 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well, and I have a warning for you. If you watch the rest of this video, you may end up downloading some new plugins, because I've been scrolling through the latest bargains at Plugin Boutique and as well as having a great effect, a great instrument and an awesome bundle for you to take a look at, I've also got something completely free, but let's start off by taking a look at what I reckon is one of the best compressors ever released. I think the new Smart Comp 2 compressor from Sonnaball is amazing, not just because it's so smart, but also because if you've ever struggled to use compressors at all, I reckon this is a great learning tool as well. I've got it inserted onto this acoustic guitar track, which sounds like this. And in order to start actually compressing, the first thing we need to do is set a threshold, a level at which, a volume at which, we start to compress the signal. So we do that by adjusting this bar here, so I'll just pop that down there. And the other thing we need to set in order to actually compress at all is the ratio. Ratio determines how much compression. So how much we're going to turn down the signal after it's gone over the threshold. The great thing about this plugin is we can visually see what's happening to the signal in real time as we adjust these parameters by looking at the top area here when I play the guitar. Look at the red sort of a graph which scrolls across as I play this. So we can see the compression happening here and if I adjust the ratio and the threshold, we can see how that's affecting the signal. And we can also see at the bottom here are some two gray areas, dark gray and light gray. That's kind of a before and after as well. Now a lot of people are going to struggle when they're using compression with the settings like attack and release. OK, so thankfully again, we can really easily see when we adjust these how it's affecting the signal. Now we do adjust them just by hovering over their values here and then dragging up and down with the mouse to change those values. OK, so let's put this attack all the way down to zero milliseconds. So it's clamping down with the compressor right away and then I'll adjust it up and down and you'll see what's happening to the red area at the top here. So a slow attack and a quick attack. Slow, quick. OK, so you can really easily see that with a quick attack, it really clamps down hard and fast on that signal. OK, likewise with the release, we can adjust that. You can see with a really long release there that it's virtually compressing all of the time. In fact, it's just destroying the dynamics because it's compressing even the sort of next note of the guitar. It doesn't get a chance to breathe. So often that's a mistake we can make as beginners. We can have that release too long sometimes and the compressor bleeds into the next notes and we sort of ruin it that way. This is great that we can actually see what's happening there and adjust accordingly and we can start to see when we've got that release time to the right level at which we can actually allow some dynamics and then start to compress the next note as well, allow some of the transients through. So that is the basics of the controls there. As you can see, it's great plug-in already. But what about the smart features? Well, the smart features are really clever, in my opinion, because I really don't believe in presets with things like compressors at all. Because how can you really set up a preset for an instrument if you don't know what the source material is? Well, Sonoma will get around that by actually having listened to the source material and coming up with a preset for you. But first of all, it's advisable, I reckon, to go up here to what appears to be a preset menu, but it's really a profile menu where we set up the profile for what the smart feature is going to listen to. So this is in this case an acoustic guitar, so I'll select that there. And then I want to click on this Learn button here and play the acoustic guitar. It's now going to analyze that acoustic guitar and come up with some compression settings for me. So I'll click there, then play the acoustic guitar. It's analyzing it, it's not compressing it yet. And then when it gets all the way across. I reckon that's a really great setting. There's some compression happening there, but I'm not really aware of it. It's very, very transparent. Now, the eagle eye, amongst you, will have also noticed that there was something happening at the bottom here in green. This is the spectral compression. OK, what is spectral compression? This is compression which is applied to different frequencies in different ways. A little bit like a multi band compressor in this way, but on a much more micro scale dealing in many, many more different frequency ranges. It's had a listen to that guitar and it supplies adjusted it to something that thinks is suitable for that instrument. Now, I can blend that in and out using this control here. I've also got controls over here for a more clean signal to a dirty signal and also a darker sound to a brighter sound. You can blend those in as you wish. That's the basic controls for this. I haven't gone into much detail about some of the other things. For example, you can set up curves for the attack and release as well as a whole bunch of things actually down here as well for high and low pass filters and that kind of thing. I will let you explore that, but I want to tell you now this is selling an incredible price over at Plugin Boutique at the moment. It should be selling for one hundred and forty one dollars, ninety one, but it's down to ninety seven. That's around about a thirty or thirty one percent saving. But before you do go ahead and click the link in the description down below for this, I encourage you to watch the rest of the video because there's another deal I want to tell you about later on related to this compressor, which may make you think about a different purchase. I absolutely love using transient shapers on my drums, even before use compression and EQ, etc. And this is a free one