PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic NON-Subscription effect plugins you would personally recommend. No synths or other libraries please.

Trackspacer

This is a frequency-based ducker. This is really useful when you've got to tracks with overlapping frequencies. For example, you might have a vocal and an acoustic guitar, with both of them in similar mid-frequencies. Trackspacer solves the problem of making sure the guitar track doesn't stomp all over the vocal.

You can set Trackspacer to listen to one track, and have it automatically duck (lower the volume) of another track. What sets Trackspacer apart is that you can duck a range of frequencies, as well as ignore upper and lower bounds. This makes it much more transparent, avoiding the obvious "pumping" sound you get with traditional ducking, where you can hear the volume of the other track "pump" up and down.

Plus, it gives a visual display of the frequencies in real time, so it's dead simple to figure out where the overlap is, and only duck that portion.

Ordinarily, you'd want to EQ tracks to keep them in their lanes. But Trackspacer allows cutting the overlapping frequencies only when they are problematic, and otherwise leaves them alone.

Basically, it gives me an easy way of always keeping the vocal in front.

I believe Izotope has something similar, but I'm not sure what it's called.

Panagement 2

Panagement (a play on "panning" and "management") is a plugin for placing sound in space by using a slight delay (aka "the Haas effect") instead of adjusting the volume of the signal in each channel. It's also got an integrated reverb (concrete/heaven/wood/cave/dark) precalculated for that space that sounds very nice.

For me, Panagement "just works", placing the sound in a way that makes my ears happy. YMMV.

There is a paid version of the program, but to me, the best features are these available in the free version. ( got the full version on sale for $12).

RealPhones

This is a solution for using headphones to simulate listening in different environments. However, it's not something that you want on the final track. You can use Panagement to get something similar that does work on the final track, though.

I used to have use a Focusrite VRM Box, which simulated various speaker systems. It made it easy to test the mixes in virtual environments, and was less fatiguing to listen to than plain headphones. Unfortunately, VRM Box didn't play nice with newer versions of Windows, locking up other USB devices. (I just tested it, and my USB mouse froze, requiring a system reboot before it saw the mouse again). So I needed find another option.

Waves Nx was the first option I looked at, but for reasons not important here, I wasn't thrilled with it. It did have headphone correction, which VRM Box didn't have. Goodhertz' CanOpener was also similar, but had far less options and more expensive.

I ended up settling on dSoniq's RealPhones. In addition to simulating a number of environments (recording studio, car, Apple EarPods) and giving headphone correction, it also ran in in System mode, so it can be used when listening to audio outside the DAW. It was a bit pricey, but I also managed to find it on sale.

If you're on a budget, you can look at HoRNet's VHS (Virtual Headphone Simulator). It's not as nice as any of the other options, but it's much more affordable, and can be used without the room simulation if you only want headphone correction. They seem to have sales every other week.