 Plug-in boutique have asked me to pick my top five plugin bargains from their Black Friday sales this year. They left it completely up to me and I've got to tell you the choice was not hard. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. There's actually loads of great plugins available at Plug-in boutique at the moment during this Black Friday season. So in picking my top five, I wanted to set some criteria for myself. So that criteria is that they must be plugins that I've used in my workflow a lot and have stood the test of time. I think that's really important. It's easy to spend money on things during this sort of silly season, which may not work out for you in the long time. So for all of these, I've used them for absolutely ages and I still use them regularly in my production. I've also got some news about some free plugins that you can get when you purchase plugins at Plug-in boutique at the moment. More about that later, but let's get started with my number five pick. You know, I could talk about my number five pick for hours. Trust me, this is take nine and I already have done. So this is the shortest way I can say it. Okay, because there's so much in this product. This is from Artoria and it's the V Collection 8. It's a collection of classic things like this. These analog synths that you can see here. As we move down, you can see that there are some digital synths in there. They call them digital instruments. Really nice collection of those there. And also some really nice vintage keys, organ and acoustic pianos as well. There's some just great things in there. I could talk about it for hours, but I'm just going to keep this down to my favorite components of this. Okay, so talking analog synths, first of all, this is one of my favorites here. This is the June 6th synth here. And I was almost about to say 8th because I often get confused with this one, which is Duke 8. Both amazing synths. I was saying to someone the other day, if you were to buy the original synths, if you went on eBay and searched for these, they cost many thousands of dollars. Okay. And you get the sound of them here. And I think most of the features, I mean, under the impression because I haven't played all of these since the Arturia have really been dedicated to authenticity. But also what I love about Arturia is they give you some extras that weren't there with the original synths. And generally that's in the way that you can control them. So often you'll have this advanced tab like this one here, open it up. And there's some great ways to program and control these synths that you didn't have on the original, obviously, which make life an awful lot easier. So that's something I love about this whole collection because there's often that wonderful advanced tab. Moving on from there. I really like the vocoder. I think it's just so unique in terms of different types of instruments. And again, it's great. You can control it in a really modern way as well. So if you haven't heard a vocoder, look that up. It's a really specific sound and a lot of fun. Moving on from there. I love the DX7 emulation here. When I first left school, I was 17. I worked in a musical instrument shop and the DX7 was a new synth then. This was a long time ago and it was massive. Anyone who lived at that time knows this was just massive in its time. I used to have to program it to show it to people and it was a nightmare. I hated programming it because I had to go through this manual. It was just very, very fiddly. Not with this version. Open up that advanced tab and you just get this wonderful interface for programming this synth and you get all of those great, really kind of 80s sounds from this. Moving on from there. I like the CMI-5 very much. Again, just a lot of fun to play with. A little bit more of a sample-based kind of a thing there. I absolutely love this world. It's an electronic piano, really stylistic. It often gets into my songs as does the B3 organ. There's lots of B3 plug-ins around. This is definitely one of the best of them. Lots of control over this. It's very, very authentic sounding. So that's just wonderful as well. Finally, if that wasn't all enough, a couple of things actually. First of all, we have the piano plug-in. Now this isn't just one piano. You've got a selection of grand pianos that you can see here. You've also got a selection of upright pianos as well. So you're getting lots and lots of different types of pianos there. They all sound fantastic. They could keep you happy forever. Finally, you do also get this with the analog lab, which is really a bunch of sort of simplified versions of all of these instruments, which are in the collection. So you can see them all there with a few controls as you load each one up. They're not just presets. You do get a little bit of control, but not quite as deep. And that can be very handy sometimes when you just want that basic sound. You want to grab it and have it available to you. In at number four, I've chosen Melodyne Assistant. Now this is a great version for the home studio. It's got that great balance between price and features. There is a lower version, the essential version. And if you're really strapped for cash, then that's still a great version to go for. And there are some higher versions. If you've got a little bit more money to spend and you can get, say, the studio version, then you're going to get all of the possible features. But for the home studio, where budgets are consideration and you want to have a few great features, this is awesome. Of