 Black Friday is upon us, and there are plug-in bargains everywhere, but how do you choose from the hundreds of deals available? Well plug-in boutique have asked me for my top 5 picks from their amazing specials for this Black Friday season. I'm starting off with an incredible drum plug-in, which is simple to use, but also has some depth. If you look at the top right hand corner of U-Jam's Solid 2 virtual drummer, you'll see how I'm easily switching from one section of the song to another by playing different keys on my piano keyboard. Let's have a listen. Now that's one really easy way to control the drummer in your song. However, if you look at the top half of this keyboard, you'll also see that what I can do is grab one of these patterns, say a verse one here, and I can drag it off onto my door, drop it into a track where the MIDI will be revealed, and then I can customise that pattern to my own needs. So there's two ways of doing things. You can do it the really simple way, or you can go a little bit more in depth, and that's very, very typical of what this plug-in does. In fact, we don't even just have to play patterns, we still have access to individual drums, so we can play them on keys over here. Yeah, so we can get all of those available over there as we normally would do. And this is what I love about the design here, because you can use it really lightly or you can really go into some depth. Another example of this would be the ability to change our drum kit. You can see that there's five available over here as presets, and I'll just play that basic beat again and I'll switch between them. And essentially what that's doing is swapping out drums within our kit. So it's got these preset kits, but of course we can dive in and create our own custom kits. We would just go down to a drum at the bottom here. Let's say, for example, the kick here, I click on that, and you can see I've got four different types of kit available there. So I'll play my beat again. So as well as having these presets, you can also customize those kits to your own needs. Another example would be for the mix of these drums. You can see on the right hand side we have six different mixes available. We've got smooth, edge, retro, big, power, and crush. Let's have a listen to some of those. And as you would expect and hope, you can also customize those mixes as well. Again, you can select each individual drum. You can then adjust its volume from within the mix there. You can do things like adjust its decay, its tuning, how much reverb is on there. And you can even send each individual drum to an individual track in your door where you can get an awful lot more flexibility by applying your own favorite plugins, et cetera, et cetera. So very, very versatile in this way. And as I say, this is very typical of the way this plugin works. Now, there's not just that one pattern available. You'll be glad to hear. There's around about 60 different styles available here. Let's just try a few whole bunch of things for you to choose from there. Now this plugin at the moment, if you head over to Plugin Boutique is actually 50% off. So normally around about $108 now $54. It's very, very cheap for something which sounds this good and is this versatile. But it's not the only UJam plugin which is available on sale during these Black Friday sales. If we look over to the UJam page here on Plugin Boutique, you can see there's a number of different plugins there available which have 50% off. So definitely worth checking out the links in the description down below. What if I wanted to add a nice reverse delay effect to the snare drum in my pattern, which is currently sounding like this. That's what this plugin is for. This is Mirror from United plugins and I simply select a time base here. I'll go for a quarter and then I'll dial in the verb effect here. I'm also going to adjust this blur control as I have a listen. And it's as simple as that. Now of course you could do all of this, couldn't you, in your door. You could grab each individual snare sample, you could reverse it and put it just before the snare, do that across the entire track. The only problem is if you then want to change things, you're going to have to do all of that again. Very time-consuming, not very inspiring. Whereas with this you can simply change the settings of course. Not to mention that these settings can be automated. So you can adjust them through the course of your piece of music. Now if you head over to Plug-In Boutique at the moment, you'll see that this plugin is 50% off, normally $75 or so, down to $37.40. Now there's a lot of other bargains to be had as well at Plug-In Boutique for some of the other United plugins are over there. So just check out their page there. I've got a link for that in the description down below. It's honorable of getting a great reputation in the audio production community and for good reason I think. Here's an example of one of the things they do. This is Smart EQ3. Now you can use this just like a regular EQ plugin. I could accentuate certain frequencies like this, maybe adjust the cue like so. I could attenuate other frequencies like this. All of the things you would expect from a modern EQ plugin and it does them very, very well. But it's really the smart AI features which get me more excited about this plugin. I'll just reset that. Now I