 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. I'm currently packing my bags to head off on vacation to Bali, but before I do I wanted to quickly let you know about some great plug-in bargains available at the moment for Black Friday. Now talking about great bargains, if you follow the VIP link in the description down below to our sponsor DistroKid, you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. Now let's dive in and take a look at some of these plugins. These are some of my favorite native plugins from Universal Audio and when I say native I mean that you don't actually need Universal Audio hardware to run them and with some of them like this 1176 you're getting a plugin which was actually created by the original makers of the hardware it's based upon making it super accurate to the original. Now there's an ever-growing list of native plugins available and I would recommend taking a look at the producer edition it's got 22 plugins and they work out to around about $14.95 each. If you can stretch to it take a look at the signature edition also there's 44 plugins working out around about $12.40 each. These smart plugins from Sonable use some of the most amazing artificial intelligence to get you to great starting points for various different aspects of your mix. A great example of how they work would be the Smart EQ3 plugin we can see here. I'm going to go up to the top and tell it that we're actually working with an acoustic guitar and then I'm going to click on the learn button and then I'm going to play that acoustic guitar track and it's just going to take a few seconds to analyze it. Let's do that now. And it comes up with this initial EQ curve based on what it's heard. We can choose to emphasize that or we can de-emphasize it or even invert it if we wish. We could also go ahead and say split it in two like so so that we can treat different frequency ranges in different ways. We can change the ranges that we're affecting all of that good stuff with this plugin. We can also use it like a regular EQ and add in our own EQ curves as well as that AI EQ curve that was generated there. At the moment if you look at this bundle it includes a limiter, a reverb, a compressor, the EQ that we were just looking at there, a gate and also a really awesome de-esser. Check out the link in the description down below. I have just discovered Scale at EQ and I have to say I found it to be rather unique and believe me I use a lot of EQs. Now before I tell you exactly what it does I'm going to start off by detecting the key of my song with it so I'll just click on detect key here and play my song for a few seconds. Now it's detected as D major it's absolutely correct about that. Now why would I want to do that with an EQ? Well that gets revealed when I go to boost some frequencies. Let's go for the fourth band here. I'll just push it up and you can see something a little bit unusual happening there. It's boosting quite a few different frequencies within this range which ones is it boosting? Well it's boosting the frequencies which are in the key of the song so it's a very sort of musical boost if you like. Now you can do the things that you would normally do in an EQ here like change you know the width of the effect of this, change the cue all of that kind of thing as well and you can also change the range so that each of those little frequencies which are being boosted there you can adapt their range so they affect some of the frequencies around them. This is really unusual and it means that you're sort of keep you're doing boosts and cuts in keeping with your song so if you wanted to get rid of some of the frequencies that are not in the key of the song you could do a cut like so yeah really unusual very very different and so far I'm sort of liking the results that I get from it. It's also different in things like the way it deals with shelves so for example if we take this shelf up here and we boost it you'll see there's two different EQ curves going on there and that's because it treats the mid and the side differently so you get a bit of a smoother effect there with that shelf and the same goes down the lower end for things like cuts as well so really different so far yeah now in addition to this you also get some dynamics some dynamic EQ if you like so we can switch on dynamics here for a band and you've got the usual controls for threshold ratio attack and release that's cool to have that in any EQ but remember it's still only doing this on the basis of frequencies which are in key with the song so that makes it really rather unique and even if you were to go to one of the presets I'll go up the top here let's go for a master I'll go for something like master dynamic musicality so it's applying that preset there but of course because we have set the key of the song it is only applying it again with frequencies in the key of the song so that preset is adapting itself to your particular song now as well as all of this as you would hope for you can also use this as a regular EQ so if we take this fourth node here and I'll just go down here and select a regular sort of peak type of a node and you can see that that behaves like a regular EQ now if you head over to plug in boutique at the moment you'll see you get a nice discount on this normally 6490 you can get it for 5390 at the moment I think it's a really good price for a very unique EQ indeed now don't forget if you go ahead and use our sponsor distro kid to distribute your music to the world they make it super easy for you you just upload your track some artwork fill in a simple form and they do all of the rest they get it out to all of the major platforms like Spotify Apple Music Amazon Google Play all of those places where you want your music to be just follow that VIP link in the description down below I made a whole video about this compressor recently the legendary tube tech cl1b and this is the plug-in version from soft tube now this is a very very popular compressor especially for vocals I would say now one of the things that makes it a bit unusual is the different modes that it has so we can go to the fixed mode here for example and in this case the attack and release are fixed so these knobs make no difference to the sound so the only two controls you really have to use them for compression a ratio and threshold that makes it a super simple compressor to use but you'll be surprised this mode is actually incredibly useful in many cases now you can of course switch over to the manual mode where you do gain direct control over the attack and release times I would say that this compressor sits somewhere in between an LA2A and 1176 it's a bit more versatile than an LA2A because you do have control over the attack and release but it does have that kind of flavor because it's an opto compressor on the other hand it's not quite as aggressive as an 1176 but it's still very very versatile and very useful now if you head over to plug-in boutique at the moment you'll see there's a good discount over there the list price is two hundred and seventy three dollars but you can get it at the moment for a hundred and eighty five dollars ninety lifeline console is one of my favorite plugins to actually use I just feel that they deserve awards for the UI on this plugin it's fairly simple and straightforward mostly to use you've got these very basic controls for some very commonly used sort of processing in all recordings so pre-app eq compressor modulation here and where which adds a little bit of sort of character to it if you like if you want to do things like change the order it's so easy to just grab them and move them around as you wish and although it's sort of simple on the face of it each of these modules also has an advanced mode so you can open that and then adjust things in much more detail it's a kind of a channel strip kind of thing this plugin I would say very very useful in just about everything and as I say a real pleasure to actually use now another plugin in their range is lifeline expand uses the same kind of design principle as we saw in lifeline console there with these main and the advanced modes so keeping things simple if you want it but the idea of this one is to really add some character to your recording so you can see that we've got the ability here for example to degrade or resample things here to add dirt to reamp to add width and to add some space as well now if you head over to plugin boutique at the moment there's a bundle with both of these plugins the lifeline bundle normally they would be 142 dollars or so together but as you can see you get them at the moment for 97 dollars 90 or around about that definitely follow that link in the description down below so let me know in the comments down below which of these plugins really take your fancy I bet some of you have been sit on the fence with a few of these for a little while is now the time to take the plunge let me know in the comments down below I'll see you all when I get back from Bali stay safe and have fun