 I've used and reviewed a lot of new plugins this year but some stand out from the crowd. So here is my top 5 plugins for 2022. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. One of the plugins in my top 5 is so new I haven't even reviewed it on the channel yet but it's super impressed me in the time that I've been using it. Another one is actually completely free. Now before we get into all of that I want to remind you to follow my VIP link in the description down below for the sponsor of this video DistroKid. If you sign up for them using that link you'll get an extra 7% off an already great price. We'll talk about them later. Now I'm going to do this top 5 in reverse order finishing off with my absolute favourite. Let's take a look at number 5. Back in April I reviewed augmented strings. The first in the augmented series from Arturia they subsequently also released augmented grand piano and augmented voices but I continue to love this plugin. Before we get into what it's all about let's just have a quick listen to it and keep an eye on this morph knob in the middle. See how the sound changes as I change the setting here. And you can hear there how initially we were hearing this much more sort of traditional type of a string sound and then later we got much more of that synthesised sound. And you may be mistakenly thinking that this is just like a mixed knob but it's so much more than that and it's what makes this series more powerful. If we go into the advanced section we'll see that this sound is made up of two main layers layer A, layer B. They can be samples they can also be a synthesised sounds as well. But the key to this is over in the macro section where we can see with this particular preset how that morph control is actually changing those sounds. It's not just going to be always about volume although it is in this case but it can be about all kinds of other things as well. This is true for the color of the time the motion controls here as well. So it's a really sort of interesting way of approaching creating these sort of hybrid sounds and I'm rewarding Arturia a little bit here because I like to see companies who are bravely going in new directions. Arturia are mostly well known for modelling existing or hardware instruments okay. Synthesizers old sort of piano electric pianos and things like that. They do actually have a great synthesizer pigments which is amazing in its own right. But this is really a new direction and I really love it. I hope they keep going in this direction and add more instruments like this to the collection. Modo base 2 represents for me a nice trend away from sampled instruments to modelled instruments. If you don't know what the difference is sampled instruments are made of lots of little recordings audio recordings of real instruments normally. And then if you want to change the sound you can do a little bit of a change through sort of amp sims and things like that. If you really want to dramatically change something about the sound you need more samples. That means they're not that versatile and they can be quite large okay. They can take up quite a lot of disk space. With modelled instruments the plugin itself creates the sound okay. And if they're programmed well which I think is happening here then you can create a great deal of versatility in sound and still keep the plugin rather small in size. Before we'll get into all that in a moment and what the advantages of that are. But let's just have a quick listen to this P bass sound from Modo base 2. A nice basic sound if you'll excuse the pun. Now we could go to another instrument here. We'll go for a fretless jazz bass here have a listen to the difference in sound. And even we could go to an acoustic upright bass here have a listen to this. And there's a great deal of you know different models of bass available for this plugin. But where it gets really cool is if we've say got this P bass first of all we can do things like change the position of where we're playing where we're hitting the strings. Now this is fairly subtle see if you can hear the difference. Here it gets a little bit more full up this end but as I say reasonably subtle at the moment. But what about if we do something dramatic like change the playing style from you know using our fingers here perhaps to pick perhaps the slapping. Have a listen to this. Obviously a dramatic change in sound there. And we can do some really interesting things that an actual player may do. For example you may want to swap your strings from round wound to flat wound. How does that sound? You could even change the action that's the height of the strings here. From the body of the guitar from the pickups more specifically. So go to a high action here. Let's go to a low action. Slight differences there. We could change the gauge of the strings. We can change things about the electronics. We can even move the pickups around just by dragging them. That has a big change in the sound. And of course as you may expect we can go to the studio here. We can do different amps. We can use different pedals. And then they also include a great deal of patterns different things that you can actually just drag these patterns out into your door. Yeah for different kind of starting points perhaps for your song. You also have a great deal of control in terms of being able to assign controls on your keyboard to different parts of you know the bass and changing it on the fly as you play. An amazing plugin actually. I haven't really done it justice here with this quick overview. So definitely check out the link in the description down below. You can download a trial for this. I think there's a free version and there's a trial version. I'm not quite sure at the moment but follow the link and find that out. It's really worth trying out. Before we find out about my number three pick which is completely free. Let's find out how easy it is to release your music to all of the best platforms using DistroKid. By using DistroKid you get to release your music directly to some of the best platforms on the planet. We're talking Spotify, iTunes, TikTok, Amazon you know all of the household names and you don't need to open any accounts there because DistroKid does all of that for you. Now once you've created your master and your album artwork it's as easy as filling in a friendly form, uploading them and DistroKid takes care of the rest. All for one flat annual fee and DistroKid takes none of your royalties. Sign up with my VIP link in the description and you'll get an extra 7% off. Never has a plugin library been so aptly named as this one. This is the free orchestra. It's from Project Sam and it is a free orchestra or parts of an orchestra at least. Now I made a demo of this back in August when I reviewed it. Let's just have a quick listen to that demo now. Now I feel that that kind of speaks itself in terms of quality there but let's just take a look and see what it's actually all about. Now I want to point out here this is a library, it's a free library and it works with the free version. Listen carefully the free version of contact player. Okay so there's nothing you have to pay for here to make this work. You were hearing a few of the different sounds included with it there obviously I'm showing the short strings here but let's just pull up the library here which thankfully has got a little sort of speaker icon on each sound so you can get a preview of it. We've got heroic horns, we've got the short strings we were listening to there, Saldino violins, nice bombastic basses I like these, yeah we've got Pandora birth, ominous lows, luminous choir, power strike, you get the idea, a lot of different