A question to People who have used lots of different DAWS and effects

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Nielzie wrote:
You should really try OrilRiver and Sanford Reverb. Two outstanding reverbs (32+64 bit vst) for free! No need to buy anything for pretty high quality reverberating these days :)

MuTools MuVerb is a free one that I also like and use a lot.

That said, yes I do also own the Valhalla Reverbs and Eos and Hornet Spaces, etc. But I think if I really had to, I could perfectly live with only using the free ones mentioned above.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm downloading them now :)

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EnGee wrote:
Nielzie wrote:
You should really try OrilRiver and Sanford Reverb. Two outstanding reverbs (32+64 bit vst) for free! No need to buy anything for pretty high quality reverberating these days :)

MuTools MuVerb is a free one that I also like and use a lot.

That said, yes I do also own the Valhalla Reverbs and Eos and Hornet Spaces, etc. But I think if I really had to, I could perfectly live with only using the free ones mentioned above.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'm downloading them now :)
I forgot to mention Tal-Reverb-2 and Tal-Reverb-3 which are also really nice and free. :tu:
No band limits, aliasing is the noise of freedom!

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Nielzie wrote: I forgot to mention Tal-Reverb-2 and Tal-Reverb-3 which are also really nice and free. :tu:
Yes I have them, but always forget to load them! I'll give all a good test :)

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I believe there is sometimes a false impression that included plugins aren't as good. Some of the included plugins can be quite good. Not many though.

I'm particular about having a good clean limiter, so the included limiters in most daws don't make me happy. Some of the 3rd party limiters are more adaptive to the input and do a more surgical job or boosting at just the right places. Same with EQ's. The filters in some EQ's are just noisy and they have inherent design flaws making the job of fine tuning a track or master much more difficult. Dynamic EQ's like the Melda MDynamic and The Ozone Dynamic EQ respond like EQ with a built in compressor that can be adjusted by band. A very useful tool.Anything multi band is easier to narrow sound than not. Multiband compressors, limiters etc. all make the job a bit easier. I commonly use side chain into some of my limiters to narrow what I want to limit.

I am picky about my reverbs too. I have Valhalla Room and Shimmer, a bunch of the TRacks stuff and tons of others. I find I need to play with those a lot to get the effect I want. Many times running my tracks into a bus and giving the verb extra EQ treatment to get what I want out of it on my master. Then you need to deal with the cumulative build up effect of feeding sends into a bus. Takes a lot of tweaking. I have a few convolution reverbs. Waves makes good one. There are free ones out there.The thing about convolution is you have more control over everything about the verb. I usually don't have the time to play with it too much though so I end up tweaking a preset.

Probably the most hands off thing now with respect to mixing ease especially for newbs is the new wave of intelligent plug ins. We see it in Ozone's Neutron series of EQ's. Intelligent track comparison and plenty of presets. Allows you to see selected track EQ's all side by side so you can see exactly where there might be frequency clashes. Mastering presets for different genre. Analyzer tools to tell us if we have comb filtering or out of phase issues. Pretty soon they won't need mixers any more. Some computer AI robot will be doing it all. Honestly though, I still prefer the things on either side of my head for making those last calls on a mix.I haven't always agreed with what the smart plugins tell me. For a newb though, those presets and intelligent plugins are the bomb.

Daws, man don't get me started. The easiest daw for you is the one you know the most about and can use the best. If you're the artist and the mixer then the way you construct the music in it is as important as the mixing part of it. I learned on the former Sonar now called Cakewalk by Bandlab. I know my way around that daw. I know all the keystrokes, I know where everything is so it's easy peasy for me to do just about anything in it. I have Studio One Professional 3, Ableton Live 10, Mixcraft Pro8, Acid Pro, Music Maker..soon to probably buy Samplitude. I don't really recommend having a bunch of daws event though I have a few. I would look at what you primarily plan to work in. If it's mainly midi then seriously look at Cubase or CbB since they have strong midi tools. Not that the others can't handle the basic stuff.

If you need to track a bunch of audio then look at programs known for strong audio recording and editing tools. In this case the audio interface and the way you track is just as or more important.If you're a DJ or electronica dude, then you need a strong loop program like Ableton, Acid or Mixcraft.

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kb420 wrote:I primarily use Cubase and Live. Both have pretty good included effects, especially when it comes to eq and compression. I don't like the included reverbs that much in either program. The ONLY reverb that I ever really liked that was included with a DAW was a scaled down Lexicon reverb that came with an early version of Sonar. It was dxi format, and is not currently available as a vst at all, let alone 64 bit. Now, I have a group of reverbs that I use:

Valhalla Vintage Verb, Shimmer, and Room
2CAudio Aether, Breeze, and Breeze 2
Fabfilter Pro R
Sountoys
Eventide Blackhole

Other than reverb, I can actually stick to the included DAW plugins, but for basic eq, compression, and saturation, I also love Fabfilter and Izotope Neutron 2 and Ozone plugins. I have a lot more plugins than I need, but those are my favorites.
CHROMA VERB coming with LOGIC PRO X recently is a pretty good reverb by the way... :phones:

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