 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. I've just done a scan of my system and found I've got 1,889 plugins installed and to be honest with you there's another few well probably like another thousand or so which I own but I don't bother to install because I've long since known I won't use them ever again. Now of those 1,889 plugins I reckon there's about maybe 10 or 11 which I use on a really regular basis so I thought I'd share with you what those plugins are so that if you've been on the fence about them at all at least you'll know you'll likely get good use out of them and therefore they'll be really good value for money. I'd like to thank the sponsor of this video DistroKid if you follow the VIP discount link in the description down below you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to all of the major platforms. Now let's dive in and take a look at the first plugin. There are so many reasons why Pro-Q3 from FabFilter was so obviously going to be in this list. Of course it's a very slick and easy to use EQ but I particularly like some of the more advanced features which help me to carve out frequency ranges in some instruments so that it can be exposed in others. For example I've got it applied to a bass guitar here at the moment and you can see with this second band I've created it looks a bit different from the others and that's because it's a dynamic EQ band and it's only going to be applied at certain times it's not going to be applied permanently and I've set this up so that it can be triggered with the kick so that the bass frequency or the bass guitar frequencies kind of get out of the way of the kick when it is being played. Added to that you're going to be seeing spectrum analysis for both of those instruments on the screen as I play this in a moment so look at that but pay attention to this second band which I've created here. And it's just one of those plugins that whilst these kinds of advanced features may be available in other plugins it's almost certainly going to be the case that FabFilter implements it so much better than many other plugins and that's why I reach for it many many times during my mix. Now I use a lot of virtual instruments in my recordings and when I'm looking for inspiration I'll almost certainly reach for contact from native instruments and the reason I reach for contact is because it has such a vast range of libraries available for it either from native instruments themselves or from third party developers sometimes they're free sometimes they're paid for but there just is a massive range and if we go over to my main screen in contact here you'll see the collection I've acquired for myself over the years. I have to say most of these are included with another product from native instruments called complete okay now complete is sort of a series of bundles which have which has contact in it as well as libraries effects and all kinds of other good stuff in there as well and that's how I've really built up such a range of instruments in my collection. By the way if you follow the link for this for contact and complete in the description down below at the time of making this video there's a sale on a plugin boutique for complete there's some nice discounts there at the moment so you may want to follow that link for this and all the other plugins in this particular video. I've loaded up just to give you a brief idea some of my favorites here which for example this Stradivari violin which is just absolutely gorgeous a really oldie but a goodie a leashes keys I'm sure many of you will be familiar with this if you just want a bog standard sort of pop rock piano sound this just does the job for you prime bass which I've started using recently a fantastic compositional tool studio drummer which I use occasionally but there's a whole bunch of drum libraries available for contact and pick nylon although I'm a guitar player I have been using pick nylon a little bit here and again it's a great compositional tool look this loads and loads available orchestral sounds um look you name it there's probably a contact library for it so definitely check out the link in the description down below for contact and complete when I'm using compression in my mixes I'm very often using an 1176 style compressor or an la 2a style compressor both of which you can see on the screen at the moment now there's been many plugin versions of these compresses over the years and some of them very very good I've used a number of them but recently I've been using these versions more and more these are from universal audio who actually make the hardware itself so they know a thing or two about the hardware which these are based upon but the main reason why I've been using these more often is that they're a regular kind of VST AI versions of these available without you needing to own any universal audio hardware such as one of their audio interfaces that didn't used to be the case but that's changed and that means that my mixes are much more portable with my mixes on my laptop I don't have to make sure I've got one of my audio my universal audio interfaces with me at the time to run these plugins super super handy now in this case I've got them applied to a vocal and it's very common for me to use them in combination like this the 1176 at the top is just taking care of some of the more sharp transients the the sudden increases that you get at the beginning of words in terms of volume with the vocal and then the la 2a is kind of just smoothing it out making it a little bit more silky and rounded overall and the combination of the two means that you get a really nice present vocal which kind of sits on top of the mix have a listen and see what you think was