Category Archives for "Software"

New Music Gear Monday: UAD Empirical Labs EL8 Distressor Plugin

UAD EL8 Distressor plugin on Bobby Owsinski's Production blog

It’s really difficult for a piece of gear to become a standard that everyone must have. It’s especially difficult when it comes to compressors, since most of the classic designs were created 50 years ago or so and we’ve seen mostly variations on a theme since. That’s why Dave Derr’s EL8 Distressor is such a […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Plugin Boutique Scaler Chord Composer Plugin

Plugin Boutique's Scaler on Bobby Owsinski's Production Blog

All songwriters face writer’s block from time to time and search for anything anywhere for inspiration. If that’s happened to you, one excellent place to refer to is a new plugin from Plugin Boutique called Scaler that’s uses “Creative Chord Composer” as an apt description that’s almost guaranteed to get you thinking about music in […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Boz Digital Labs Manic Compressor Plugin

Manic Compressor on Bobby Owsinski's Production Blog

You probably read the headline for this post and thought, “Not another compressor plugin,” and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that at first I thought the same thing about Boz Digital Labs’ Manic Compressor. But this plugin has a number of tricks up its sleeve that most compressors don’t have, which makes […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Wavesfactory Spectre Enhancer Plugin

Wavesfactory Spectre on Bobby Owsinski's Production Blog

There are a ton of different EQ plugins to choose from and all have their unique character. That said, most mixers still find a need for a sound shaping tool that adds a bit more than the traditional boost and cut. Enter Wavesfactory’s Spectre multi-band enhancer plugin that incorporates a graphic-style equalizer with the introduction […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Sonnox VoxDoubler Toolbox Plugins

Sonnox VoxDoubler Toolbox on Bobby Owsinski's Production blog

It’s surprising how much vocalists love the sound of their voice doubled, but manually matching a previous vocal can sometimes be a time consuming process. Through the years all sorts of gear has been created to attempt to automatically double a vocal (going all the way back to Abbey Road’s Automatic Double Tracker – ADT […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Audified DW Drum Enhancer Plugin

DW Drum Enhancer from Bobby Owsinski's Production Blog

There are lots of channel strips on the market that work well for drums, but up until now there hasn’t been one that’s been specifically tuned by a drum manufacturer for drums. Audio software developer Audified has teamed with DW Drums to change that, and the result is the DW Drum Enhancer. The plugin incorporates EQ, […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Waves Andrew Scheps Omni Channel Plugin

scheps omni channel

Andrew Scheps is not only noted for his excellent mixing abilities for acts as diverse as Adele to Metallica, but he’s also one thoughtful guy, so when he comes out with a plugin, you can bet it’s something special. For instance, there are a lot of Neve 1073-style plugins available, but his Scheps 73 is […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Sound Radix POWAIR Smart Compressor Plugin

Sound Radix POWAIR

Did you ever have an unusually dynamic vocal where your compressor works perfectly in one section of the song, then springs into over-compression on another? Of course you did. That’s something that everyone runs into on a regular basis. One way around this is to automate the parameters of the compressor, but that’s gets time-consuming. […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Mastering The Mix Expose Mix Quality Control App

Mastering The Mix Expose

As I’ve written before, there’s no need to do specific mixes for streaming services like Spotify, since most labels and aggregators like TuneCore will submit a 44.1kHz/16 bit file anyway. Plus, the streaming services do their own encoding and normalization, so there’s no benefit in doing it yourself. That said, it’s always good to know what […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Eventide Elevate Mastering Plugin

Eventide Elevate mastering plugin

Today’s mastering tools are better and better, but can also be much more complicated than the average engineer wants to deal with. That’s why some plugins are becoming smarter in how they operate thanks to incorporating artificial intelligence, and a perfect example is the Elevate mastering plugin developed by Newfangled Audio and distributed by Eventide. […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Unfiltered Audio SpecOps Spectral Effects Plugin

Unfiltered Audio SpecOps

While many software developers concentrate on reproducing the sound of old analog favorite outboard pieces, there are others that prefer to explore the digital boundaries of what hasn’t been heard or done yet. Such is the case with Unfiltered Audio and their new SpecOps plugin. It’s hard to place SpecOps into a category, but something […]

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New Music Gear Monday: Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve 14 Workstation

DaVinci Resolve 14 audio

There are so many digital audio workstation choices at all different price ranges and they’re all, at worst, pretty good. So why would anyone even consider a new one? For one thing, when it’s pedigree is Fairlight, and secondly, when it’s actually an all-in-one video editor as well. That’s what you get with the new […]

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