At last!!!!! Audio Plugins for Composers and Musicians
We consider ourselves composers and musicians first, and audio engineers second. While my interest in audio engineering has increased significantly in the last four years and my skills have grown in this area, I still have much to learn. Fortunately, we have people in our fold who provide the final stages in mixing and mastering to make our compositions sound complete and professional.
To help us – and a lot of other people – on our way, companies like Izotope and Waves are producing a new generation of audio plugins to help composers and musicians get great sounding results that are much closer to a finished product than ever before. Each plugin provides a series of pre-sets designed for specific applications (processing, drums, guitars, synths, vocals, stems, or even mastering final mixes). The plugins then allow you to tweak the presets to your taste using a series of simple and well laid out controls.
Different companies have taken their own approach to these products. For example, Izotope developed their own bundled suite of plugins for processing a wide variety of audio: Alloy, another suite for processing vocals: Nectar and another for mastering audio: Ozone
The folks at Waves teamed up with big name producers and engineers to develop plugins that model and recreate the signal paths of the hardware they use to create their signature sounds. Examples of the best Artist Signature Collections by Waves (which can be bought individually or bundled) are those developed with Chris Lord-Alge, Eddie Kramer and Tony Maserati. I was able to meet and speak with Chris, Eddie and Tony after they live demoed their collections at a recent AES show, and these guys were very gracious, informative and encouraging.
Give these plugins a look and see what they can do for your productions. There are plenty of reviews about them available online. Because they work better with some types of music than others, I strongly recommend downloading the free demos and test driving them first. We use many of these products in our projects, and we like ‘em very much. Thanks for reading, and have an awesome day…
Anthony@LiveBody
