 Plugins, plugins, plugins, whilst our door may have replaced a tape machine and console, plugins give us access to instruments and effects in a convenient and affordable way. I probably have too many installed, so what if I had to pick just 5? Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Now behind this rather crinkled curtain is my new studio. Ooh mysterious, not really, it's just not quite ready yet, but it will be soon. Now when I get into my new studio I will continue to use some of my favourite plugins. Although I have thousands of them, I've picked 5 of them today. My top 5 is going to be different to your top 5 and I think the number one spot may be a little bit surprising to some of you. Now another thing that I will continue to do is have DistroKid as a sponsor for this channel. If you follow the VIP link in the description down below, you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. Now there were many plugins to pick from and I've picked some virtual instruments and some effects as well. We're going to start off with one of my favourite virtual instruments. For the longest time, this was my go-to piano. This is a Leisure's Keys, it's a contact library and it's a wonderful contemporary sounding piano. I also particularly like the dampen sound with this. Now if I wanted something with a bit more character, I may have to swap it out for this, the Gentleman, this is an upright piano. Also a contact library and a really nice quality instrument if you want some character of sort of a bar room sound if you like. Now if I wanted something a bit more grand sounding, then I'd go too well. The Grandeur, this is much more of a sort of a concert piano sound great for sort of classical soundtrack kind of things. Now the thing about all of these is they sound wonderful partly because they're actual samples of real pianos. So each note of the piano is recorded at different velocities and that's how they create the library. That's also the downfall of these plugins because it means they're not that versatile. If you want to sort of change the character of the sound and that's one of the reasons why this is my favourite piano plugin and it's my number five pick. I've been using this a lot over the last year or two. It's on version eight at the moment. I started I think on version six or so and this is very different to the others because it's not made up of samples at all. This is a modelled piano. So the idea here is the sound is actually generated from the ground up by the plugin. Once it knows the characteristics of the piano that it's got to create, that means that we can change it very easily. But before we get into that, I just want you to have a listen to this kind of default sound, which is this Steinway D Prelude. I've got to tell you there's something about playing this particular piano. It feels more natural when you're playing it on the keyboard than some of the other ones I've mentioned. For some reason, I haven't figured out what that is, but it just feels more sort of organic for some reason. Now, as I say, we could swap it out or change the character of the piano quite easily. There's lots and lots of presets to choose from. Let's go for an upright sound. We've got this one here, U4Tool. Have a listen to that. Now here's where it gets really interesting because it's modelled, we can go in and tweak characteristics of this piano. If we click here, we can see a whole bunch of things that we can change here. There's also some other things down here, like mallet bounce, for example. So we can really go in and tweak that sound. An interesting one I want to show you, an interesting way to tweak the sound is down at the bottom here. This is the condition of the piano. We can change it on the fly because it is modelled. We can start at Mint, which is just a perfect sound in sort of piano, and go all the way over here to warn. And you can see the interface has changed to reflect that. Let's kind of go halfway down here to a piano, which is probably a little bit out of tune and in not great condition. Let's have a listen. We can do that so easily because it is modelled. Now it's not just acoustic pianos, which piano tech includes. We can also load up, for example, this one, a Tynes electric piano. Let's have a listen to this. And it's sort of interestingly in this latest version, and you can sort of take this with a pinch of salt, because it's probably not why you would get this plug in, but they've also started to model things like sort of guitars in there. So we've got a classical guitar, for example. There's actually a range of other instruments in there, apart from acoustic pianos. I'm a rimmer here, for example. Let's have a listen. These are probably not the main reason you would get this plug in. It's the range of pianos, which you can then go in and adapt, which would be the reason for you getting hold of this. And I've got to tell you, I have not been disappointed whatsoever. This is Superior Drummer 3 from TuneTracker. Really sophisticated drum plug-in. There's lots of kits available. You can create your own kits and things. There's a great mixer here, which is really very versatile. You can send each individual drum out to different tracks on your door and really get control over the sound. You've got some grooves included, for example. And overall, it's just a very, very well-made drum plug-in, which I use sometimes. Now, it sounds like this with one of the kits. As you can hear, just a great overall, especially here with