Quick Math

You could lower all the track faders to maybe -10db as a starting point before starting the mixing. One reason of doing gain staging is that, usually plugins sound best at RMS -18db level. If it's louder, the plugin may have more noise, distortion or other artifacts. Some analog emulation can emulate the analog behavior so if you crank up the input, the sound could have nice saturation even if that could exceed 0dbfs peak level. But most of plugins would sound horrible if the input level is too high. RMS level is average level of certain amount of time while peak level is just the highest value of the waveform. RMS is more like perceived loudness. I usually put VU meter plugin before any plugins and set the level to 0VU by using gain plugin or whatever that can control the level. 0VU usually mean -18 RMS. For not percussive Instruments, I set it to 0VU and for percussive Instruments such as snare, I set peak level at -10db because if I aim at 0VM it could actually go above 0dbfs. So it'd be like either -18db RMS or -10db(peak) before any plugins

EQ > Reverb > Comp > Comp > EQ > Reverb (Send) and for that aux track Reverb(Send)> EQ > Comp > Comp (Sidechain Ducking) I guess

I already have Kirchhoff EQ. I bought it on their Chinese webshop with my friend's help as it had better deal than English website + intro deal. I thought I was smart. But if you guys can get it for $30, you guys are clearly the winners. As it's PA, we don't know what would happen in the future though. Perhaps it can get even cheaper than $30...who knows.

Kirchhoff EQ is going to be a part of PA mega bundle apparently. I don't have any other sources but perhaps you could buy it a lot cheaper as it's PA... https://www.plugin-alliance.com/en/blog/blogpost/items/kirchhoff-eq-beta-available-to-mega-xxl.html

I know nothing about this particular plugin but Coffee The PUn by Acustica Audio is said to be a portion of the Chandler Limited Germanium Tone Control. And it's a freebie and it's an EQ but maybe perhaps it has similar color or mojo. I tried it recently and it was great.

This Voxengo EQ has only 3 nobs. If you are looking for simple EQ like this, check BasiQ. It's also free. https://www.kuassa.com/products/basiq/ I use this often and the sound is very clean and it's actually versatile as it's baxandall EQ. I haven't tested this Voxengo one but I think this one can be an great alternative for BasiQ for quick EQ.

The coupon can be used for other plugins as well, as long as you put the EQ and plugins you want.

One day I was thinking about getting 1176 emulator or FET compressor. So I was checking YouTube comparison videos and I found PSP FET compressor sounded great and thought it's fairly clean and probably one of the best. Then after demoing it, I felt it's actually indeed a good compressor so I bought that. But after a while, I felt maybe real hardware has more color, rather than being clean, so I thought I should get another 1176 emu. And I thought the purple comp from PA was probably one of the best so I got that. Now, this forum is saying softube FET comp is having a deal and it comes with pro channel version. I usually don't use pro channels but pro channel is cool. Now I want this one... Maybe I will be using pro channel and making actual music. Yeah definitely I will.

Yeah, drop clutch, 2nd hihat, foot pedal that triggers snare or other sound, or 2 drummers, or the Dualist pedal. ? Dang, I like Djent. First time I listened to Periphery's first album, I felt it's like a machine and it's programmed by non drummer, and then recorded by a drummer. From second album, the drum part became much more natural. I liked both styles, but I liked that digital, machine-precision drum, too. Before knowing Djent, I would have said that that level of complicated bass drum pattern is unrealistic and not playable. But now, I would say anything is possible. Guitar is more difficult to guess for me like is this chord playable? Is switching chords from this to that possible? Or is this arpeggio possible? (Okay let's try to think they use special tuning ?) The exact song I was taking about is this, it's a game sound track and I think game music used to have a lot of humanly impossible to play kind of parts. This one is more realistic and the drum part is most probably playable than any old game music.

