Producing Professional Music On a Budget
https://open.spotify.com/album/3lx4S0Eix6cmqaDspVPbl5?si=FrGE9C0ySTeMpQHPLu1jJQ
I have to admit, when I first began producing music, I had the misconception that you had to have the newest and best plugins to even come close to creating professional quality tracks. And I bought a lot of plugins (many of which I don't actually use) because that was what the pros were using. Well, as it turns out, just because everyone else uses a certain plugin doesn't mean that it's good.
I mentioned briefly in another post that this song began its life several months ago, but its final version wasn't finished until recently. Before its final iteration, I used “premium” sample sets on it and for whatever reason, they never gelled together as well as the cheaper plugins did. And after I had the melody finished with the cheaper plugins, that's when I decided to challenge myself to only use cheaper/lesser known plugins to finish the song.
My DAW of choice has always been and will always be Reaper because of its light footprint and ease of use. Besides that I chose to use 4front Truepiano, Sonivox Companion Strings, Sonic Academy ANA, and Synthmaster One. Realistically I could have made all of the synth sounds with Synthmaster One, but I always use ANA for my subz.
Before I go any further, I want to say how amazing the Sonivox library is. This is a sample set that was recorded over a decade ago and still sounds amazing. It's not a Kontakt library so anyone can buy it and use it. Truepianos is another non Kontakt instrument I like to use when I want that “pop” sound. And I like to think of Synthmaster One as a combination of Sylenth1 and Massive. Basically, the layout is like Sylenth1, but you have the ability to work with wavetables as well.
The reverb I used on everything was Oracle by Soundspot. I bought it when it first came out. After the fact, I read several reviews online that said it was one of the worst reverbs they had ever used. I disagree. It's not the best reverb I have ever used (that's Slate Digital's VerbSuite Classic), but it's a solid plugin that sounds very well IN context. To get rid of the metallic sound that people mentioned, I EQ'd everything after the reverb to help with that.
Most of those “monster growls” are from some form of FM synthesis. So I pulled up Synthmaster One because it came with a few FM wavetables that sounded very well. My secret to making the growl bass in this song was to add an external distortion after doing a slight automation of the wavetable. I personally use Trash by iZotope because it's a quality distortion plugin that comes with amazing presets (I'm not the best at working with distortion yet). And after that I added a tiny amount of reverb so it sounded like it fit with the rest of the track.
And I always use ANA for my sub bass. It was the second VST I ever bought, and I just got really good at making basses with it, especially subs. And it even has this amazing feature that lets me duck it when the kick hits so I don't have to side chain it.
In almost every situation the included EQ will be all you need to mix and master. If not, I use the Nova EQ by TDR. It's a dynamic EQ, so you can do a lot with it if you choose to do so. In the past I have used it to tame the bass frequencies, but multiband compression can do the same thing. But on this track I only used it to cut the highs and lows with a steeper slope than the included Reaper EQ could do.
And even though this track didn't use Kontakt, an expensive state of the art orchestral library, or even an expensive reverb, limiting myself forced me to go back to basics and use my ears. And what I found amazing after the fact was that when I had other people listen to a couple of my favorite songs, most of the people said that Time was their favorite. And that blew my mind when I originally did that because it could have saved me a lot of money over the years.
Below are the links to every plugin I mentioned in this article:
Reaper
https://www.reaper.fm/
Orchestral Companion Strings
https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/1-Instruments/64-Virtual-Instrument/1845-Orchestral-Companion-Strings
Truepianos
http://www.truepianos.com/
Oracle (I bought it during the introductory offer and it's not on sale anymore)
https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/2-Effects/17-Reverb/3759-Oracle
Barricade 4
https://www.toneboosters.com/tb_barricade_v4.html
I think this is a mistake everyone makes at first. I know my hard drive is littered with plugins that no longer see real use. Always best to pick a few workhorses and learn them inside out.
Absolutely! I still remember buying a couple things because the presets were really good. What are your favorite plugins?
Reaktor gets the most use out of me. Constant inspiration from it. Synths I love are largely semi-modular in nature like U-He's Bazille or Madrona Lab's Aalto. Big fan of granular synths like Granulator 2 as well. Maschine is pretty big in my setup even without using the controller. As far as effect I like Valhalla DSP and Audio Damage's distortion, reverb, and delay plugins. Than I use Fabfilters plugins for general mixing solutions.
https://www.youtube.com/paulbegley34
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