an acoustic drum kit, great sound. I do sometimes use this in my productions, but it's not my favorite drum plug-in. Now, many of you have recommended to me that I should try out Steven Slate Drums 5. And I know for many of you, this is your favorite drum plug-in. I haven't had a chance to do that yet. Maybe I will in the future, but I wanted to mention it because this may well, for all I know, be the best drum plug-in. I just haven't tried it fully. I'm going to use the free version of it. My actual favorite drum plug-in of all time is this, Addictive Drums 2. I think the reason I like this is, first of all, it loads up really, really quickly. It's got all of those versatile features you get with your mixer effects, all that kind of things. Many, many drum kits, which you can swap out, we'll have a listen to those in a moment. But I also really like the sort of default sounds, you know, just loading it up and quickly getting some drums going. So for example, let's just have a listen to this. Nothing to write home about in one sense, but just we'll get you going with a song really, really quickly. A basic drum sound like that. And there's an enormous variation of kits that you can get as well. So this was, this one, have a listen. Let's swap over to something different. Fair facts. I mean, a bog standard kit sounds really great. And that's if you want sort of traditional acoustic sounding kits, we've got this one, Fairfax 2, we'll move on. We've got bigger sort of rock sounding kits like this one. Black Velvet, yeah. And we go through things, you know, we've got R&B kits, we've got another heavy kit here, a pop sound, lots and lots of kits. And you go all the way through to sort of more unusual things like electronic kits as well, you know, sort of 808 sounds and things like that in there. And just the funk is good by the way as well, really like that. Just a great range of things, great when it comes to these jazz kits as well. We've got some brushes in there which I sometimes use. So, you know, lots of variations in sound with addictive drums, which I really appreciate. Here is that, that brush sound. Oh yeah. So that's one of the reasons I really love it. We've got all of those features. I say we can go into the kit here and we can swap out individual drums like so. We can just, you know, choose a different drum to go into that slot. If we go into editing, we can edit each drum in terms of, you know, so it's envelope and things like that. We can swap out different effects on individual drums. Incredibly versatile. I'll put a link for it in the description. It's my number four pick as one of my favorite plugins ever. I guess it could be important for makers of these plugins to be in top fives like this prestigious one. A bit like how it's important for you to get on a playlist when you release your music to Spotify. One of the ways to get more listens to your music is to get on a Spotify playlist. Now DistroKid makes this fun and easy for you to get on their playlist with a feature called the Wheel of Playlist. I'm going to go to the top of my DistroKid account here, click on the menu at the top there, then go down to get heard now and then click on Wheel of Playlist. The first thing I need to do is pick one of my songs. I'll go ahead and pick one randomly here and then I click on connect with Spotify. I then have to agree that DistroKid can access my Spotify account, which I have done here, and then the Wheel of Playlist comes out. Now the idea here is that you get three spins and the best of these three spins determines how high up you are on the playlist. I'll click on the first one. Now of course the higher up you are on a playlist, the more likely it is that your music will get heard. I'll click again here and we've come up with what we've got. It's teasing me, 2880. And then finally we have... Oh, 1927 is the best result. Now don't worry, you can play this every single day to increase your chances of getting a higher ranking. This is included for free with your DistroKid account. Follow the link in the description down below to get 7% off today. This is Ozone 10, the latest version of the renowned mastering suite from Isotope. I used to use this for all of my mastering from beginning to end. I don't do that anymore, we'll talk about that later, but I still think it's incredible, sweet. We're looking at the artificial intelligence result at the moment. It's analysed my track and it's come up with some basic settings to get me going. But I can of course go in and tweak each individual module. We've got an EQ here, there's the stabiliser, impact, imager, dynamic EQ and finally maximiser. This is mostly for setting the loudness and it's this as an individual plugin, which is actually my number three pick. Now it may not be the most exciting sort of plugin of all time, but it is very, very useful. I probably use it in every single production. The reason it's so useful is because I'm often targeting particular values when I'm doing my limiting. So for example, I may want to make sure that I've got a true peak value of minus one. I'll click on true peak at the top here and just drag this ceiling down to minus one. I know I won't go over that. But more often than not, we're trying to set something called the LUFS value these days for streaming services. At the moment, the LUFS value is set to minus 11. I'm just going to go in and change that to minus 14. For example, and the next thing I need to do is then just click on learn threshold. Okay, so I click