here called Transberg. You can get it for free at Plugin Boutique at the moment. It's absolutely easy to use. I've got it inserted onto this kick drum track at the moment. Let's say I want to change the attack of that kick. I can, of course, use the attack control here. See what it sounds like when I have a slow attack. It sounds really sort of woofy and then a hard, fast attack. Love that. But I'm bothered by that sort of ring on. There's too much sustain on this kick for my liking. Let's use the sustain here to control that. I'm liking that much better. And I'm just going to get rid of a little bit of that click on the top end. So I'll use this filter up there for that. And that's how easy it is to shape the sound of your drums using this free plug in. Follow the link in the description down below and grab it for yourself now. Recently, I saw this plug in being talked about by Phineas, of course, a great producer in his own right, but probably most famous for being the brother of Billie Eilish and her producer. And he was saying that they use this particular plug in in some of their productions. This is Arturia's Fafeza organ plug in. And I'm just going to quickly play you three of my favorite presets from this, starting off with Mellow Strings. Nice. Let's try Faiz Ghost and something a bit different. Let's try Crunch Lead Knee or Crunch Lead Knee. There's so many different types of sounds on here. I can't possibly play all of them to you, but you get a rough idea of the quality here. Of course, it's very it's very sort of loyal to the original Fafeza and you've got all the same kind of controls that you would have on that there. It also runs through this kind of amp sim here. It's got five pedals. You can adjust all of these, all of the controls on these, as well as the swirl pedal and in the spirit of everything Arturia, if you click on the advanced button here, you've got a whole bunch more controls so you can really tailor the sound to your own needs. Selling at a great price at the moment over on Plug-In Boutique. If we head over there, we can see it's eighty one dollars. Currently, that's 50 percent off down from one hundred and sixty dollars. If you like this kind of retro sound, then this is definitely something that you should be grabbing. So earlier on, I told you about Smart Comp 2, an incredible compressor, not only because of its compression capabilities, but also because of its smart artificial intelligence. Well, what if I was to tell you that that's also a part of a bundle, which includes a smart reverb, a smart EQ and a smart limiter? Well, that is what I'm telling you, and it's also at a great price. So let's take a look at the other three products in that bundle. Let's start off by looking at the smart features of Smart Reverb. I'm going to select a profile here, which is guitar, because I've got this applied to a guitar. Then I'm going to click on this learn button and then play the guitar so it can come up with some basic settings for me suitable for this instrument. So we're off to a pretty good start already. Now, you saw a bunch of things move over, move around over here. You can adjust all of these things yourself. But before you dive into that, you may want to try this control over here, which is a kind of a macro control, which does a lot of that for you. OK, if we move this joystick up to the top here, we get a more natural sound. At the bottom, we get a more artificial sound to the right, a more rich sound and to the left, a more intimate sound. Of course, you can move it around to many different areas within that control. So let's try this with a really rich sound. Natural rich sound and a more artificial intimate sound. So that's a great way of just getting the kind of sound you want. But as I say, you can dive in a lot more detail. For example, if you wanted to adjust the high frequencies, this is a time scale at the top here, and this is the high frequencies up here. You can just drag that around there so you get less effect from the high frequencies over time, you could increase the high frequencies like so, get rid of the effect in the low frequencies down here. We just drag all those around yet and you'll hear that now. And likewise, you can adjust things like decay over time. Yeah, with these controls down here, you can adjust the stereo spread so you can make it sound wider over time. Yeah, in that sort of decay of the reverb, it can get wider and wider and you can change the density as well. Lots and lots of fine control as well as some sort of automatic settings which you can use to set up your reverb. I've really only scratched the surface of this incredible plug-in. We've got things, you know, like filters that we can see down at the bottom here. We've got this infinite feature. Have a listen to this. I love that kind of stuff. It's not freeze, et cetera, et cetera. It's just one of the many things that you can do with this plug-in. If you wanted, you could use Smart EQ 3 just as a regular EQ. You could just double click on the line here, create a node, and then you can drag them around and then adjust things like the cue as well, of course, and that would be a very valid way to use this plug-in. But it's the smart features which really attract me. Let's reset that. I have acoustic guitar set as my profile at the top here. I'm going to click on the Learn button and then play the acoustic guitar. I'm going to analyze it and then come up with a suggested EQ curve. Let's do that now. And you can see I can adjust the intensity of that curve that it's suggested, that very detailed curve, I have to say, just by dragging this up and down, or I can even invert it like so and do that sort of thing. That's all very well and good, and you can often come up with a really good result like that. But what if you don't like some parts of that? For example, I'm not sure about the low end of that sound for this song. I could just drag this over here and then just ignore all that low end curve that's created over there, yeah, and just adjust the intensity on the high end there. Or another way I could do it, if I want to keep that low end, but just have