it the fear of my touch was I too near you too much too soon that kept you running I have a bit of a confession to make about this particular plugin this is piano tech from modder by far my favorite virtual piano plugin look before we get into the actual confession I need to explain that I make very sort of rudimentary use of piano plugins I'm not a piano player so there's no virtuoso playing involved and it's generally an accompaniment to a vocal have a quick listen to it with this vocal so just some basic arpeggios there a little bit later in the song I actually make use of some of the higher notes have a listen and I just sort of find that this almost always does the job for me I drop it in it sounds wonderful right away and I just start using it and it feels really nice to play as well it's a it's a modeled instrument so it's not a sample library the plugin itself is generating the sound at the time you play it and in my opinion that gives a really nice sort of response it feels very very good to play now here's my confession with this this has many many different pianos available because it is modeled and if I click on here you can see the many pianos available as well as a whole bunch of other percussive sort you know melodic percussive instruments and some other instruments in there as well okay but 99.9 percent of the time I load it up and just use the first piano which in this case is this Steinway the prelude because it always just sounds gorgeous to me occasionally I may want a sort of a bit of a honky upright kind of feel to it and I'll select one of the other pianos but yeah I probably don't deserve to have the pro version of this I think there's three different versions available with various numbers of features and instrument packs and yeah if you're an advanced user you may want to check those out but if you're like me you may want to check out even the sort of basic version of this piano plugin I just think it sounds wonderful and I can't praise it enough this LX 24 reverb plugin from Arturia is new as a favorite plugin to me especially as a reverb plugin and that's because it's a pretty new plugin it only came out a few months ago but I'm using it all the time at the moment especially in this large hall mode it's got lots of different modes lots of different types of reverbs but I particularly like the big long tails on the reverb now this is based upon the famous lexicon reverbs of the 80s but it's got its own thing going on as well before we get into that let's just have a quick listen to it on that vocal that we heard earlier on in fact let's have a listen to it in solo now although this is very similar to the original lexicon reverb with the sort of buttons and sliders to adjust the parameters it's got its own little sort of trick up its sleeve and that is in the advanced mode when we click in the advanced mode we're largely adjusting the same parameters that we had in the more simple mode but in a completely different way it's nice that we've also got a spectrum analyzer which we'll see at the moment and there's a couple of added features in here we have a ducker a tremolo and a gate as well but I'm going to adjust this vocal reverb again you'll see that's just a very different workflow as I do it and because of the way this works I just feel it's a little bit more intuitive but overall the main thing is I just love the sound of this reverb now later in this video I'm going to be revealing to you the very simple plug-in chain I use for most of my mastering now mastering happens just before you release your music and when you do release your music I hope you will consider the sponsor of this video DistroKid for less than 23 dollars per year you can distribute an unlimited number of original tracks via DistroKid they'll do all the hard work for you they'll get it out to all of the major platforms and they'll even collect the royalties for you without taking any cut for themselves it's super cheap already but if you do follow the VIP link in the description down below you'll get another seven percent off I own many of the major amp sims and they're all very good these days in my opinion but I seem to have settled more and more on bias effects too but in order to explain why I think we have to understand my specific needs I don't play a lot of high gain electric guitar I use a Gretch and I use a Strat I don't have a humbucker so you know I'm a little bit more gentle as an electric guitar player and I'm generally going from reasonably clean tones to overdriven tones and I like that I can do that with my playing and that it's got a great feel to it and that is what I happen to have found with the amps in bias effects okay so let's just have a listen to an example of that in this particular track I've soloed these double tracked electric guitars you'll hear me playing rather gently sounds rather clean and then it becomes more over driven as I play harder chords let's have a listen to that in the context of the mix so I just find the tones of so this is a vox ac 30 emulation I'm using here I like to use you know things like fender twins fender tweeds that kind of thing they just sound closer to the real thing to me than some other amp sims so that's why I like this just like any other amp since it's got the the usual features you'd expect you've got your amp selection and you know there's a whole bunch of choices for that you've got cabinet selection I've just pulled up some there just have a look through those you've got a pedals that you can select from as well you can just add those in and you've also got some outboard gear I'm using an la2a compressor at the beginning of a very simple chain there overall it's all about the sound and the feel for me it'll come