Your favourite tools & toys

[EdRyan]

ok. Just been having a mess around, and wondered what everyone else's favourite sonic juicers are. Which kit and tricks do you always seem to come back to...

I have to say, since moving to Mac + Logic, the following have become my favourite toys..

Phase Distortion Audio Unit. I love putting this on bass sounds. Turns them really crunchy, even quite flat sounding basses can develop a nice bite !

the RTA function on the eq. I know not to mix by sight, but for quickly running through a track and scoping out the key areas for each instrument, I've found this to be very valuable and educational because I've seen things I used to miss.

Delay designer. Crazy, backwards style delays are so easy to create and manipulate with this. I find this to be the easiest and possibly the most flexible delay effect I've come across.

Korg Legacy Pack. In particular, I love the Ms emulator. Some crazy sounds on that one !

PSP Vintage Warmer. I'm impressed with the stock compressor, but this one can work wonders. It's hard to pin down but when you hear a bounce of the stock vs this, you know that it's added something to it..

ReCycle. For chopping up drums into a re-programmable format, I still think that this application is still the best going. You need reason to get the best out of the resulting sampler files, but it's still impressive.

Reason3/4. I don't use it very often because a lot of the sounds can be achieved by logic's built in units. I used it more when I was running a pc and cubase. But I like some of it's drum kits,redrum because it has a long step sequencer (handy for dance music), would kill to experiment with thor and you can do amazing things with combinators. It's the worlds biggest sound module imo..

EFM1. Basic but quite authentic and powerful sounding. I use this or the Korg Ms for a lot of my basses.

things I miss...

Stepfilter from Cubase. Quite an old plug-in, but one I used to use a lot for creating subtle variations to passages. I miss this really bad !

z3ta. The microwave bass and arpeggio preset = instant workable ideas. They never got round to writing a mac version tho...

Krakli Chill. One of the best free VST's ever. It would take some work but you could get some really low,punchy sounds from it.

Glitch. Trippy but awesome effect for stutter edits on drum parts.

Re-Birth. I don't care if they built it into logic, it's still not as much fun to play with as the proper program. Bring this back !

MrRay 73 - Nice and free Rhodes soundalike. I relied on this so much !

[cut_N_paste]

Straight in on the tools I miss.. Both were on Mac running OS9 and not, to my knowledge moved over to OSX. First was a super cool but oh so complex stand alone app called MetaSynth It was basically about creating original sound textures and processing source material using light and colour as a modulator. It was really tough 'sit with the manual on your lap' territory, but the end results were amazing - in fact I'm gonna try and dig out some old samples to post up...

Hang on.. whilst researching a URL to add for info.. OMG.. it is actually now available for OSX.. See this link
UI Software MetaSynth... Well, there you go.. you can check it out yourself.. luvvly jubbly

And the second one I was going to mention was Arboretum's Hyperprism.. a collection of rather ace processing tools which I ran on OS9.. Oh yes, seems that too is now available for OSX Hyperprism Review

Dang, this forums good to be on.. I've just had my fires re-ignited for two old flames .. lol

[conor_j]

Originally Posted by EdRyan

PSP Vintage Warmer. I'm impressed with the stock compressor, but this one can work wonders. It's hard to pin down but when you hear a bounce of the stock vs this, you know that it's added something to it..

Glitch. Trippy but awesome effect for stutter edits on drum parts.

Those are two tools I use quite a lot, in every project almost. Glitch is a wonder little tool

Apart from that im also fond of BBE's sonic maximizer, and my collection of ableton live racks and fx ive collected from the ableton online community members over the years

[JAYDMF]

Battery 3 - awesome piece of gear, works everytime for me and i dunno where id be without it

Reaktor - this is great from 2 angles, 1 making sounds that you cant find anywhere else and 2 for being able to see whats really going on within plugins and get further down into whats possible

MPC1000 - has a character of its own, just sounds warm for some reason and when Amens are blasting out it puts a smile on my face like nothing else

Korg Wavestation plugin - dont really use it much on tracks but i love this thing it just sounds fresh no matter what really did change the way i thought of synths

Waves bundle - without doubt the best bundle of plugins ive used so far. Doesnt always do exactly what i want but its usually the first port of call for me

[waxxy]

korg legacy collection and ms20 controller, yamaha cs1x ,roland xp30 , refx vanguard vst...and lots of other stuf but there the main ones i use most of the time.

[EdRyan]

Korg legacy pack is wicked. Used a lot. There's a preset in the Ms 10 tha I swear is used by a lot of the recent electro crowd. Especially people like Dave Spoon and D Ramirez..

[waxxy]

yeah theres loads of top presets on there ..its easily been my most used purchase and i hope korg are working on other vsts for the future.

[TrevCircleStudios]

UAD's Dimension D. Awesome little plug in.

[Dave Boulden]

I rather like Dimension D too... great on acoustic guitar... and rather difficult to describe 'cos is not quite chorus, not quite phasing...

[gzweb]

All UAD plugins rule!

I have an outboard toy that I quite like:

FMR RNLA Really Nice Levelling Amp at DV247.COM

Wish someone did a plugin version. Would be unbeatable.

[cane creek]

Stylus RMX , Abbey road brilliance pack , URS channel strip pro , Arturia Jupiter 8 , UAD-1 1176LN / Plate 140 , Logics own tape delay , schaak audio transient shaper , Gforce M-tron , Powercore Tube tech CL1B , Vintage warmer ... just a few off the top of my head

[macleodgrant]

Originally Posted by cane creek

Stylus RMX , Abbey road brilliance pack , URS channel strip pro , Arturia Jupiter 8 , UAD-1 1176LN / Plate 140 , Logics own tape delay , schaak audio transient shaper , Gforce M-tron , Powercore Tube tech CL1B , Vintage warmer ... just a few off the top of my head

i love that powercore CL1b, really nice plugin and i also enjoy the 24/7 powercore.

my favourites would have to be soundtoys from a 'toy' perspective but from an eq & compressor perspective i love the sonnox stuff

waves gold is awesome too, some gems in there

[cane creek]

Originally Posted by macleodgrant

i love that powercore CL1b, really nice plugin and i also enjoy the 24/7 powercore.

my favourites would have to be soundtoys from a 'toy' perspective but from an eq & compressor perspective i love the sonnox stuff

waves gold is awesome too, some gems in there

Yes i bought the soundtoys native bundle superb indeed and you can really push CL1B , ive got the old powercore firewire however its still good as i can run 8 instances of CL1B if i wanted.

[sureno]

+1 for the sound toys bundle, but to offer a few new plugs
tone2 gladiator
arturia V collection
albino 3
voxengo crunchessor

[mutilatedlip]

Anything by Audio Damage :: Home

Also, Goldbaby samples. Immense sounding, and great value:

Goldbaby