Variety Of Sound

An esoteric thing that requires a good ear and, from my experience, manual separation of channels (L/R or M/S done with splitting). So for me, it works best on mixes that "ran their course" but still need some polish, and you want to try a quick thing because you run out of time. For example, in M/S configuration and used carefully, it can give you very quick and very powerful stereo results on master; especially when you have no other "compositional' ways to pull that stereo up. However, it's sometimes hit or miss, and also you have to read the manual to have the slightest idea of what's happening at all, trust me. (In short, it's three compressors that work together and talk to each other, but not really.) Other than that, at this point I'm ready to say that it's tried and tested in the real world for multiple years, that it works and sometimes works as an irreplaceable thing, IMO - and I'm usually the first to hate on both compressors and black boxes.

Didn't test it extensively yet, but did use it a lot in one production project (https://youtu.be/L3YSHdWGc0Y) and was very, very happy with how it sits in the mix. Quick responsive interface and not too hard on the CPU.

It's one of my secret weapon :

It's one of the best watchdog against volume bias (louder is better) thanks to
the great AGC.

I use it as the big broad shaping tool to quickly get me where I wanna be.

Unless I need fine resonance/gross stuff control or make final adjustements to the mix (which might requires a more analytical mindset) I only use this.

Also great while producing.

Docking a point for very occasional stability issues, but this is a really smooth-sounding plate reverb that you can make brighter without sounding harsh. The GUI is nice and big on modern setups, and I've got my fingers crossed that VoS uses it as a model to update their older plugins, which can often be a bit small and hard to read.

One of the best ambient reverbs you can get for free. The controls are simple and intuitive so you can quickly create gigantic lush reverbs to use on synth pads etc. The included presets also do a good job of showing off the different sounds you can get (some of them surprisingly subtle).

I love compressors. Not that I have tons of bus compressors, but there are quite a few sitting in my VST folder, which are considered as one of the best by many many users. But Density mkIII is my favorite one. There are many reasons for that. First of all, for a compressor, that doesn't have any latency and look-ahead, it extremely fast in catching transients without any distortion (here I am talking about LIM mode, which is actually not a limiter, but just a very fast compressor with attack starting with 0.1 ms.). The "glue" factor is astonishing. I see that a lot of work and passion was given to this baby. There is no 'Ratio' control, the compressor does it automatically and does It well. It is versatile enough to handle any bus duties - drum bus, master bus. It sounds clean, but alive. You can add some mojo with the dedicated 'Color' control. I do mostly electronic music and it shines there perfectly. And It is free. Thank you Variety of Sound for such a gift.

It's one of the best freebies out there. You can slap several instances of it on a track with hughe benefits.

If it's not working you'd need to install the vc redistrebutable from Microsoft Version 12.0.40660.

This EQ differs from others because of mainly 5 things:

1. 'Auto Gain Compensation' - the plugin keeps unity gain and allows to notice more accurately what the equalization (and saturation, if applied) is actually doing to the signal, without changing the volume. A very important feature. I wish incorporating this would be more popular amongst developers.
2. Four switchable curve shapes (American, British, German and Soviet), which differ in slope, steepness but also attenuation of certain frequencies. (the Q value changes proportional to the gain).
3. Gain-dependent saturation ('EQ Sat' button) and gain-independent calibration of the saturation.
4. Another very subtle output saturation stage comprised of 4 saturation models.
5. Highpass-Filter after the EQ-section to preserve added harmonics to the low end.