have this applied to an acoustic guitar track in my song. I'm going to let it know that by going to this menu up here and selecting acoustic guitar. I'm then going to click on this Learn button and play my track. Now it's analyzed my track and it's found some areas, certain frequencies where it thinks they should be reduced and others where it thinks they should be accentuated. And I can scale that effect by using this handle here like so, yeah? I can even reverse it. Very, very nice features there. I can even focus on certain frequency ranges. If I just want to apply this curve to the high end, I could do that as well. I could even go ahead and split it and treat the low end and the high end separately, yeah? So I could just have less accentuation in the low end, a bit more in the high end. All of that good stuff. I can even have it applied on top of my own EQ curve. So maybe I like what it's doing to the top end here. It's getting rid of some of those nasty frequencies, it's centering the best ones. But overall, I just want to boost this up here so I can do that. And you can see it applies its EQ curve on top of mine as well. Really, really nice stuff. Now, one of the things I really love about this is how you can use it to create space using EQ with different instruments in your mix. So I can take this guitar. I can actually use this button up here, Join Group. Now, I've got this plugin already applied to some other instruments in this mix, OK, which you're going to see in a moment. But first, I'll just give this group a name. Let's call it My Band, OK? What I can do then is start to arrange my mix in terms of allowing the EQ to carve out spaces for different instruments. So I've got my guitar here. I might put the vocal there right on top. I might have the drums here, the bass here, etc., etc. And I can sort of arrange those and experiment and allow this plugin in a smart way to use those EQ curves to carve out spaces. I love this very much. Now, if you head over to Plugin Boutique at the moment, you'll see that this plugin is currently down to, let me have a look, $65 or so. So it's got around about 54, 55% off, OK? So definitely worth checking out. This is a very sophisticated plugin, especially for that money. And it's not the only sonnable plugin which is on sale during this Black Friday season at Plugin Boutique. If you head over to the sonnable page, I've got a link for that in the description down below. You can see that there is the EQ3. There's also this smart bundle, which is really, really good, some good plugins in there. So definitely check out that great value for money. I've mentioned many times on this channel already about how great I think Addictive Drums 2 is even after all of these years. So I'm not going to go on about that anymore. But I did get to thinking, if I had to pick just three kits to go along with the core plugin, which three would I pick out of their amazing selection? Now, for me, I have to say, what's governing my decision is the fact that I record many different genres of music. So I want versatility out of this. My very first pick would be this one, Fairfax. This is just a bog standard acoustic kit. It sounds great on many different genres of music. In fact, it sounds like this. It just sounds so natural and there's still a lot you can do with it. If you go into the kit, you can see that you can obviously mix it. But then if you go into individual drums, you can make a lot of changes to individual drums in this plugin, which makes a kit like this very adaptable to different genres of music. So this would be my first pick. Now, if there's one sort of downside to this kit, the fact that it's all sticks, okay, there's no brushes in there. And sometimes I really like to have the light sound of brushes with acoustic kits. So my second pick would be this one, okay, modern jazz brushes. Now, I don't really record any jazz, not very often at all. So I don't actually use this for jazz, but it's still a great kit for other genres of music when you want to keep things really light. Let's have a listen to this example where there's some hits being done with the actual brushes. So it has that lovely light, delicate feel to it. I also like the swirl sounds once in a while. Here's an example of that. So just an incredibly light sounding and delicate sounding kit. You can mix that up with the other one sounds fantastic. Now, that's the acoustic side of things covered for me, but I do still like to have some electronic sounding drums in there as well. So my third pick in the name of versatility would be this one, real machined, okay. There's some great 808 sounds in here, 909s as well. Let's have a listen to the Tape 808 Dry and also the 909. Now, if we head over to Plugin Boutique at the moment and take a look at this page, you can see that you can get this product, which is Dictive Drums 2 Custom Collection. Now, this is the basic plugin and you also get to choose three kits, all right. You get three kits, three MIDI packs and you also get to choose three kit pieces. So these are individual drums as well to add to those kits that you've already chosen. Now, if you take a look at normally would cost about $200, it's 50% off at the moment. So it's $98. There you can see that. Now, why is this such a great bargain? Well, if we flick over and take a look at the other Dictive Drums