course, we can do the basic features we associate with Melodyne, which is pitch correction. We could grab all of these notes here and double click, for example, and it will fix the pitch of those. Or as I prefer to do, just grab individual notes and double click on them to correct the pitch. With this assistant version, we can actually do things like, for example, pitch drift. So with this note on the end here, we can see the pitch drift in this note. It's going up and down there from the center line. Now that's a natural part of the human voice. And it's not a bad thing, but you may want to just tame it or take control of it. So you can open the pitch drift tool. You've got a slider here and you can just control how much the note is moving away from the center. Okay, so that's pitch drift. The other thing that's really great that you have in this version is amplitude. So you can go in, you can grab a note and you can change you can change how loud it is. Okay, very, very handy indeed. When you're preparing your vocals, even before you do compression, just to get anything that's poking out as suddenly too loud, getting that under control. So that's great. The amplitude feature. The other thing is some timing features. So we may want to adjust the timing of a note. You could grab the end of a note like so, and just drag it around. And you can see that it's changing the relationship with the next note as well. Really great. You can do that. You can even do it to the grid to kind of quantize your vocals if you like. If that's what you want to do. So that's a great feature. Another feature would be the sibilance tool. I'll just move along here because I know in this phrase, we've got an S here. So sibilance is things like and they can really be an irritation with a vocal when they really poke out too much. And often we try and fix it with DSing plugins. But I think this is a much better tool to use for DSing, especially if you want to have manual control over specific parts, rather than just stick it on for a whole vocal. So I'll just go to that tool now, the sibilance tool. You can see this s here. I'll just play from a bit before. You can hear that there's someone. And if that's a bit too loud, I can just grab it. I'm dragging my mouth down. I've made it a bit quieter. So that's a fantastic tool to have. And it just addresses that issue right away. You can just directly control how loud that sibilance is. I love that. And talking about how loud things are, we can also create fade-ins for our notes. So with the fade tool, we can just grab, say, the beginning of a note and create a little fade in there. It's not always appropriate to do that. But it's a really handy tool to have if you just want to take the edge off of an attack at the beginning of a note, very, very handy indeed. I just wanted to quickly mention that if you do follow any of the links in the description at the moment and buy something from Plugin Boutique, you get to choose a free gift at Checkout. So what that includes in terms of your choice is things like this Polycomp from Audiority, I think they're called. The Orb from Audio Thing, Punish from Heavyosty. This is a great looking plug-in. This one. AAS Soundbank there and also Levels from Mastering the Mix. That's a great plug-in. And Autoformer from United Plugin. So not only will you get to buy a great plug-in at a much cheaper price, but you'll get a little bonus in there as well. So really number three, I don't mind telling you, I've got another Arturia product in here. This is the FX Collection 2. I reviewed this on the channel when it came out. I had the previous version and I continue to love many elements of this and they added some great new things in Version 2 as well. Again, I could talk about it forever because it's got things like these bus effects in here. It's got some modulation effects. It's got a range of compressors. It's got a range of delays. It's got a range of reverbs. It's got some preamps in there and it's also got a range of filters. I can't go through all of them right now, but I will just show you my favorites. So starting off, if I go over to my door, I often, if not always, have this at the beginning of my signal chain on my more important tracks, especially things like vocals or key instruments. It's a preamp and now there's I think three different preamps in this collection. I happen to use this one for my style of music more often than the others, but they're all good and I usually try out each one of them, but I end up using this one an awful lot. Even if I'm just going to be doing something simple in there like a, you know, a high-pass filter or something, I still like to have it there. It adds just a little bit of character at the beginning of the signal chain, which I love. And sometimes I wonder if it's doing anything until I take it out and then I think, yeah, I've lost something there, so I like to keep it in there. The next one is this chorus. This is taken from the Dune 6 synthesizer. They've just got the chorus element of it here. It's just so good because it's simple. I rarely find myself using any of the controls out of the box. I love throwing it on to guitars, especially. And it's just a great chorus. Next, we have this, this FET-76 based on a 1176 compressor, a classic compressor. You should always have an emulation of 1176 in your collection. And this is one of the better ones because, again, as Arturia do, they don't just model it on that hardware. Then they give you some extra options which were not in the hardware