This Thanksgiving I’ve been reflecting on what a special year I’ve had doing audio work in a paid, part-time capacity. Working in music has been a dream for me for well over a decade now, and production, mixing, and mastering has been one of my favorite aspects of audio work.
I have a bit of an obsession with ranking and list-making… maybe it just comes with the engineering mind? I may never know, but what I do know is that when I mix in-the-box or (more often these days) in a hybrid digital/analog setup, I aim to use as few audio plug-ins as possible. One main reason for this is to minimize computer resource usage, but another is simply to keep things as organized, clean, and efficient as possible. As I go about mixing in this fashion, it becomes very apparent which tools are the most versatile and powerful. A natural extension of these observations is the classic game question: if stuck indefinitely on a desert island, what audio plug-ins would I choose to do every mix with?
I’ve made a couple assumptions for this article. This first and most obvious is that this island has electricity and a sufficiently-powerful setup for audio work. Second, I’m without my favorite analog toys, so my plug-in choices have to be capable of assuming the roles I often leave to hardware. With these constraints in mind, I boiled it down to FIVE essential tools that I could do any mix with, given all other plug-ins are out the window.
1. A/B Comparator – Metric AB by ADPTR AUDIO
If there’s any one plug-in I had to choose over all the others, it’s this one. This tool is placed on my monitoring effects channel, after the master track. It allows me to hear my current mix against another so I can double-check loudness, isolate certain portions of the frequency and stereo spectrums, and easily play back specific sections of other mixes. While it doesn’t actually affect my mix audio, this plug-in saves me from so much second-guessing that I can’t imagine doing work without it.
2. Equalizer – Pro-Q3 by FabFilter
You know what it is, you knew this was coming… Pro-Q is infamous with mix engineers because it seems too good to be true. Every feature imagineable is crammed into this EQ: spectrum analysis with sidechain, EQ matching, band solo monitoring, linear-phase filtering… the list just keeps going. It also sounds incredible; head-to-head against other EQs, Pro-Q tends to be my favorite for high-end treatment. I’ll use it for broad tone-shaping moves and more precise, surgical EQ. It does it all.
It also possesses a powerful dynamic EQ algorithm, giving users multiband compression capabilities as well (on the JTN mix sessions, I used this algorithm with a flat all-pass filter shape, turning Pro-Q into just a regular compressor). To top it all off, Pro-Q is far more lightweight on CPU usage than any of the analog emulation EQs I typically use. This thing is an absolute dream.
3. Compressor – Smash And Grab 2.0 by GetGood Drums
The GetGood Drums Smash and Grab compressor was a cool concept when it debuted: a compressor plug-in specific to drums, with two options (punchy VCA or leveling FET) per each individual drum (kick, snare, etc.), and a few bells and whistles to round it out. With the 2.0 update though, a “Pro” mode was added so users could change time constants and ratios as needed, making Smash And Grab appropriate for just about everything.
Compressors just might be my very favorite mix tools because no two seem to sound the same, nor are they always capable of taking on each other’s roles. For that reason, you’ll normally see me use compressors of every color and type. In making this list, I spent the most time choosing the compressor because I limited myself to 5 plug-ins. Including two compressors would prevent another vital tool from being listed, but one compressor is absolutely necessary. Smash And Grab is the winning candidate for three reasons:
- Two-In-One: Quality VCA and FET style compression are both included here, giving me two different compressors in one tool.
- Saturation: Smash And Grab includes three styles of distortion under the hood. I don’t think they’re very diverse, but they do a great job of marginalizing unwanted transient peaks without audible artifacting or adding color to otherwise “boring” sources.
- Internal Sidechain: Smash And Grab also allows you to sidechain externally as well, but the internal sidechain is a big deal because it allows this compressor (in VCA mode) to usefully process an entire mix at once on a master bus. Powerful bass or kick will cause compressors to overreact, so most bus compressors (including my favorite hardware bus compressor) include internal HPFs on the detector circuit so they’ll ignore larger swells that come from the low end. Mix-level compression is almost always a part of my mix flow, and Smash And Grab performs it reasonably well.
4. Reverb – VintageVerb by Valhalla DSP
I’ve been playing guitar for far longer than I’ve been mixing, so it’s still being ingrained into me that reverb is just as much a practical tool as it is a creative effect, and that studio-grade reverbs are much more powerful than their spring tank or effect pedal counterparts. Somtimes, a drum room recording arrives too weak (or in some cases not at all), vocals tracks are dry, or a mono source just needs to take up a little more of the stereo space available. For all of these jobs, I’ll reach for VintageVerb. Valhalla DSP makes a lot of quality time-based effects, but VintageVerb is my favorite due to its familiar workflow (for a more intensive experience, their Room plug-in offers finer tuning in designing your space). The sky is the limit for how you use this reverb.
5. Maximizer – Ozone 9 Elements by iZotope
A brickwall limiter isn’t a normal mix tool; it tends to be reserved for the mastering process and bringing a finished mix to commercial volume. However, my top-down mixing workflow relies on a high-quality limiter in order to gauge how the effects of my mix work will sound after stepping through the mastering process down the chain, so a maximizer is just as important of a mix tool for me as any other. I’ll remove it from the master bus before I deliver a mix, so this plug-in serves a similar-ish purpose to Metric AB since it’s used more for monitoring. Ozone 9’s limiter is great as it includes a couple different styles of limiting, along with a “transient emphasis” feature, so I can hear different scenarios where peaks from drums are being crushed, or somewhat preserved.
Ozone Elements 9 also comes with a stereo imager, which comes in handy here and there. Is this cheating? Who cares! It’s all one plug-in. 😉
Honorable Mentions
There are plenty of plug-ins I use daily that just didn’t make the cut due to a lack of flexibility or reusability, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t awesome! Here’s some of my favorite tools that see regular use in my current workflow:
- T-RackS Comprexxor by IK Multimedia: Smash And Grab 2.0 narrowly beat out this Distressor emulation as my compressor choice on account of the latter not quite being able to do my favorite mix bus compressor tricks, but its built-in distortion flavors, optical mode, and wide range of time constants make it my favorite compressor to use just about anywhere else.
- Saturn 2 by FabFilter: I’ve long mused that I could do an entire mix with this plug-in ONLY… which would be impressive given that it’s a multi-band distortion engine! This tool gets used for many roles that distortion is perfect for, like adding punch to kick drums & emulating stompboxes, but it’s also one of the tools I first reach for when cleaning out cymbal bleed from drums!
- bx_console SSL 4000E by Brainworx: If you’ve listened to any mix I’ve ever done, it is guaranteed that you have heard this channel strip emulation in action. It’s one of my favorite things to put on individual drum channels (or if I can get away with it, everything!); just instantiating it on every channel adds a tiny bit of depth from the emulated console harmonic distortion, and I love the workflow that comes with it. The low-order LPF is great for easing off high-end from guitars and basses and the VCA compressor is dead-simple and effective, but the ability to switch between the mid-forward “black knob” EQ and the more drastic “brown knob” EQ is what really takes this tool to the next level.
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