What plugin 2 turn a sleeping pill into a warrior?

[kernaudioio]

Especially drums, bass and vocals often need some plugin to either make them more aggressive, more upfront or add more energy.

On drums the old Waves API 2500 still the best choice for me after so many years, either on drum bus or parallel track

Bass some LA3a with saturation for instance PSP Saturator work best for me and RBass is maybe one of the best plugins ever developed, don't need it each time, though.

BSS DPR 402 sometimes is the better choice on bass and drums, maybe one of the most unseen or underrated plugins.

Vocals, on my voice LA3a is the best choice, sometimes ReaComp, rarely a distressor emu when it needs to be very agressive.

On voice and bass guitar always some pultec eq for dipping and also boosting

For glueing on bus still The Glue makes the best job after so many years, sometimes Kotelnikov.

Sometimes no compression at all is needed, though. Compressors and reverbs are overrated imo, manual volume automation/ corrections instead of compressor, a good delay instead of 100 reverbs.

Even though I have Fabfilter ProQ, I prefer ReaEq for clinical eq and whenever I would need dynamic eq (rarely) I prefer NovaEQ over ProQ;
the reason is I get good results faster than with Fabfilter.

It is pretty interesting to see that so very old plugins still do the best job for me, I could say that most plugins I bought in addition were waste of money, but that's ok, I don't regret.

What do you use?

PSP Saturator is solid on bass, especially in parallel. VintageWarmer on a bus is still hard to beat for that multiband compression + saturation combination. for the "making things come forward" goal specifically, PSP InfiniStrip has a decent channel strip approach if you want preamp color + compression in one pass.

[simon.a.billington]

for me the harmonic angle is what does it most consistently. saturation that's tied to the input envelope so it actually breathes with the transients rather than sitting statically on the signal. tape and transformer characters do this naturally because the nonlinearity is program-dependent. a lot of "saturation" plugins are just static waveshapers that add the same amount of grit regardless of dynamics, which is why they make things feel louder without actually adding energy.

RBass is interesting because it's doing something similar but in the low end specifically. generating harmonics below the fundamental so smaller speakers can feel the weight. it's not "adding energy" exactly, it's making existing energy more perceptible across more playback systems.

zerocrossing's point about using saturation to carve space is real though. shelving out some of the competing low mids before you add harmonics back in is a workflow that holds up.

RBass can be a main tool to make electric bass cut through in a mix for me. It is not about low end 60-100 Hz, but the frequencies 200hz+.(low mids).
I would use RBass on a parallel track there sometimes and voila! you can also hear the bass on small speakers or smartphones.
First I dip around that boomy 200 Hz area and then RBass, if I used an eq too just boost it would make it sound boomy

Damn. I was going to say pretty much the same thing, but you bet me to it.

Imagine it is USD 39 only !!!!
They could offer it for 200 and it would be worth it.
I remember a thread about RBass alternatives, I demoed all suggested plugins, no one comes even close to RBass, the worst was some PA plugin called Mint or something similar.
It took me quite a lot of time to make a real electric bass sit well in a mix, RBass only!

That's most likely because every just seems to make a "sub harmonic" plugin. They add lower frequencies into the mix. RBass adds "upper harmonics" that psychoacoustically make you perceive the bass is deeper and fuller. Two very different effects.

The lower frequencies wouldn't have the same responsiveness of the upper frequencies simply because of the difference in wavelengths. This could explain the differences you're noticing.

It's not an answer to everything. Waves makes another plugin called Submarine themselves. That came out quite a while after RBass. What it actually means is that even they acknowledge that sometimes what a sound actually needs is simply more subharmonics,

[Songsterr]

Solid list for me, the Waves API 2500 is also an absolute staple for drum punch, it just has that grab that’s hard to replicate

[simon.a.billington]

Solid list for me, the Waves API 2500 is also an absolute staple for drum punch, it just has that grab that’s hard to replicate

I'd love to see them do a whole API channel strip. True you can piece one together, for the most part from their other plugins, but the workflow isn't quite as immediate as single channel strip tool. Plus the added Preamp features would be a great addition.

I'd also like to see them do a Neve 1057 as its incredibly rare and it would be nice to see all this really old hardware modelled as plugins before they become extinct.