originally. So these advanced controls, I absolutely love that they do that. Moving on there, we have this Tape Delay 201, a wonderful analog sounding delay plugin. Very, very useful indeed. A little bit of an outlier here because I think a lot of people have kind of misunderstood this plugin. We do, of course, I mean, it sort of looks like a channel strip, doesn't it? Because we've got an equalizer. We've got filter, compressor, and sub-saturation, which is fine. But I think it's the fact that this is a parallel processor which really makes me like it. And if we click on these buttons, we start to see some of the options we've got for the routing. So with parallel processing, we're processing the signal, but we're often maintaining the original signal as well. And we may split off into different routes and combine them together and blend them together. Now, for me, it's one of my favorite forms of processing because things remain natural. You don't tend to sort of be aware of the processing. And I don't know, it's quite easy to use, I find it in general. And this is what's great about this plugin for me. So that's why I've got it in there. Next, a reverb. One of my favorite reverbs, this plate reverb, I love to have this on vocals especially. And again, it's got some advanced features in there which can really be very helpful. But it's not my absolute favorite reverb. Now, when I'm talking about favorite reverbs here, I'm not talking about just Arturia, I'm talking about of all reverbs. This is actually my favorite reverb. I know, I guess not many people say this, but I've absolutely loved it since I first owned it. It sounds great to me out of the box. So it often works for me right away without having to do too much to it, maybe apart from, you know, adjusting the size of the room or something like that. But it's got some great features on there, including of course some advanced features. So you really get to play with this with filters, with some modulation, all of that good stuff. But as I say, I don't always use all of these features. I often use it in its more basic mode. And to me, it just sounds very, very lush. Number two is honestly a no brainer. This is Ozone 9 Advanced from Isotope. Normally costs around about $499 and it's costing $199 in plug-in boutique at the moment. People love this plug-in, including me. It's a mastering chain. It's actually got lots and lots of different modules to it. Let's take a look at them now. And let's add in a module. We've got a dynamic EQ here, wonderful, an EQ which is going to respond to how loud things are a specific frequency and adjust them accordingly. We have some dynamics processing. So basically compression and limiting. We have an equalizing. They're actually really capable EQ in there, very, very good indeed. We've got an exciter in there. We have a stereo imager, which is my favorite stereo imager. You get lots of controls over different frequencies band in controlling your stereo image. I use that for stereo imaging on anything I'm going to release. Low end focus plug-in there. We have master rebalance, which is a way to actually remix your track without actually remixing your track. It can detect certain things like vocals, bass and drums you can see down there and you can actually go ahead and rebalance them. We have a match EQ, which I haven't used, but I believe this is like a sort of matching the EQ curve of a source. So analyze it and you can capture it and match that. Then we have what is maybe the most used plug-in of my whole studio. They're maximized, but it's absolutely wonderful. This is a must-have in my opinion when you want to release to streaming platforms like YouTube or Spotify, all those kinds of things. It makes doing that very, very easy in terms of getting your levels and things correct. So I use that every single day in the studio. We have this one, which is a spectral shaper. We also have some vintage things, a vintage compressor, a vintage EQ, what else was there? There's a vintage limiter and also a vintage tape. Now, if all of that wasn't enough, one of the reasons people absolutely love Ozone is the mastering assistant. If you haven't done mastering at all, then this is a great way to get started. You simply go here. It's going to ask you three simple questions about your music and about what you want to get from it. Then it's going to analyze it and it's going to come up with a starting point for you, which could be the ending point. You may not need to adjust it, but you could fine tune it from there. I personally think you get slightly better results from using that than you do from services like Lander or that kind of thing where they do the mastering for you because you've still got the amount of control that you really need over your music with this without having to be a technical wizard with mastering. Now, before we go on to my number one pick, I just want to make a couple of honorable mentions. Now, these are honorable mentions and not in the top five because they don't fulfill my criteria of me having actually used them for any length of time. The reason I've put them in here is because having looked around the plug-in boutique site, I reckon these are a couple of good deals that were really intriguing me and something I may go for at this price point. The first one here is Scala 2. Really interesting. What they're calling a music theory plug-in and one of the great features of this that I can see looks really interesting is that it'll analyze your music, the melody and it will suggest