that. It's playing the track already. And you can see it's adjusting this threshold. If I give it enough time, it'll eventually come up with a great value there, which means we will get the result we want in terms of minus 14 for LUFS. Okay, that saves me having to sort of get an analyzer out and a limiter separately and keep adjusting it and tweaking it and tweaking it till I get it where I want to. Okay, it's just like an automated process. That's a great time saver and gets you the result that you want. Now, of course, we get many plugins that come with our doors. These are called stock plugins, but I have a question for you. If you had to pick just one non-stock plugin, what would it be? Usually, any of the major doors have stock plugins, including EQ plugins. Okay, and they're often very, very good. They often have the features that you need to get the job done. But sometimes you want a little bit more than just getting the job done. You want to get the job done really efficiently and really well. And that's where I think my number two pick really excels, particularly above the stock plugins, but really above any other plugin of this type that we see out there. And of course, you probably have guessed that my favorite EQ plugin is FabFilter Pro Q3, not just me, but for many people. I think the reason why this is so popular, because it's got so much functionality, but it feels very intuitive and quick to use. You get the job done with it really well. There's some things you can do with it, which you can't do with a lot of the stock plugins, especially. Now, let me give you an example. When we look at some of these stock plugins, this is the Cubase one, the Logic one, we've got the Studio one one here, and the Cakewalk one there as examples. They've all got areas in them where they have knobs as well. You can see the low, low, mid, high, mid and high here. These relate to specific frequency bands. And because they all have that, they're kind of tied to the idea of having a set number of bands. Because Pro EQ doesn't do that, it makes it really flexible. You can just add as many bands as you want. Or I don't think there's any limit anyway. I've certainly never reached it. So we can go in and just create a new band here just by clicking on the line in the middle, start dragging that node around. And you'll see that the controls for it have appeared at the bottom and they move around with it. That means the interface has now become incredibly flexible, as I say, because I can add many, many bands. But I'm only seeing the controls for the one that I want to control at the moment. Now, we can control things down here, but they tend to think of things really cleverly, which make it nice to use. Like, for example, we can control it down here. But up here, we can also control it with this hovering sort of interface here. And we can use our scroll wheel and our mouse, for example. I'm adjusting the cue at the moment. I'm adjusting the gain by holding control. For example, here, I can go in here and change the type of node that we're using there. Okay, so it just feels very intuitive to use. But at the moment with everything I've shown you, you could actually do it with another EQ, with the stock EQ. So what are the extras that you start to get in there? Well, first of all, we have things like the ability to analyze and compare other tracks which have this EQ applied. So let's go down to the bottom here, I'll just click on the analyzer. We can see a list of the other instances of this EQ I've got in my project. I'll go to the base one here, click on that. You can see that we're now seeing in red, the frequency analysis of the base guitar. There's also these sort of red sort of heat areas here. That's showing where we may have some masking going on. So masking is where two instruments are really occupying strongly the same space. And you probably want to carve one out so that the other one can be heard. Okay, so this is very helpful with masking. When we did go down to the bottom here as well, we saw another feature available there, EQ matching. So we can actually match the EQ from other tracks. It's going to basically create an EQ curve. So it has a very similar sonic characteristic to the other instrument or a whole track. We can apply that to, of course, as well as a whole song meaning. So lots of features in there. As I say, very intuitive things like, you know, down at the bottom here, if I were to add a node, it automatically has created a high pass filter node there, rather than, you know, the regular sort of bell curve. So I don't have to go and swap it out. It saves me time. The same when I, you know, go up to the top here, it'll do the same when I create a new one. Of course, they can be changed to something like, you know, a sort of a shelf if you want to. So, you know, lots of features in there, many more than I've covered at the moment. Oh, almost forgot, didn't I? One of the most important ones, and you're also forgetting something, is the fact that we've also got dynamic EQ in here. It works really well. So we'll choose this node here. That may be a problematic frequency, which we want to cut, but not all the time. We go into the controls over here, just slide this ring down. That turns it into a dynamic EQ node there. We'll adjust the Q. And what that means for those of you who don't know is that, yes, that will now be attenuated. That frequency will be turned down lower, but only once it goes over a certain threshold, threshold. So not all