Best VST’s for Reggae and Dub

[peterdh]

I find it weird to make Reggae with plugins on a computer
It takes a bunch of stoned black dudes jamming together

[sqigls]

racialist

[jancivil]

clavinet _is_ good for the rhythm guitar part. I got someone to play an actual guitar for it but I supplied the track with clavinet first.

He used some Gibson, SG iirc but EQ'd it for cut. Strat is more directly applicable. Or Tele.

The guitar engine I think has the most capability for rhythm guitar programming is Orange Tree Samples strum engine, and they have a strat model now.
At the time there wasn't anything I wanted to throw a whole lot of time at and I asked someone to do it who found the time. It really made the track, whereas I, while being pretty good at realistic MIDI was never going to cut that. I'm really picky.

[michu]

...honestly i think the cheapest and easiest way would be to get yourself some cheapo guitar and record it yourself...

No real guitar for me, too difficult. And samples, don't they have the negative "transpose" effect if not every note/chord is sampled separately? Rob Papen RG, which only produces minor and major chords, sounds nice to my ears. I read on the internet that a Fender Stratocaster guitar is often used for the Reggae rhythmic guitar. Is that right?

i'll start with a sigh
guitar is an "easy to learn hard to master" type of instrument. raggae chords and James Bond theme type melodies are way on the easy part of this spectrum.
Learning something with "this is hard" attitude takes twice as long as with "this is easy". i'm quoting one Victor Wooten here
a guitar with single coil pickups is an obvious choice (and i mean virtually any guitar ) but a lot of dub comes from "we take what's available, take a drag on a spliff and see what we can do with it"
if you listen to a lot of say Lee Perry and the Upsetters - they really weren't messing about

[peterdh]

Typically, instruments and instrument plugins are not made to suite only one genre of music, but can be used for different musical styles. The rather adequate question would be: which VST / plugin covers the sort of sounds that are typically used in the kind of music I want to make? The same is true for effects!..

Nice formulated!

...Dub is obviously heavily delay based, so some plugins / impulse responses that cover classic tape delay and spring reverbs would be adequate...

Don't know much about spring reverbs, why these?

...i'll start with a sigh
guitar is an "easy to learn hard to master" type of instrument. raggae chords and James Bond theme type melodies are way on the easy part of this spectrum.
Learning something with "this is hard" attitude takes twice as long as with "this is easy". i'm quoting one Victor Wooten here ...

I have to accept my limitations

[michu]

Don't know much about spring reverbs, why these?

Spring reverbs were built into tape delay machines they were using. it's that simple.
btw impulse responses won't do much good in replicating a spring reverb or a tape delay in a bad shape (which is what you mostly hear on old dub stuff). spring verb does a characteristic ping/boing sound on a sharp transient. a worn out tape delay unit is basically an entity with it's own mind.
you may also delve into analog BBD based delay emulations. these are a thing from late80s early 90s but fit into aesthetic very well. if you're willing to hunt down a pack of old ArcDev plugins and suffer 32bits Synthedit creation then ET-301 can get dubby as something very dubby

I have to accept my limitations

we all have to, eventually
tho i tend to test mine from time to time sometime changing an angle and approach. one man's honey is another man's poison

[TheSynthScientist]

actually you can use any plugin for any style.

Very true, every one may choose different instruments due to personal taste, but it really comes down to your taste.

[Obsolete236871]

Don't know much about spring reverbs, why these?

Spring reverbs were built into tape delay machines they were using. it's that simple.
btw impulse responses won't do much good in replicating a spring reverb or a tape delay in a bad shape (which is what you mostly hear on old dub stuff). spring verb does a characteristic ping/boing sound on a sharp transient. a worn out tape delay unit is basically an entity with it's own mind...

I will have to disagree on the "impulse responses won't do much good in replicating a spring reverb" part, because it's simply not true.

What is true is that one impulse response sample (one capture of the original sound) can only provide one representation of the sound at a given time, which is sufficient for most purposes.

What you will not get are the constant slight alterations and modulations that appear when operating a mechanical device in the real world. However, you can achieve similar random alterations by adding subtle modulation effects to your reverb effect channel.