different chords that you could apply to. I mean, it works out what key you're in and that kind of thing and it will suggest different chords. I think that's really an interesting direction that we may be going with using artificial intelligence with music. The other one that I want to mention is called Lifeline Expans. Now, I think that this is tremendous value for money, $49 for a multi-effects plug-in. Okay, so you've got lots of things in here. If we scroll down, we're going to see some of them here. You can see the main plug-in here and you can put your different modules in different orders, move them around, that sort of thing. Those modules include things like a reamping module. You can see here a dirt module to add a bit of grit and different harmonic effects in there as well. Digital damage as well, handy. A stereo width module there, very, very handy indeed and is not normally a stock plug-in with most doors and also a great selection of reverbs there. So if you do want to expand beyond your stock plug-ins with a really kind of handy collection of useful things, I reckon this could be the way to go especially at $49. This is one of those plug-ins that could be number one year after year. Of course, I'm talking about addictive drums to a very, very well-loved drum plug-in. It's probably the number one drum plug-in, I guess, at least from the surveys I've done. You know, I recently started a little series on the channel and the first episode of that series was what makes this plug-in so great and that was FabFilter Pro Q3 because that particular plug-in is so very popular. This is going to have to be my second episode because people just love this plug-in so much. It's partly because it sounds great, but it's partly because you can grow with it. So you get the basic sort of package, but then there's lots and lots of ad packs that you can buy. Mainly that's referring to kits. So we've got this one here, this Fairfax. I'll just go through a few. Lots of different genres. Some of them will, some of these kits will cross one genre. So there'll be a few kits which are actually suitable for say heavy rock or something like that, but most genres you can think of, Soul and R&B here. Again, another heavy one, a pop kit, some really old vintage dry stuff. There's a few bits like that, a percussion set which I absolutely love, an indie kit, some another metal kit there, an electronic kind of kit there with real machines, a great funk kit. Absolutely love this. Jazz as well with some sort of sticks and brushes. We've also got this one, Retroplex, another great kit. Blue Oyster, I love this one, Black Oyster. Just going through the last few, a studio kit there, a studio kit for pop, and then a studio kit for rock. That's the sort of things that you can add onto it. What's great about the deal I'm going to suggest you, because there's a few deals for this plug-in on plug-in boutique at the moment, is I love again that balance between price and what you get with this one. And the one I'm suggesting is the complete collection. Now with this one, you get obviously addictive drums. You also get three ad-packs in terms of the kits. You get three ad-packs in terms of some midi, so some grooves you'll get with it. And you also get three ad-packs where you can select individual drums that you can swap out. All of that, normally that would cost $179 and that's a steal, but it's selling at the moment for $89. Just find $89 from somewhere please and get this in your collection because you will make great use of it. It does sound wonderful. Now moving on, let's just have a quick look at how it sort of all works. This is the main page we end up using, which is where you've got your different individual drums for your kits. And you can swap those out up here. Depending on what ad-packs you've got, you could swap these out for individual drums and just craft your own kit there. We've got a great mixer here as well. We can output the separate channels in our door. Just all the good routing options you need there for great mixing. Then moving on from there, I love this edit page where I don't know, for me the effects on here or everything sort of tailor made for drums, everything you kind of need to change the sound and shape the sound of your drums. And I often make use of this rather than using external plugins and things to shape my drums. I do sometimes, but I often use these ones. And then we've got effects over here, sort of reverb and delay, that kind of thing. And finally, we've got a whole bunch of grooves depending on which ones you've purchased, which ad-packs you've got will depend on which grooves are there. And they're really natural sounding grooves and great starting points. So that's why this is my number one pick, because I just think you will get masters and masters of use out of this. Let me know in the comments down below if you already own this and you've had it for years and you still use it for every single track. I'd love to hear from you guys on that. Could you do me a favor? If you decide to go ahead and buy any of these plugins at the moment? Could you let me know in the comments down below? I just want to see which ones of these are most popular with you guys. Now, if you want to delve a little bit further into these plugins, check out this playlist right here. I've put this together. These are reviews that I've done in the past for plugins that I've included in this top five. You can hear in full what I've got to say about them. You definitely want to be clicking right here right now.