as no surprise to my regular viewers that my favorite virtual drum plugin it's still addictive drums too after all of these years and despite the fact I own some of the other major players I still just like this plugin it's got a great range of kits available as you can see here in many many different genres so you've got a lot to choose from there and then when you own a few of these you can mix and match them so when you go to kit mode here you can swap out drums easily and put your own kit together with the kits that you have available there as well as that it's got some nice sort of built-in effects which are very very suitable for drums so you can go in and adjust them there you know EQ compressors all kinds of things in there you can output the drums individually two separate tracks in your door so you can do the actual mixing still in your door console and overall it just seems to do everything I want it to you've already heard it earlier on in this video when I was demonstrating the virtual guitars have a listen to it as it comes in here and I think as with any virtual drum plugin it's not just the sounds themselves it's how you use them it's about you taking care with putting a nice drum part together which is suitable for the song and has enough humanness in it is not over quantized etc etc I think addictive drums is an awesome tool if you have the right approach my mastering plugin chain is incredibly simple it's almost embarrassing it starts off with this one this is t-rax one from ik multi-media and this is where most of the work gets done the knobs on the left hand side relate to sort of EQ roughly so if I wanted for example much more high end frequencies to be accentuated I'd use this air knob up here the big knob here is to do with compression we've got a width control for stereo width in the middle we've got this volume control which is really to do with limiting we've got transient speaker itself analog which is really about saturation and bass punch there for the low frequency things so any one of these knobs takes care of much more complex processes which a lot of the time I don't have time for because I I'm often doing very very quick masters so I just listen to the track and I adjust these knobs until it sounds right to me sounds stupidly simple hey but I like the fact that it's all contained in one plugin more or less there are some other plugins that I use for example I do sometimes feel the need for some more intricate EQ so I would use this one you may be asking why don't I use fab filter that we talked about earlier I'll explain why in a moment but this EQ part of the isotope ozone suite is very very useful and I'm often doing things like a a low cut before I go into my one plugin okay I may use this in other parts though if I want finer control over my EQ now there's a specific reason why I use this particular EQ and it has to do with the next plugin I'm going to show you which is this one this is not really changing the sound at all it's kind of my secret weapon this is tonal balance control and this acts as a second set of ears for me particularly if I feel I can't trust my ears because they're fatigued and I quickly need to get some mastering done I'm releasing a video or what have you and I want to master the soundtrack for that video then I'll take a look at this plugin and these lines that you can see in the middle here and give you a basic sort of indication about whether your track is representative of this genre in terms of EQ at the moment let me play the song I've got all these applied to and you'll see these lines move around you'll see what I mean and you can you can see that these lines are now sort of centered in these frequency ranges which lets me know that for this style of music I'm in the right ballpark I never trust this entirely I use my ears as judgment mostly but these this does kind of help now the reason I use that earlier on the isotope EQ is because I'm using another isotope product here with tonal balance control and I can access that EQ and have them there in the same interface so I can make my adjustments while I'm kind of looking at tonal balance control just makes the workflow a little bit easier now it's not the only other isotope plugin that I'm using if we go back to the main plugin that I use one do you remember I said I don't really use the limiter in here and that's because I much prefer to use this one this is the maximizer plugin from isotope it's basically a limiter but it has some really nice sort of automated features that I like to use again I'm usually in a hurry so what I generally am going to do is I'm going to set up my true peak value which is minus one in this case as the ceiling I set a target threshold sorry I set a target value for my LUFS okay so that's this this is roughly equivalent to rms I guess you could say with LUFS a different way of metering it so I'd set that up there in this case it's minus 14 you don't have to use minus 14 remember it could be a different value in this case it's minus 14 then I just click on learn threshold and play the song through and this automatically sets the right value for the threshold for me for the limiting so it's more the fact that this is I mean it does a great job but it's that sort of automated part of it which appeals to me mostly when I'm in a hurry and that really is my mastering chain now at the beginning of this video I talked about the fact that my main EQ was fab filters pro Q3 and of course EQ is such an important part of the production process so I really think it's worth you knowing about this plugin in more depth even if you already own it I made a video about why it's so incredible and I think you should watch it it's right here right now