Plugins

Plugins

As an audio engineer plugins are very necessary to get high quality sound when mixing in the box. But plugins can get very expensive, so how do we know what to buy and when to buy?

I advise people to buy one great clean EQ plugin to do most subtractive EQ-ing to clean up tracks, and a nice modeled EQ with some character to do additive EQ-ing. Same with compressors, a great transparent compressor is great for general leveling tasks and a nice 1176 or LA2A model can be great when you want to add some character, and of course every engineer needs a vocal tuning plugin. But these things add up quickly and most starting engineers don’t have the budget to buy all these plugins so most of them end up pirating plugins. Pirating is wrong and I don’t think any serious engineer should be involved in this. With some simple budgeting any working engineer can save up to purchase their plugins.

Slate digital recently started offering their whole plugin collection for a monthly fee. This is great news for engineers that want to use quality plugins but can’t afford to buy them out right. This definitely works; they offer a great assortment of plugins that offer character that any engineer can use. But it’s simply not enough for most of us. During the holiday season most plugin companies have sales, this is the perfect time to buy plugins. If a particular plugin is not immediately necessary I would save up and buy it in the holiday season so you can save some cash.

Plugins are important to the audio engineering industry. I have great respect for the people who develop these plugins because they make my life as an engineer way easier. If we don’t pay for plugins then we can’t expect for the developers to keep making them so let’s support plugin developers by buying plugins.