 This is percussive elements an awesome free contact library I love the design particularly the epicness style and the way it changes the graphic on the interface Hi folks, I'm Mike, and I hope you're well That's just one of the three things that we'll be looking at in today's video Which includes something retro and something Creepy but first of all, let's get started off by looking at a really great mastering plug-in This is master desk classic from brainworks a mastering plug-in Which is really designed to make mastering a simple and sort of intuitive process for you. It's normally a hundred and forty nine Dollars, however, it is free at the time of making this video for the next few days or so So I highly suggest you watch the rest of this video first of course But if you want to get this plug-in follow that link in the description down below right away and get hold of it How does it deal with mastering well with three simple steps and then some optional ones and those three simple steps? Have labeled controls this first one here volume, which is labeled number one this one foundation Which is labeled number two and then tone number three and as I say some optional controls as well So volume first of all I kind of wish that they had labeled this loudness since it really adjusts loudness which is Achieved through adjusting things like compressors and limiters under the hood and it's just the kind of average level of your music And that's what really people perceive in terms of loudness rather than the peaks volume for me is more of a level control But I won't go on about it. It's labeled volume. It should be loudness. Anyway, you adjust this Well, the idea is you adjust this until the metering here is showing between Six and eight DB and they've sort of shaded that in green there. Okay, so indicate that's a good zone So you would listen to your track as I'm about to and adjust this control until you're roughly in that ballpark And it's already roughly there that's fine You can see over here the dynamic range was was saying until it disappeared there around about seven DB So that's fine. The next thing that we deal with is foundation Now this is really dealing with the low end of the mix the foundation and as you push this up You get a little bit more emphasis in the low end and as you go down then it sort of disappears from the mix So I'm just going to adjust this quickly until it sounds about right to me. I Like it around about there. There's a nice warmth to it there finally step number three tone This really deals with the brightness of the mix more the higher end if you like It's going to sound really dark down here. We'll have a listen and Then pretty bright when I put it on a hundred percent I'll just adjust that down And you get to that to the point where it sounds good to you now They do have some different settings for this tone control a b c and d and I don't know really what's happening with these They don't seem to say in the manual. They just say there's four different settings for you to try out I'm not certain I can hear an awful lot of difference, but I'll go between them at the moment You can tell me in the comments down below whether you hear any difference Not sure if I'm using that wrong or whether there's just not much difference or maybe my hearing isn't that great and yours is Let me know in the comments down below. I like to play with stereo widening in my mixes And that doesn't mean I always like things to be wide definitely in some circumstances with some songs I want them to sound fairly narrow and down the middle but it is nice that this is here and What I like about the control in this particular plug-in is whatever setting you use whether it's very narrow down low Look down low like this or very wide up high like this It always seems to sound pretty natural to me. Have a listen and see what you think Now it's going to depend on your particular song, but I find even up there on a hundred percent of width It's still sounding okay. I can't say that of all other plugins It can sound really crazy on the highest and not very natural. So I guess For this I'd have it about there or so I'm happy with that now the other thing that you can play around with is this This is the total Harmonic distortion. I almost forgot what it stood for and again, this is just adjusting harmonic distortion Now if you're just starting out with your mixing, it's very likely that you can't hear much difference with this It's a very subtle control when we're playing with these kinds of things and again It depends on the track your mixing and kind of mastering I should say and how much level you've got all that kind of thing But I'll just play with it a little bit here and you can have a listen to see what difference you can hear It's very very subtle I feel there's a little bit more life in it on the high end But as I say don't feel bad if you can't hear much difference and finally over here This is it's interesting that this is optional because really it's something you should always be considering This is making sure that we're never going to peak under any circumstance now This is definitely going to limit our track to 0 dB there when we have it set here Once you've got this plug-in switched on by the way and this is engaged You will not sort of go over 0 dB, but it's advisable often just to have it a little bit lower than that Okay, just to make sure on different systems when the analog to digital conversion happens that there's no clipping So you might want to put it down to I don't know, you know It's just a little bit below like so, you know 0.3 or 0.2 something like that So that's a great control to have on there as well And really you could download this plug-in and if you've never done any mastering before you could go a long way To getting some good results from this mastering. It's really quite spooky talking of spooky How about this for a plug-in? This is actually not spooky, but creepy. This is creepy piano to light So this light version is completely free and it's got a lot of options, which are great fun I've put together a little sort of arpeggio piece here starting off with this preset coffin rot Which kind of gives you an idea of what's to come. There's some more extreme ones in this This is actually the sort of more tame one, but we'll have a quick listen It'll give you an idea of where this is aimed at So you get the idea there this is sort of a