 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. It's February the 14th and you know what that means, right? You've got it, it's PluginBoutique's 11 year anniversary. And to celebrate, they've got some amazing bargains available. Now before we get into that, I thought I'd take a quick look to see how their website actually looked 11 years ago using web archive. Now I've got to say it's a lot more brown than it is today, but they did have some free plugins apparently. And that's something they've also got today and we're going to be looking at later in today's video. But the main difference is the size of the partners that they're working with now. People like native instruments, isotope, and starting from today, universal audio. Yes, you heard that correctly. And don't worry if you don't have universal audio hardware, this is still applicable to you. But let's get started by taking a look at an amazing virtual pianist. Finally, I pronounced it correctly. What you're hearing here is virtual pianist Vogue from UJAM, a virtual pianist for those of us who don't really play that well. And so that you can hear what I'm saying, I reduce the intensity of the playing by using the velocity control over here. There's many ways we can express ourselves with this piano and I'll get onto those in a moment. But first of all, I want you to note that most of the playing happening by me is just with one or two fingers over here in purple on the right-hand side. Virtual pianist is taking what I'm playing there and turning it into a part, which you can see being played up here here with these yellow and purple parts indicated on this piano roll. But we don't want it to be doing the same thing over and over again, we want some variation. And one thing that we can do is change the phrase intensity over here with our left hand. That's with these yellow keys here. So let's go to an intensity of five here. So I'll just put that up and let's increase the busyness and velocity. So you can hear a lot more sort of bass and things in there. And of course, a real pianist would probably do something like play a fill, yeah? And that can create some great variation. We've got three different fills that we can add in there. And with all of these things combined, we can really get some changes in the playing to become really, really expressive. But we can also change the dynamics by changing the range of keys which are being played. For example, let's just play only some of the high keys and get rid of those low notes for something really quite delicate, yeah? Just one of the many ways that we can change what people are hearing and change expression. Another thing we can do is actually change the sound of the piano itself using the character controls up here. I'll just play a couple as examples to you. Let's go for the power character and let's try out plastic. I must admit I rather do like the ballad sound, especially if I wanted to mix it with something like a vocal. Let's see how that sounds. And I know it cannot be and I know I'll never feel you laying close to me. You could really build up a very convincing piano part for a song or I reckon using this plug-in. It's just so easy. You really get going with it out of the box as soon as you download it. Now, this particular plug-in has got a really good special on plug-in boutique at the moment. If you head over there using the link in the description down below, you'll see that it's currently 50% off, making it only around about sort of 80, 81 dollars or so, okay? It's not the only Eugene plug-in which is on special in celebration of plug-in boutique's 11th year anniversary. So go ahead and check all of those out and I hope you enjoy this song. Those of you who are regulars to the channel will know that I'm a huge fan of complete 14 from native instruments. But you may also know that if you get one of the larger versions of this suite, then things can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. But the thing about complete is it's got a really great upgrade path. So it's often a good idea to get one of the cheaper versions and upgrade later. And I reckon there's never a better time to do that than right now. Because if you head over to plug-in boutique at the moment, with the select version, rather than it being sold for around about $200 like it normally is, it's currently being sold for close to $100. And it's no slouch, I can tell you. It's full of really nice virtual instruments. It's got some virtual synths in there, a nice selection of effects and also a whole bunch of expansions as well. In fact, when you take a look at the select version, you can see that in total, there's 19 instruments and effects, eight expansions and 15,000 sounds. Now compare that to the next version up, the standard version. That's got 87 instruments and effects, 39 expansions and 43,000 sounds. Now the reason this is important is because if you head over to the native instrument site and you look at the select version, what they're saying is if you get select at the moment and you decide to upgrade to the standard or the ultimate version later, you're gonna get at least $200 off. So not only are you saving at the moment, but you set yourself up to save when you sort of need more instruments later on. So I definitely recommend head over to plugin boutique today and then take advantage of this awesome deal. Let me know in the comments down below if you're the kind of person who often gets tempted into buying plugins. I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you because I predict a sizable amount of you will be reaching for your credit card within the next few minutes. I'm saying that because we're