Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today's article is a bit different from the usual, and it can be considered as a prosecution of our article about mixing only with stock plugins.
Mixing and mastering is a process that can be stressful at times, but it's also a moment of discovery and of creativity, in seeing the artist's vision coming together in the form of music that can be enjoyed by everyone.
It's a process of discovery when putting together the pieces of the musical puzzle and fitting them until the picture is clear, but there is also discovery in trying every time new ways to improve and obtain better results, and this involves studying, reading, trying all the new plugins or hardware processors that we can, and all the time there is something new and more shiny that comes out.
Trying new stuff is part of the fun, in the end, but if I've learned anything in these years that I've been writing this blog, is that almost nothing is a real game changer, and that around 70% of what is advertised as a better version of what you already have brings an improvement as noticeable as "the emperor's new clothes".
Sure, there are a few game changers, for example the Neural Dsp plugins really brought the amp modeling a step forward, or Oeksound Soothe made eliminating unwanted resonances fast and easy, but besides these rare cases, there are so many good and cheap (or free, or stock) plugins out there that it's really hard to justify the real need of buying a new one, except for really just have a new toy to play with.
What I'm trying to say is that unless you're really looking for something specific that you don't have, buying a new compressor or a new equalizer most likely won't bring a real improvement in what you're currently using, and after trying so many plugins you get to a point in which you have a superficial knowledge of many of them, but you don't really know any of them very well, and this is one of the differences between an amateur and a professionist: a professionist usually has his experience built upon having something that he trusts, and he used it 1000 times, until he got to know all the ins and outs of every unit in the chain and how to obtain the best from each one of them.
The ideal point would be to choose for example a quality compressor, a quality eq, a quality delay and so on and to use them consistently until we get to a point in which we know exactly what settings are the ideal ones for our signal chain/gain staging, so that we can just plug and play, saving time and not having to do hours of trial and error looking for the right setting.
In conclusion I would suggest you, if you are at the peak of your gear acquisition syndrome, to try to stop buying anything for like 3 months and force yourself only to use what you have, I guarantee you that at the end of the third month you will have reach a level of knowledge of your plugins (or hardware processors) that will allow you to obtain results that you wouldn't have thought possible at the beginning of the trimester.
Most importantly, you might come to realize that a lot of the things advertised as "the next plugin you absolutely need" are not real game changers, in facts, most of them are what can be defined as "snake oil".
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