Plugins

5 FREE Plugins To Help You Mix Better

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Audio engineers love finding new toys and plugins to play with.
 
These days there are literally hundreds of plugins available for purchase that claim to be the solution to all of your mixing problems.
 
The sad fact is that so many of them are simply variations of other existing plugins.
 
Do you really need ANOTHER 1176 compressor?
 
It’s very easy to fall into the trap of purchasing new plugins in hopes that they will push your mixes further, but instead, the results are often minimal and you just end up with more debt.
 
If you’re looking for plugins that will actually help improve your mixing skills (and get you better results), there are some amazing FREE plugins that can help.
 
Today I want to share with you my top 5 favorite FREE plugins that you should get in order to help you create better mixes (and work more efficiently).

These aren’t your typical EQs and compressors. Instead, these will allow you to work smarter, faster and create mixes that sound bigger and that translate to other systems.

Check out the video!

What are some of your favorite free plugins?

Looking for more tips on how to get your mixes to sound clear and polished?

Check out The Ultimate Mixing Blueprint: A free guide on how to use EQ and compression across a variety of instruments so that you can create great mixes quickly.

Hacking Melodyne For Faster Vocal Editing

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When it comes recording, editing and mixing, it’s important to be efficient and work fast so that you can stay in a creative headspace. There’s nothing worse than having to deal with little organizational steps that disrupt the creative flow and force you to work slower.

For that reason, I thought it’d be helpful to share a quick tip with you today to help save you time.

Recently, I was doing some vocal editing in Melodyne and was frustrated with how slow the process was. If you’ve ever used Melodyne before, you’d know that before you can start tuning vocals, you need to play the song in real-time and wait for the audio to load into the program.  This can be very time-consuming (especially if you have a long song or multiple vocals).

That is until I discovered this Melodyne hack that I want to share with you today…

If you use Melodyne, this hack will save you tons of time with your vocal editing.

If you don’t use it, I’d highly suggest looking into it if you ever need to correct vocal tuning. In my opinion, it does a much better job than Auto Tune.

Mike

PS. I know that the newest version of Melodyne has ARA technology that automatically loads the vocals into Melodyne as soon as the plugin is inserted; however, in order for this to work, you need to have the most recent version of Melodyne along with the newest version of Pro Tools. If you’re like me and are running an older version of Pro Tools, this workaround will speed up your process.

Looking for more tips on how to get your vocal recordings to sound professional and polished?

Check out The Ultimate Mixing Blueprint: A free guide on how to use EQ and compression across a variety of instruments so that you can create great mixes quickly.

Mixing Low End To Translate On Smaller Speakers

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One of the biggest challenges most mixers face is getting the low end to translate properly across various sets of speakers. Often when we play things back on headphones or laptop speakers, the low end totally disappears.

It seems that when this happens, a natural instinct for a lot of mixers is to go back into the mix and boost the fader of their kick or bass tracks to make them louder.

The problem with this is that even if you do make the tracks louder, your speakers may still not be able to produce the low frequencies you’re trying to bring out. And by making everything louder, it just makes everything seem really overpowering when you play the track back on your car stereo or another set of speakers that has a wider frequency range.

Luckily, you don’t need to fall into that rabbit hole of revision after revision trying to get it right.

Instead, a very simple solution is to try adding harmonic content in order to help you perceive the low end on smaller speakers.

I’ve created a new video showing you how to do this using a very simple plugin.

Check it out:

As you’ll see the Waves Renaissance Bass is a very useful plugin for increasing the harmonic content in your tracks. It also happens to be super affordable.

To make things even cheaper, if you CLICK HERE and use this link, you’ll get an exclusive 10% off coupon for this plugin (or ANY waves plugin/bundle). Just thought it might help.

Do you use this plugin (or any alternatives) in your mixes? Leave a comment to let me know.

Mike

 

Looking for more tips on how to get the low-end in your mixes sounding big and polished?

Check out The Ultimate Mixing Blueprint: A free guide on how to use EQ and compression across a variety of instruments so that you can create great mixes quickly.

Dissecting Plugin Presets

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Have you ever found yourself mixing and decided to try out some of your plugin’s presets only to feel like they actually made things sound worse?

Maybe you thought:

Are the pros really using these awful settings?!?

or

Wait… Are my tracks supposed to actually sound like this???

Presets are often designed with a variety of desired end results. Just because something says “Lead Guitar” doesn’t always mean it’s going to miraculously make your lead guitar tracks sound amazing.

Instead, you need to reverse engineer the plugin settings to get a firm understanding of what source material the designer was working with.

You want to get a good grasp of why someone would use these settings so that you know when to use them for your mixes.

For example, if a preset named “Kick Drum” has 15db of 8khz added, you could reverse engineer this to mean that perhaps whoever made the preset was working with a kick drum that didn’t have very much attack on it.

For certain genres (for example, jazz), you might not want a ton of clicky attack from the kick – instead, a rounder sounding kick may work perfect. But on the other hand, if you are working with a dull sounding kick in a dense metal mix, this preset may be perfect to use.

Presets are not meant to be a one-click solution to your mixes. And fortunately, the more you train your ears and learn, the less likely you’ll feel the need to scroll through the various presets trying to find something that works.

However, if you get a firm understanding of what your presets are trying to achieve, they can definitely be useful and help you achieve your desired results faster.

You might (and most likely will) need to tweak presets a bit to make them work perfect with your source material. But saving time through less mouse clicking is always a bonus.

So take a look inside your plugin preset folders. Try to reverse engineer them so that you can find opportunities for when to use them and how to save yourself time. Use the Ultimate Mixing Blueprint to reference what each setting is trying to achieve.

What are some of your favorite presets and how do you use them in your mixes?

– Mike

 

Looking for more tips on how to create pro-sounding mixes from your home studio?

Check out The Ultimate Mixing Blueprint: A free guide on how to use EQ and compression across a variety of instruments so that you can create great mixes quickly.