As a drummer, I have no problem making realistic drum parts. But in reality, I have heard of songs where the drum part is a bit unrealistic when it's supposed to be realistic, like they have closed hihat while playing djent metal style double pedal. Listening to those actually make me think how I can possibly, or creatively play it rather than complaining and crying like "No it's not realistic!" although I sometimes feel like we drummers don't usually do this, we can't do this...how can we do this...or perhaps can we, actually...? For that example, I try to think that It's actually playable if you set 2 hihats with one always closed or something. Also, nowadays, if a drummer used some sort of sampler or e-drum set up, more things can be technically playable. There are drummers who can play very complex drum'n'bass patterns which originally weren't meant for playing it on an actual drum set. I actually think, some drum patterns by non drummers are actually creative and inspiring sometimes especially when it's complicated. When it comes just a normal rock drum, non drummers probably don't know how "lazy" drummers can be. What I mean is, let's say there is a normal 8 beat pattern, and you hit a crash cymbal at the beginning of the bar. Let's say you use your right hand to hit the cymbal and then subsequently hit hihats to continue the 8 beat pattern. This totally depends on how you play it or the tempo, but sometimes we don't hit the hihat until next snare hit. This is because the accent is basically on snare and when you hit snare with your left hand and hit hihat with your right hand simultaneously, it's easier than busily hitting all the 8 beats hihat. This is one example but I really do something like this when my right hand gets busy. There are times when hihat or ride cymbal parts are omitted. And naturally, drummers are not robots so we tend to make phrases easy to play, like imagine a drum and bass pattern snare with random accent on 16th notes while having busy hihats vs average simple rock drum patterns. That's said when I actually write Midi with my mouse, I often forget these or write something that is not so natural nor easy to play but technically playable if I try hard. Maybe I can't play it but someone better can.

I also think having an ability to split signal like studio one would be great. Mid/Side, L/R splitter, Multiple band splitters would be nice to have. Dry/Wet Knob is also nice which I occasionally use in Bitwig Studio as they have it within their FX chain. Moreover, Instrument Chain that can load multiple Instruments within a same track like studio one, would be also great.

I assume the sound was the same but the UI was different for a plugin I recently bought. I thought I was fooled but it seemed they changed the UI for newer versions. I liked the original UI...

I was thinking about these. Let's think about a sampler. If the project sampling rate and the wave file loaded on the sampler have different sampling rate, then the sampler itself converts the data to the project sampling rate. So the quality of the SRC is determined by the sampler, and most of the time, the quality is not that good. So, it's probably better to use 3rd party SR converter first to get target sampling rate. And then load samples into a sampler. But there are times where you can't do this, like Instruments where wave data are integrated within the program and users can't access to files. In that case, the degradation introduced by SRC might not be worth using higher sampling rate, perhaps. But, then there is other thing, like sampling rate conversion from 44.1khz to 88.2 is not a complicated calculation, so the algorithm behind that might not be that different among SRC?? So, for example, SI Instruments by cakewalk by bandlab internally loads sf files and it looks these are mostly 44khz, so, for these particular Instruments, rather than choosing 96khz for project sampling rate, 88.2khz might be a better choice?? Or if that's not the case and SRC quality of an instrument is actually really bad, then sticking to 44.1khz and render it and use sampling rate conversion later for later process might be the choice. I was testing something related on a Sampler on Bitwig Studio. Just loading 44.1khz samples on sampler in 88.2khz vs converting samples to 88.2khz by using 3rd party SRC and then loaded them on to the project. There were some sound differences and I liked the one with 88.2khz samples. I don't know what this means... probably this means the quality for x2 conversion is still different among SRC. Maybe because of the implementation of filter...? This is all about samplers but then what about synth plugins? They have wave forms internally as it's synth. I like Z3TA and this can load waveforms. I have some waveform collection that is 96khz 32bit. So does this synth work like a sampler? Or the waveform gets converted into mathematical formula or numbers regardless of the sampling rate as it's just a single cycle and work as it is? I don't know DSP, plugin development nor any mathematics for these. But I assume that this is how it works, so for synth, maybe whatever project sampling rate is fine? I might be wrong and I wanted to know how things work... Sorry if it's a bit too irrelevant or something.

It'd be nice to have such feature. For now I think you can do it by loading a plugin into a FX chain, and there you can set maximum value and then write automation. I was thinking about doing that in the past but never actually used in an actual song but I think it's doable.

Long hair OR bald.

I think stock plugins are good enough to make great music as long as you know what you are doing. But without knowing the right sound, it's hard to actually use them. After buying a lot of plugins for years, I started to understand what the good sound is. All these analog emulations are so helpful because I can learn the characters of the sound. Some may say stick to DAW plugins and learn and practice mixing rather than buying expensive gears but I personally think knowing the sound and characters of greatest plugins certainly was valuable to me...and that's my excuse for GAS. After spending years on these, now finally I can make music with just free plugins and stock plugins...!