of the time. This is an incredibly useful feature. Some stock plugins have begun to have this feature, not all of them, though. But I don't think there's any other EQ plugin, which is as complete as this plugin. Now, it's not that cheap, which is probably why you may have hesitated buying it. I will tell you that if you do go ahead and buy it, it's not something you're ever going to regret. Now, finally, I just want to touch on a comment that someone left on a video I've made about this plugin. Just the other day that I've left comments saying, complaining that YouTube has always focused on the functionality of this plugin, but never the sound of it. And the reason for that is because it doesn't have a sound. This is a transparent EQ. It's not there to add color or any characteristic to your track. It's just functionally an EQ and that's what makes it so good. It is functionally, functionally, I can't get my words out, it's functionally amazingly well designed this particular plugin. So I mentioned earlier how I'd use the Ozone Suite for mastering. There's a good reason for that because it's kind of got all of the things that you would need in terms of components for the mastering process. Okay, we looked at them earlier, all these different modules that you'll get, which you can also use as individual plugins as well. I'd also tried other solutions for mastering. For example, this one, the Lursen mastering console. These sort of things are great for a basic sound crafting, a basic sound. And, you know, you may find that very useful. But ultimately, I did find myself sort of going back to Ozone because it had all of those extra components that I felt I was wanting to use often in my mastering process. Now, despite the fact that we have artificial intelligence in this, we have all the components we need, I didn't eventually land on this as the sort of main mastering plugin that I was using for most of my productions. Because for the last, probably three years, I'm going to say, the plugin which I've picked as my number one pick has been what I've used. Now, the thing about this plugin is I feel like I'm revealing to you some secret source. Okay, so a little bit of magic. Once I tell you this, hopefully, like me, you'll find that you're going to get very, very quick and very pleasing results. The kind of thing that puts a smile on your face very, very quickly. My number one pick for my favorite plugin ever, I'm going to say, is from IK Multimedia. It's part of the T-Rac Suite, and it's called One. Why do I love this big yellow, orangey yellow plugin so much? Simply because of the results I get from it very, very quickly. If you think of mastering as a range of possibilities, we could just be controlling loudness, which is what a lot of people do. But there's also so many other aspects to the mastering process as well, EQ, compression, controlling transience, low-end saturation, all of those things are possibilities within the mastering process. And often we are using many plugins to deal with each of those things. Well, you know how you get those plugins, which are like one-nob plugins, you know, for a compressor. It's just got one knob kind of does it for you. You can think of one as a collection of one knobs, yeah, if that makes sense. So for example over here, we have these three knobs, air, focus, and body. It's kind of like three bands of EQ in a way. Okay, so they're focusing on boosting or or attenuating particular areas. You know, I often love a little bit of air, so you'll often see that air pushed up a little bit for me, depending on the track, of course. We've got push, which relates basically to compression. We've got width, which speaks for itself, I guess, is a stereo imaging control, but just one knob there. We've got a limiter, which I generally don't use this knob. It's normally turned down to zero because I do use the plugin I mentioned earlier for this, which is name escapes maximizer is the one that I generally use for that side of things. We've got control over transients here. We can punch the bass here, the knobs speak for themselves here and adding in some saturation with this analog control over here. This is what I like about this. I don't have to delve into complex controls to get the results I want. I simply just grab each of these dials and dial it into the level I want using my ears. So in this way, it doesn't seem a very sophisticated plugin. There's no artificial intelligence in here. It's semi-automated if you like. But honestly, I just find that I very, very, very quickly get the results I want. Now, I've been working on a song here using this. Let's just have a listen to this piece of music for a few seconds without one switched on. So it's bypassed at the moment. And now let's switch on the same section again. This has got all those subtle little things that perhaps I could have achieved in the mix, but this is just adding that little bit of polish in there. I wasn't using this to make it louder. Did you notice that? It didn't get a whole lot louder when I turned it on. That's because I've already got that maximizer plugin working on the sort of level, on the loudness of things. But it just adds something extra to the track to finish it off. Absolutely love this plugin. It's very appropriate that it is my number one pick. Now earlier I mentioned that FabFilters Pro Q3 had a lot of functions that a lot of other plugins don't have. If you want to find out a little bit more about that, take a look at this video right here.