looking at six plugins on the screen, which are a part of an exclusive bundle to celebrate the 11th anniversary of plugin boutique. They're all from Isotope, okay? And the first of them is Ozone 10 Elements, okay? This is a fantastic mastering plugin. If you're just new to mastering and you wanna get a quick result assisted by AI, then this is a phenomenal plugin. Moving on from there, we have Neutron 4 Elements. This is almost the other end of the spectrum from a mastering plugin in that it deals with individual instruments. And this is gonna get you to a great starting point for various different types of instruments in your mixes. I love Neutron. Moving on from there, we all need good metering plugins, okay? And different ways of metering thing. And Insight is a very sophisticated plugin in this way. This gives you various different ways to analyze the audio in your project. Moving on from there, we have Stratus, which is a plugin to create realistic reverbs. And then we have Stutter Edit too. With this plugin, you can sort of grab samples and chop them up and manipulate them really easily and very creatively, okay? And then finally, we have a plugin which I've been using a lot recently. This is Audio Lens. And basically it's a way of capturing and storing EQ curves for your favorite reference material. And then you can use those EQ curves in various isotope products later on to sort of match the sound of your reference material. Now, that's what's included in this anniversary bundle from ISTOP. As I say, it's exclusive to Plugin Boutique. And I've gotta tell you, this is gonna shock you. If you head over there now, you're gonna see that you get 94% off of this anniversary bundle when we look at what you would normally pay. Now it's saying $49 here, as you can see. That doesn't include any taxes and et cetera. So if we head over to the page where, for me, where it includes taxes I have to pay, it's around about $53. So basically around $50 or so, yeah. Normally, it would cost around about $940 for all of these plugins, okay? So I don't know why you're still here. Well, maybe one reason why you're still here is so you can hear about the other great news I've got coming up. Now, back in the day when Plugin Boutique was more brown than it is now, it did have one thing that it's got today, and that is free plugins. It's always my pleasure to look for free plugins for you on Plugin Boutique. And I've got a really nice sub-base, a kind of an 808-style plugin for you today. It's called Subdivine, and it's a light version of their more fully packed plugin, okay? So there's just a little bit cut down. We've got six presets. We've got the ability here to add drive to the sound, and we can also control the release time of the sounds. Now, what I'm gonna do now is just play some bass part with a little bit of a backbeat. I'm just gonna go through one, two, or three of these presets, and you can see what the drive in the release time does. Now, if you are playing this through subwoofers, a subwoofer, and you haven't got everything secured down, now may be a good time to do so. One of the best pieces of gear I have in my studio is my Universal Audio Apollo X4. And one of the reasons I love that audio interface is because of the quality of the plugins that run on it. Now, up until recently, you did have to have Universal Audio hardware to run their plugins. But last year, they announced something called Spark. Spark is a subscription service which gives you access to some of their plugins to run natively, meaning you can run them on PC or Mac without the need for Universal Audio hardware. But I can tell you that from today, you can actually purchase some of these plugins via Plugin Boutique. There's three new bundles available, and I think you can actually buy some of these plugins individually as well. I don't have the full details on the prices, et cetera, at the time of making this video, so you should definitely check the link in the description down below to find out about that. But first of all, let's just take a quick look at some of these plugins. There's a really great selection amongst these plugins, including some classic compressors like the LA2A and 1176. And remember, Universal Audio actually make the hardware versions of these so they may know a thing or two about them. We've also got some really nice tape saturation plugins, which I really enjoy, and also classic EQ amongst them as well. There's a channel strip. We've got some really well-known modulation here as well as some great tape echo. Now, there's a reverb chamber in there, which is super flexible. You're really gonna enjoy playing around with that one. And there's a plate reverb, which finds its way onto most of my recordings on vocal. I really do love the sound of this plate reverb. And they pay so much attention to detail. Take, for example, the Lexicon 224. This reverb unit actually had some bugs in the original hardware, which they actually put in the plugin itself. But don't worry, you can switch them off by going to a hidden menu and clicking on the logo. Now, it's not just all about effects plugins. There's also some instruments in there as well. There's some lovely analog synths. And how about a little piano? You know what, I feel like this piano needs a really nice sounding B3 organ. Don't forget to check the links in the description down below for all of the amazing plugins that we've looked at in today's video. Now, I mentioned earlier that I do use a Universal Audio Apollo X4. If you wanna find out about why you would purchase such an amazing audio interface, check out this video here, where I compare it to something, well, completely different.