And I love the simple, distinctive UIs.īut if I had to choose one of those, probably Vintage, based on first impression. You can tell this guy cares deeply about DSP. And the smoothing is a rarity, and something I've missed in other plugs, meaning click-free automation and huge sound design potential. On the strength of their showing in this thread, I downloaded Valhalla Room and Vintage, and I'm really impressed. And no algorithmic reverb plug ever did it for me. Convolution reverbs can sound great, but are more or less untweakable, and require auditioning endless IRs. IL used the same X/Y graph widget that they use for a lot of their stuff, meaning that the compression curve's menu includes such absurd entries as "Create sequence"(!), "Analyze audio file", "Scale/Normalize levels" and "Decimate points". And its drawable compression curve is ridiculously powerful. I love its sound, its UI, its analysis displays, its looks. Long story short, I fscking love Maximus! As a workhorse track compressor, all the way to a mastering limiter, I just seem to be able to get better results faster with it.
So, in the spirit of exhausting what I already owned before buying more, I installed it and started experimenting with it again. Time passed, and I was shopping for a multi-band compressor/limiter, and I remembered that Maximus's VST version had been included in the bundle I bought (which hadn't been the case with a few other "included" products). It came with FL, and I used it a bit in there, shallowly, and promptly forgot about it when I stopped using FL so much. The Melda stuff discussed in that other thread looks pretty tasty, but I've got limited experience with it. If I want to be gentle, I usually just use the Apple AU MultiBandCompressor. It's got some great tone, but it's anything other than transparent. The Molot compressor probably sits at the far end of that extreme. ReaComp is great, but there are ton of good ones out there, depending on whether you want to compressor to color the tone or not. The TAL-Togu Reverb II is the one I've found that sucks the least, so that's what I generally use.Ĭompressors is where I get all giddy. Blue Cat's Triple EQ is my go to model, but I'm not adverse to using others, and I could probably just get by with just that. I can't live without an EQ, although just a couple of well placed parametric cuts is usually all I need to clean up signal to something useable. (I typically don't use recordings of audio, which of course is quite a different scenario, where I probably couldn't do very well without EQ and compression either.) where notes are too soft or loud, I prefer to adjust the velocities of notes and/or volume envelopes of the instruments). Where problems need to be fixed I prefer to adress them at the root of the issue anyway (rather than its symptoms) with changes to the orchestration (tweaking synth patches) / arrangement (e.g. I can do without EQ and compressor just fine.