orchestral sounds some of them sort of you know sort of real sort of instrument sounds and some of them more like sound effects and things. The organ is really really nice too, it's an amazing library if you haven't got it already then follow the link in the description down below and just get hold of it. Back in February I made a video about this plugin piano tech seven and I made the argument that this was one of the best piano plugins of all time it feels wonderful when you play it it sounds absolutely exquisite in my opinion and the great thing is it's another modelled instrument so it's incredibly flexible there's all kinds of things you can do to change the sound of the pianos and other instruments that you can get with this plugin however since then they've actually updated it to version eight and it's that plugin which I'm including in my number two spot for my top five plugins for this year they've just continued to improve an already amazing plugin in my opinion now enough talking let's just have a quick listen to see how it sounds with this Steinway D prelude piano I just wanted you to hear there how it sounds sort of across the range of the piano keyboard a lot of the time I'm actually using these instruments in a much more simple way just as a simple accompaniment to a vocal perhaps like this so of course because it is a modelled piano then they're able to give you a whole bunch of presets included lots of different types of pianos for example we have this Mistral piano here another Grand piano but this one sounds a little bit more sort of hard sounding and then we've also got things like this one this is an upright piano and it's able to achieve all of these sort of variations in sound with all of the under the hood controls that we can see here all to do with the design of the piano just lots and lots of things you can change here you can see all the options on the screen here to get different sounds and sort of model the piano yourself if you like but it's not just pianos they also have some sort of different instruments in there as well including things like let me just pull it up here this electric piano I mean there's a few electric pianos but this is just one of them you see how this sounds and in this new version they've sort of branched out in an interesting way I mean they've always had some different interesting instruments in there but they've actually got a guitar in there this time let's have a listen to that and that's probably not the key reason why you would go ahead and buy this plugin to be honest with you but you know it's nice that it's there I've just felt for a very long time that piano tech was just an incredible plugin this latest version definitely doesn't disappoint back in August I reviewed this plugin Smart Comp 2 from Sonable and it is my number one pick for this top five and the only effects plugin in the mix go figure let's hear what me from August had to say about this I think the new Smart Comp 2 compressor from Sonable is amazing not just because it's so smart but also because if you've ever struggled to use compressors at all I reckon this is a great learning tool as well I've got it inserted onto this acoustic guitar track which sounds like this and in order to start actually compressing the first thing we need to do is set a threshold a level at which a volume at which we start to compress the signal so we do that by adjusting this bar here so I'll just pop that down there and the other thing we need to set in order to actually compress at all is the ratio ratio determines how much compression so how much we're going to turn down the signal after it's gone over the threshold the great thing about this plugin is we can visually see what's happening to the signal in real time as we adjust these parameters by looking at the top area here when I play the guitar look at the red sort of a graph which scrolls across as I play this so we can see the compression happening here and if I adjust the ratio and the threshold we can see how that's affecting the signal and we can also see at the bottom here are some two gray areas dark gray and light gray that's kind of a before and after as well now a lot of people are going to struggle when they're using compression with the settings like attack and release okay so thankfully again we can really easily see when we adjust these how it's affecting the signal now we do adjust them just by hovering over their values here and then dragging up and down with the mouse to change those values okay so let's put this attack all the way down to zero milliseconds so it's clamping down with the compressor right away and then I'll adjust it up and down and you'll see what's happening to the red area at the top here so a slower attack and a quick attack slow quick okay so you can really easily see there with a quick attack it really clamps down hard and fast on that signal okay likewise with the release we can adjust that you can see with a really long release there that it's virtually compressing all of the time in fact it's just destroying the dynamics because it's compressing even the sort of next note of the guitar it doesn't get a chance to breathe so often that's a mistake we can make as beginners we can have that release too long sometimes and the compressor bleeds into the next note and we sort of ruin it that way this is great that we can actually see what's happening there and adjust accordingly and we can start to see when we've got that release time to the right level at which we can actually allow some dynamics and then start to compress the next note as well allow some of the transients through so that is the basics of the controls there as you can see it's great plug-in already but what about the smart features well the smart features are really clever in my opinion because i really don't believe in presets with things like compressors at all because how can you really set up a preset for an instrument if you don't know what the source material is well sonnable get around that by actually having listened to the source material and coming up with a preset for you but first of all it's advisable i reckon to go up here to what appears to be a preset menu there's really a profile menu where we set up the profile for what the smart feature is going to listen to so this is in this case an acoustic guitar so i'll select that there and then i want to click on this learn button here and play the acoustic guitar it's now going to analyze that acoustic guitar and come up with some compression settings for me so i'll click there then play the acoustic guitar it's analyzing it's not compressing it yet and then when it gets all the way across i reckon that's a really great setting there's some compression happening there but i'm not really aware of it it's very very transparent now the eagle eye amongst you will have also noticed that there was something happening at the bottom here in green this is the spectral compression okay what is spectral compression this is compression which is applied to different frequencies in different ways a little bit like a multi band compressor in this way but on a much more micro scale dealing in many many more different frequency ranges it's how to listen to that guitar and its supply is adjusted to something it thinks is suitable for that instrument now i can blend that in and out using this control here yeah i've also got controls over here for a more clean signal to a dirty signal and also a darker sound to a brighter sound you can blend those in as you wish now whilst i haven't made a video about my top five pieces of gear for 2022 i did pick five and i've put the reviews for those in this playlist right here