sinister sounding piano But the fun for me is in these controls down here. We've got rain, vinyl, wind, darkness Now darkness is a little sort of harder to describe than some others. We'll play with this first I'm going to play that arpeggio again, but then I'm going to blend some darkness in. Let's have a listen Okay, we're getting a bit sort of creepy here. Let's have some rain And some vinyl. We're definitely going to need some wind That is the opening for a horror movie right there. Now we'll switch off these effects Let's do that quickly. I do like the fact that when you switch these effects off They don't suddenly disappear. They sort of gradually fade out like that. That's a nice touch Now that is the sort of a basic sound that I was using. They're called coffin rot As I say, some of them are much more extreme. So I'll go over here to let's go to grotesque here. Have a listen to this Okay, cool. Um, let's I'm just randomly going to go for evil stench Oh, yeah I'm sure if you need to write a piece of music in this sort of vein with a piano in it This is definitely something you should be reaching for. Of course, you can see some other controls here We've got a regular sort of attack decay sustain release controls there to adjust those sounds And we've got some panning for those sound effects. You've got some Mod depth and mod rate here for some modulation effects there. So look, it's all good stuff If you like this kind of thing definitely download it right away Talking of pianos the very first sound that we're going to listen to from this free plugin retro vibes light Is the pop piano sound now this comes with 16 different sounds all very different all very quirky This is just a piano, but there's pads and there's all kinds of other sounds in there Now for some reason, I don't know why they've restricted them to just three octaves And that's reflected with the three octave little keyboard that we can see at the bottom here Not quite sure why they did that but they're all kind of quirky sounds Okay, they're they're sort of fairly extreme and I think with things like this pop piano You're either going to love it or hate it or you may just love it or hate it for the particular piece of music That you're intending it for let's just have a quick listen to see what you think It's very metallic sounding isn't it as I say it's sort of fairly harsh and that may not be what you want But you may love it if you do like it Then you know hit the like button for me and if you hate it Hit the like button anyway because you're enjoying the video right you could do that for me Moving on some of the other sounds we have in there are things like this pad, which I'll select now This is called shiny space. Let's have a quick listen to this Could be useful and then we've got things like this this is cool. Let me just find it here good times. Is it good times? That is retro vibes like they as I say there's all kinds of different sounds in there They don't really have many percussion type sounds But we'll get to hear that in the next library Now, I really don't know how this company splash sound org has passed me by up until now They've actually got a range of excellent free libraries for contact now before I get all the hate in the comments Yes, the library is free. But you do need the full version of contact if you haven't got that You know what have a listen to this because it may push you over the edge and think wow Even the free stuff you get from contact is awesome. This is called percussive elements Now I think this is version two and they've also got version three available and as I say a bunch of other stuff Let's just have a listen to what this is all about. I've got the war ensemble loaded up We'll have a listen to this Oh, yeah And you can see I'm just hitting these red keys up here to play these kind of patterns now These are not sort of audio loops which are playing They're actually rhythms which have been made of the individual sounds that we've got down here on the blue keys All those things down there So because of that they are adjusted to the tempo you've got set in your door So they will play at a different tempo depending on what the setting is for tempo in your door Which is really really handy in my opinion now, of course as you can see there's a bunch of controls up here There's a compressor up here with the regular threshold ratio and the mixer That's going to help you to make things a little bit more punchy. I guess then we've got a low pass filter I'll have a listen to that And a high pass filter Maybe really handy for making things like this sort of sit in your mix and then we've got a mid control there as well Now the other sliders and controls over here For mixing in the mics and the sound of the room The sort of reverb effect, I guess and that sort of thing as well But the control that really Sort of I think it's great. I just sort of love it is this one down here. It's called epicness. Okay Now I'll play one of those patterns again, and I'll just turn it up and down And you can hear I think what it's doing is just making an adjustment to the velocity Of the notes being played for those patterns But again, I'll do it again and check out the sort of graphic in the background here Oh, it's getting hotter I don't know little touches like that on plugins. Just thrill me small things small minds and all that Now that is just one of the libraries you get in this particular pack So there's also one that I'll load up now, which is called Ethnic ensemble. We'll have a listen to that Good stuff there. Another one we've got which is sort of interesting is high percussion now if you think about the first one I had say war ensemble then you may want to add this to it Nope try again I know it's just a high hat, but it's got some Little bit of subtleness in there, which is nice other variations there Love all that stuff as I say there's quite a lot of free libraries from these guys and they're all Really high quality. I definitely recommend following that link in the description down below Now if you like any of these plugins You're also going to love the other free plugins that I've been looking at recently including vocal doublers Reverbs eq some really clever gates lots of very good stuff now for your convenience I've put all of my videos about these free plugins in a playlist Which you can watch just here if you want more good free stuff. I suggest you click there now