I really understand this. I have Waves CLA-3A and for la2a I use Cakewalk LA2A and I'm with it. There aren't many LA3A emulations out there and the Overloud one looks great to me too. But it's too pricy so I'm not gonna buy it for now.

Wow, this actually is really good. But you guys are somehow talking about something else lol. Anyways, great find. I have heard of good things about the Jazz stuff from there but personally didn't know much. I have had online jam sessions with other random but fairly or very skilled Japanese people online in the past so the video reminds me of these and these good vibes.

This has upward/downward compressor and upward/downward expander and I want this!

For 3rd party Tools that are probably better than DAW in terms of quality, Voxengo offers free SRC software called r8brain. https://www.voxengo.com/product/r8brain/ Other than that, RX (iZotope) and Saracon are often mentioned for the best SRC out there but these are not free.

I bought so many plugins in the past. And now my curiosity goes like I have so many expensive plugins now, but what if I stick to free plugins...? And I'm not using any cool plugins I bought recently....Why did I even buy them? Well, I will be using them in the future... There are great free plugins nowadays. And I learned that if we wait, the developers make better plugins than what we have now and sometimes they give us for free... I would still buy new plugins and there are plugins I want but I wonder how much I can do with just free plugins.

I used to use the same monitor. The frequency response of the monitor isn't that flat. And without a subwoofer nor headphones, you can't hear extremely low frequencies from the monitors. I really don't know what's the cause of that but maybe you could let others listen to the mix so that one can identify the problems of your mix? And having a reference tracks when mixing would be helpful. Headphones with some frequency adjustments (like what Sonarworks plugin does) can be more reliable than monitors in untreated room. And mid range is the more important than high frequencies simply because other speakers are usually not as good as your monitor speakers, so high and low can be compromised and what you hear is basically mid range frequencies. I don't mean you should simply boost mid range with EQ but mid range needs to be clear and powerful, or "standout". And this kind of thing is from mastering perspective and not necessarily about mixing so perhaps you might have missed that? Mastering is like to make your mix sounds great for any speakers and headphones.

This is the hofa plugin for blind test and I was using the free version. https://hofa-plugins.de/en/plugins/4u-blindtest/ Well, I bought it much cheaper with the intro sale on their official store. So yeah it was the much better price for me. Originally, the original price was $149 but they had extra intro discount iirc. The developer is from China, and a Chinese shopping website (Taobao 淘宝) has their official store there. It seems like the price now is 699 Chinese Yuan which is roughly around 105 USD? I am not Chinese but can read a little bit of Chinese and my friend helped me buy it on Taobao. So Technically anyone outside of China can buy it there, too and the price there could be lower. Also they might have BF sale or some, perhaps.

That sounds disappointing but we don't know what we will have. I'm pretty sure they will offer special Voucher that doesn't require minimum spend or something similar. They gave us a lot of plugins for free. They will be having something like that maybe. I already have a lot of plugins from them. I can wait. I also have GAS.

Yeah, Kirchhoff EQ offers various EQ types of analog hardware, such as Pultec. But It's clean linear EQ, so you can add saturation later. But I am not sure if that's the easiest or simplest workflow for everyone. I make music completely in the box without any external instruments nor hw. I feel I need to use whatever I can to optimize the sound. So, clean EQ is actually good for surgical tasks. While Profession mixing engineers could probably use professionally recorded audio sources so they probably don't need to fix in the mix so they could rather stick to analog emulations with few nobs rather than digital EQs that offer millions of choices which might be more time consuming. I usually spend a lot of time and use various kinds plugins for mixing, so I feel like trying mixing with only a few analog emulations to see how it sounds... Btw, I was comparing the sound of Kirchhoff EQ against Crave 2 yesterday, by using hofa blind plugin, on a synth lead sound with one bell boost in analog setting in both EQs. I actually almost always picked Crave 2 over KH but then I changed the setting regarding the filter structure of KHEQ, which was added on newer version and set to checked by default, to unchecked, I picked KHEQ over Crave EQ all the time. When I bought KHEQ there was no such setting(=unchecked) and tested it against other EQs including crave EQ and liked KHEQ and that was why I bought it back then. So I was a bit surprised when I first preferred Crave EQ to KHEQ yesterday, but now I again liked KHEQ over Crave EQ.