it at a different intensity, is just sort of split this. So I've now got two adjustment areas here. Let's just move that one over there, that one over there. Now I can adjust the intensity of the high end and have the low end quite a lot less intense, okay? That's just an awesome way to use this particular feature. I'll get rid of that, and you can also see that you can have that curve and you can add your nodes in as we did earlier, and they will be adjusted, but still use that curve so you can adjust the intensity of that curve at a very sort of more micro level there if you want to. I love all of that about this particular plugin. But my favorite feature of all is where we apply it to several instruments at once. I've got this plugin inserted on a bass guitar track, on some drums, and also on some vocals, and they all together sound like this. Now one of the uses of EQ is to kind of carve out spaces for different instruments so that they can sort of shine. Now you can do this with this plugin by clicking at the top here, join group, okay? So I'll click on join group. I'm going to give my group a name. Let's call it band, oopsie, helps if you can type, band, okay? So we've got my band there, and its first member is that guitar, okay? You can see three different levels here, level one, level two, level three. That's the sort of how you want them to sit in the mix, what intensity you want, okay? So naturally I want the vocals to be right at the front. So I'll just drag those up there like so. I've got some female and some male vocals in there, so I've put those at the top there. I've got the guitar in the middle and I'm going to put the bass and the drums for this particular song at the bottom here, okay? You can obviously just move the guitar down there and just have two levels like so, or do as you wish. What this does, it's subtle, I have to say, but what it does is it just really helps to carve out spaces for these instruments in the mix. So I've got this sound now. I never thought I'd need to. Never let us drift apart. I just love this feature. In the interest of time, I'm just gonna quickly go over the basic features of Smart Limit, a tool which is gonna be super useful to you when you come to mastering your music and making sure that it's loud enough in terms of competing with other songs around it and also that it meets the requirements of the platforms that you're releasing to. I'm gonna start off by using the Smart feature. I'm gonna select a genre of music at the top here. It doesn't have to be perfect, but I'll just go for say pop here, which definitely isn't perfect, but it'll be fine. And then I'm going to click on this learn button. Now, before I do, I just wanna warn you that while it's analyzing this piece of music, it's gonna be playing it back at its initial loudness, okay? But as soon as it's done that, it's gonna apply its settings and things are likely to get quite a lot louder. So just make sure you do protect your ears. Let's analyze this song by clicking on this button and playing it. You shouldn't kill me from the start. I never thought I'd need to. Let us drift apart. So as you can hear, it got quite a lot louder and we can see the limiting it's doing with the red information at the top there. You've got your basic settings, which is for the peak limit here and also for your gain. You can also like the other plugin to control attack and release there. And you can also blend in some other options here like saturation at the bottom here. You can boost the bass and all that good stuff. Now over on the right hand side, I have my platform selected here, which is Spotify, okay? But there's a bunch of other platforms there. Sometimes like me, you may be releasing to YouTube or SoundCloud, all that good stuff. But I'll be going for Spotify in this case. The lowest value or the recommended lowest value for Spotify is minus 14 dB there. So you can see that showing there. And we can see some information here about the dynamic range in this strip we should expect to be in and also how, where the loudness should be. As I play the song, you'll see this crosshair move a little bit, okay? Let's watch that. You should have killed me from the start. I never thought I'd need to. Never let us drift. When we play it for long enough and we see that kind of settle, then we get an idea of where our actual values are. One of the nice things that we can do is click on quality check here, okay? So I'll click on that and that is analyze this in terms of thinking about it for Spotify. And I've got two ticks here. The peak level is good for Spotify and the input gain looks good for Spotify. But if it wasn't, we could adjust those things. And also on the right hand side over here, it's informing me that Spotify will turn this track down by 4.9 decibels. Now I could go ahead and turn it down myself, but probably I could just leave it there and let Spotify do its work there. But that shows you what you should be expecting as a result there. That's a very, very brief overview of an incredibly good plugin, to be honest with you. That plugin is the last one that I'm gonna talk about in this bundle. And I wanna tell you that of course in that bundle, we have all four of the smart plugins from Sonoball that we've talked about today. That is the compressor, that's the limiter here, the reverb and the EQ. And all four of those are in the smart bundle that we can see over at Plugin Boutique. For all four together, you can currently get them for $218 there, down from $328. When you compare it to similar plugins from other manufacturers, we call them that, then this is really, really well-priced for some plugins. I think you could use across the board in your productions. Absolutely excellent. Make sure you click the link in the description down below. You know, one of the other great plugins that Arturia makes is Pigments 3, an incredible synthesizer that you're just going to love. I made a video all about that and you can click on that on the other side of the logo over there. And by the way, that's also on special Plugin Boutique at the moment, so make sure you check that out right away.