 Why wait until Black Friday when you can get plug-in bargains all year round? Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. My friends at Plug-in Boutique have asked me to pick my favourites amongst their current specials. I've picked an effect, an instrument, a bundle and something completely free. But let's start off by taking a look at some strings. This is U-Jam strings with all those extra eyes in the middle, but before I talk about what it does and what all the features are, let's just have a quick listen to it and see what's possible with it. It's one of those plug-ins which is so easy to get good results from, it kind of feels like cheating actually. Let's just break down what we were hearing there. On the right hand side we can see the play range of keys here, that's where you're going to play your basic chords and you can play major, minor, suspended, fourths etc. I'm just playing A major there and I was getting this result. Now we can get some variation on the phrases by using these keys on the left hand side down here. So we were using that one, let's hear some different phrases. You can hear some differences in intensity and complexity there. Now we can also do some variations of the bass notes here, yeah? So we do that by playing the sort of middle set of keys here, let's have a listen to that. And we can also get some variations with the black keys on the left hand side here by adding in some additions. Okay, let's have a try with that. And you can see I finally used the end key there to get that nice finish to everything. Now this is just one of the presets. Let's have a listen to something else, we just click through and a couple. Let's have a listen to this one, Vivaldi, okay? This is probably what you expect it's going to be. Easy results with a whole bunch of different presets. Now you can see that it's basically made up of low strings and high strings here. And we can actually sort of blend the two by using the pitch bend wheel on our keyboard. You can see that down here. So you'll hear that we can go between the low and the highs here. We can also get a bit of sort of dynamics by using the actual mod wheel here. So the keys themselves are not velocity sensitive, but as I say, we can add dynamics using this. So as you can hear, the whole thing is made up, or you can probably see, is made up of low strings and high strings here. And you can see that we can also apply effects to the low strings and to the high strings as well as to the overall sound. Now the reason I bring that up is because as well as these traditional sounding strings, you can also get some really kind of way out there, funky things by using these effects here. I'm going to demonstrate that by going to one of the other presets, ATM After Dark. Something really different, hey? And moving on just one more, I haven't tried this one, ATM Loss Satellite Strings. So you can see that the applications for this could really be way beyond your traditional string section sounds. There's a whole bunch of presets, a whole bunch of different styles that you can use in this. Now how much does it cost at the moment? Well if we go over to Plug-in Boutique, we can see that it's currently got 50% off, okay? So it's down to $92.96, all there about. So I have to be careful with this because there's some slight variations depending on what country you buy from. There could be some differences in taxes. 50% off to bring it down to this price in my opinion is an absolute bargain when you consider the effortless way that you can get great results from this plug-in. Smooth operator from Baby Audio is another one of those plug-ins which feels a little bit like cheating because you get your results without having to do too much. What does it do? Well I think that what's happening under the hood with this is some dynamic EQ but there's some artificial intelligence mixed in because it attempts to automatically find resonant frequencies for you which may be fatiguing and it reduces those, okay? We're going to see that happening in a moment. But first of all let's just have a quick listen to this track which I've got it applied to. It's bypassed at the moment. We'll listen to the track first. Okay so I'm now going to switch it on and you're going to see when I play the track again you're going to see a sort of a frequency analyzer happening or a spectrum analyzer happening at the bottom here and at the top you'll see where what I think is dynamic EQ happening, a kind of multi-band compression if you will. Let's switch it on and see what's happening. You can see there was quite a lot happening in the low end here and a little bit in the mids. It obviously felt like there was just too much boominess I think in that low end. It may well be right. So that gives you that kind of automatic fix. Now you can sort of control how much this is emphasised with the overall threshold just by dragging the middle control down up and down here yeah. As with many of these types of plugins if you can sort of really really hear what's happening like we did when I pulled it all the way down here then you're probably using it too much. It should be sort of fairly subtle in my opinion. Now so that's the sort of automatic use of it. Now you can control how detailed it's going to get with this focus control down here. So with the focus all the way up it's really going to hone in on specific frequencies and that's the kind of automatic use of this plugin but you do have a little bit of more than a little bit of manual control as well so we'll switch it back on. Now what if I sort of like what it's doing but perhaps I don't quite agree with what it's doing in that low end there yeah. I'll pull it down and now I'm going to push this low end up here. We can also do the same on the high end and then we've got a couple of bands that we can adjust ourselves there yet with sort of high lows and the sort of mids there or the high mids I guess we would say there. So we do have some manual control. I think this is really nice. It's very subtle but it's a really nice way just to easily get rid of some of those irritating frequencies that you'll sometimes get in your mixes. How much does it cost at the moment if we head over to plug-in boutique we can see that we've got 43% off of this at the moment bringing it down to around about $42 there. Follow the links in the description for that. Those of you who've watched the channel for any length of time at all will know that I'm a huge fan of Tokyo Dorn Labs plug-ins and it's great to see that plug-in boutique have this exclusive bundle the Tokyo Dorns Labs TDR channel strip bundle that's a mouthful isn't it. So a channel strip bundle here with three really useful plug-ins. Now I'm not going to run through these in detail but I will give you a link at the end of this video to another video I've made about a few different Tokyo Dorns plug-ins and why I love them but just to give you a quick overview of what's in this bundle first of all we get a limiter okay this is the TDR limiter six so-called I guess because it's got these six modules in there for your limiting purposes great for finishing off tracks getting your levels good there's compression in there there's peak limiting etc so that's the first one in this bundle the second one we have is an absolute sort of classic for me because I've featured this in a number of videos talking about how much I like it on the face of it and over here is just a parametric EQ but what I really like is its dynamic EQ features really nice to use quite intuitive and great for dynamic EQ compression and expansion as well. And lastly the third item in this bundle is TDR mollot is it mollot or mollot I don't know how it's pronounced this is a great powerful and sort of a compressor which has a lot of character to it as well as I say follow the link at the end of this video for some more in-depth reviews I've done on TDR plug-ins how much does this particular exclusive bundle cost well if we look over at plug-in boutique we can see it's currently $97 90 that's a saving of $78 it's normally $176 for all of these three plugins so if you've you know watched some of my other videos and seen how much I like these plugins maybe you've tried out some of their free versions and like them this is a great time to upgrade to these full versions of these plugins so we're back to where we started with a u-jam product this time finisher micro and by the way there's a summer sale on at the moment over at plug-in boutique for a whole bunch of u-jam products up to 75% offer some of those it's definitely worth checking out but this one is absolutely free now I may have mentioned this on the channel before I think in another video but it's worth talking about again for those of you who missed it finisher micro is not a specific type of effects some of the presets which we can choose at the bottom here with the mode dial a sort of more chorus based some of them are delay based some of them are mixture of the two and some of them give a kind of a lo-fi sound there's just a bunch to choose from there you can try them out and then just dial them in using this amount dial here that's all there is to it so I'm going to give you a bit of a taste of some of these presets here by playing this piano part and I'm just going to sort of just watch when I change from one mode to another and then I dial it in and listen out for what the effect is an awful lot of fun they're definitely worth downloading give a try on a track which you just think you need a bit of inspiration with now as I mentioned earlier I'm a huge fan of tokyo dawn records plugins and you can check out a video I made right here where I compare their free plugins with their paid plugins why not take a look at that right now