products, you can see as we scroll down that even at 50% off, a lot of these will cost say $43 or so. They normally cost around about $90 each, okay. So three of these is still would cost you more than buying the product we just looked at just a moment ago. Keep in mind as well, you do also get those MIDI packs and the individual drum kits as well. Great value for money. If you haven't got a Dictive Drums 2 yet, go ahead and get this I would recommend. If you've already got a Dictive Drums 2 and you want to get some more kits, now is an awesome time to buy them. When I was compiling this list, I knew that there had to be something in here from Arturia. First of all, because I'm a fan boy and secondly, because they're not exactly sort of cheap products normally. So if you can get them at a bargain price, you definitely should. Now why am I such a big fan of Arturia? Well, those of you who watch the channel regularly will know, for example, that this plug-in here is my favorite Revo plug-in of all time. I just love the way it sounds and it's got lots of great options in it. I also often use this pre-tried A, okay. I just love that it adds a little something extra to the signal, especially right at the beginning of the signal chain. I also like this compressor. This is an 1176 style compressor. I'm going to use this to highlight something that I like about Arturia across the board. They'll often do representations or have plug-ins which are inspired by old hardware, yeah. So this is inspired by 1176, but almost always, maybe always actually. If you click on the Advanced button, which I'm going to with this one here, it's going to reveal some features that often weren't there on the original piece of hardware. I just love this attitude. Let's be inspired by those old pieces of hardware, but it's a new age, yeah. We can do new things that they couldn't do back then or didn't do back then, and I just love that attitude. This is why I'm always impressed by these plug-ins. Of course, they do sound great. Now that's on the effect side of things from Arturia, but I also love what they do in terms of their keyboards, okay. And again, carrying on this sort of idea, I remember trying to program the DX7 when it first came out, back in the day when I was a teenager, and it was an absolute nightmare. So I'm glad that Arturia reproduced the sound of a DX7 without the interface of a DX7. If we click on Advanced here, you can see the interface we have here for adjusting the sounds or the presets in the DX7 here, and it's a joy, I can tell you, compared to the old days. Now, I also enjoy from them things like the June 6, this Roland June 6. Look, these things cost an absolute fortune, thousands and thousands of dollars if you buy them, like on eBay or something at the moment. So the plug-in versions sound just as good in my opinion. You don't have to maintain old hardware. And again, as I say, you often have features on there that perhaps weren't on the original. I also have a real soft spot for the Melotron. Melotron for me is famous for being in strawberry fields by the Beatles, but it's actually been loads of different famous records. One of the original samplers, if you like, I guess. And again, clicking that Advanced button gives us access to all kinds of options for the sound of this instrument. And also just outside of this sort of product range, because this is not based upon old hardware. But I also love their pigments synthesizer. Now, I am still a noob when it comes to programming synthesizers, to be honest with you. So one of the things I like about this is do I need to program it even because there's so many great presets. Yes, I probably still need to program it a little bit just to get it sounding how I want it to. But they have some fantastic tutorials included. If you go over to this panel over here, I'll just go to tutorials. I worked my way through these and it taught me so much about sound synthesis. They really get you, if you spend, you know, half an hour going through these, you'll be well up to speed with creating your own sounds etc. So well thought out plugins. What I decided in the end is if I was going to recommend anything at all, then I guess I would have to recommend this, the V Collection 9, okay. So this is the instrument. These are based upon classic sort of synthesizers, electric pianos, there's even some acoustic pianos in there, I think, as well. But it's mainly those electronic instruments. There's a big collection in there. This normally costs $658. You can see it's down to $328 at the moment. Like a 50% saving, really massive there. And you get such a great range of high quality classic sounds in there. So definitely worth it. Now if you don't agree with me, if you think I've made a bad choice there, then perhaps you would just follow the link in the description down below also to this page, the Arturia page which you can see in actual fact not only is that V Collection on sale 50% off but also the effects collection with all of those wonderful effects and the ones I showed plus many more in there and pigments is also 50% off. In terms of pure innovation, I really think the sonnable products are the winners here. If you want to find out a little bit more about the other products available in their line, check out this video here. I delved a little bit deeper into one of their bundles.