One could can also use multiple impulse responses of the same device captured with slightly different settings and then alternate between sending the material to one of two or more reverb channels.

Then there are also algorithmic approaches to spring reverb, but many of them do not sound better than impulse response samples. They often sound a bit more artificial in terms of the basic reverb sound they create compared to impulse responses. It's not a coincidence that some of the most highly regarded spring reverb plugins still make heavy use of impulse responses internally.

There are some new approaches with dynamic impulse responses that include those alterations and modulations over time, but as far as I know they focus more on digital reverb devices of the 1980s, which are not so very typical for Reggae and Dub music.

Here are some nice spring reverb impulse response samples:

Free: http://www.dubbhism.org/2008/10/free-do ... tubby.html

Pay what you like (but the guy has put a great effort in capturing all these devices):

https://floaudio.bandcamp.com/album/fen ... mpulse-set

https://floaudio.bandcamp.com/album/yam ... mpulse-set

https://floaudio.bandcamp.com/album/par ... mpulse-set

[sqigls]

cheers Izak

[Music Bird]

For reggae I’d probably use synth brass instead of natural sounding horns unless you’re going for that roots sound, whenever I hear new reggae songs, even in roots music, I hear a lot of synth brass, especially in the lovers rock bands. The instruments you need will vary, but out of VSTs
Korg M1 is great for brass and the skank.
Trillian should do a good reggae bass.
There’s lots of good guitar plugins, but for chords I’d use the piano or a DX-style e piano, so Dexed could work for some 80’s e piano, synth stuff, and bell type sounds, but keep in mind it isn’t so easily programmable.
For the synth leads, Synth1 should do.
If you want to double the bass guitar sound with a synth bass, Trillian should have that, and so should MS-20 Legacy (MS-20 was used a lot by dub bands back in the 80’s and 90’s for basslines, I think the squelchy synth bass lead in Sweat (A La La Long) comes from one).
Also, there’s a guitar VST called Cute Emily Guitar, it may sound good for your guitar because it sounds like a reggae guitar.
For processing the guitar patches, you could use Guitar Rig.
For drums, a mix of drums can work. But NI stuff works real well, and so does Toontrack’s reggae drums and Addictive Drums (which I hear in a lot of reggae).

[DeBro]

I won't comment on the statement made in the post above about who plays reggae music.

Here's a dub version of a song that I did an internet collaboration via the cloud with a buddy of mine. We both have the same DAW. He rendered his vocals and I did the instrumentation, mixing, and production of the song. The entire production was done in Cakewalk by Bandlab using only plugins that were bundled and a few free ones.

The rhythm guitar was played live and the dry guitar signal was recorded into the DAW, where the bundled Overloud TH3 amp sim was applied and an emulation of the MXR Phase 90 was used in the effects section of the amp sim.

Lots of automation was used to mute sections of tracks and to bring in the delay effects. Also occasionally, the side-stick hit on the snare drum received a huge dose of reverb.
So as you listen, Reggae Dub is doable in a DAW.

https://app.box.com/s/nwyjpbf2176993ci5d85iketdaqut4id

[simmo75]

Fluffy_little_racialist

[DMG68]

BFD3 for drums
Session horns pro for horns
Tremor for the synth percussion sounds
Piano, I don't remember, either addictive keys upright or NI Upright.
Live bass, guitar and percussion
All mixing ITB, mixer is used as a midi controller
You can produce reggae purely with software, you need to know what style you want to focus on. You can use almost anything, it's more about what you do with it than what you use. Developing your skill is more important than what you use, your stock DAW stuff can probably go a long ways to satisfying what you need, even drums, depending on the sound you're after.

https://youtu.be/ZoGsMP69ai4

[peterdh]

Thanks guys for all the input

Skank...is this Reggae slang for the rhythmic, off beat "other instrument than drums/percussion part" of the Reggae/Dub song? If it is, I like the phasing skank part in your song DeBro.

[DMG68]

Yes, that's the skank. It's not uncommon to put a phaser on it for dub, especially for digital or steppers style dub.