love the idea of combining a good EQ with a transient shaper. I already like entropyEQ which I got for free at PluginBoutique at some point IIRC, but kinda feel it could be improved…

#323

Update: tried it out a bit against entropyEQ: so far my impression is good, I like the workflow better than in entropyEQ and I think the sound might be a bit cleaner, but it’s close enough that I don’t really need it. Gonna check it out some more over the coming weeks though.

#324

Another Update: just using Physion to split tonal/transient parts on two channels in a group rack and putting Pro-Q 3 behind both instances works nicely, too. That also makes it possible to use dynmic EQing and all kinds of other effects. I think I cured my GAS for nthe moment. Thanks again @White_Noise for the help! :smiley:

#325

This interests me.

#326

Me too, that’s what I was asking the Eventide guys about. So for using it as a send filter like that, Physion and Split EQ perform equally. I don’t do it a whole lot because it’s hard on the CPU and there are artifacts in the audio that Eventide gets around by a combination of how the internal effects in Physion are coded and they then stitch the two audio streams back together in the plugin. AFAIK, there’s no separate plugin right now you can put at the end of a chain and link it to the instance at the start of the chain to say “this is the audio you got, and I want it recombined with this other audio stream” so that they can account for the expected artifacts when you go back to sum the audio together at your master bus or wherever else you might do it. When they get there, that’s when I’ll upgrade for sure.

#327

You could try stitching it back together with something like Zynaptiq Morph I guess… I only checked it out for a few minutes but the artifacts were not so bad imho…

#328

Free dynamic eq is

  1. [

TDR Nova | Tokyo Dawn Records

](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwjx9JmP35j0AhUCvYsKHb__CE4QtwJ6BAgJEAM&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tokyodawn.net%2Ftdr-nova%2F&usg=AOvVaw08x58UrYin-4Kw50iKd4mA)
2. Dynasaur
by Analog Obsession https://plugins4free.com/plugin/3086/
3. Platinum Ears IQ4gui Dynamic EQ - Free
https://freevstplugins.net/iq4gui-dynamic-eq/

And this is my last favourite compressor. Very nice gui. It’s free
https://freevstplugins.net/snfk-music-glowcomp/