My latest:
I’m probably going to sell Neutron. It’s my most used plugin but all I am really using is the dynamic EQ and the compressors. Well, I have tons of compressors, and Pro-Q is a nice upgrade for the dynamic EQ. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, Saturn is a really interesting multiband distortion/saturation plugin. I wasn’t shopping for it but I got it used with Pro-Q in the same bundle on the cheap, so why not.
Picked them both up for about 100 euro total.
Great deal! Fabfilter stuff is awesome (but pricey).
Oh yeah. TBH I have wanted it for a while to side by side with Neutron. Both are awesome, each has some advantages.
For people newer to mixing I would also 100% recommend Neutron over Pro-Q as well. I learned a lot from it and it automates a lot of stuff that Pro-Q and others don’t.
Gonna wait for this one to go on sale and then grab.
Lexicon licenses them to make it so presumably it’s good.
Yes, probably. Bass teacher nudged me towards FabFilter and I am still trying to understand what it all can do. So far, I am mostly following my ears and picking up wisdom from others…
I have it too and absolutely love it, no regrets!
Yeah I don’t think Neutron is better or more capable, it just has some nice automation
FYI:
While looking for an analyzer I stumbled over a truly great tuner: MTuner | MeldaProduction
I understand that even @howard likes Melda Production stuff, so it must be good 
It’s part of MFreeFXBundle (as in: free!) and can be found here: MFreeFXBundle | MeldaProduction
What I like about this tuner is the fact that it shows tuning clearly and allows for very precise tuning in a way that I have not seen in any other tuner I own. Most tuners are quite “jittery” … this tuner responds also very fast, but by minimizing the blue-grey-ish bar on the top left panel you get to a perfect tuning easily…
You know what I mean when you use it yourself.
You can switch to bass mode in the settings, which is a nice gimmick to change the panel below (with the violet E1 bar).
Oh, and of course the bundle also includes an oscilloscope that I used as an analyzer to get a better grasp of my PUs (MOscilloscope | MeldaProduction) with pitch detection…
Melda’s stuff is really good for sure. I use MCharmVerb and MChorusMB a lot.
MTurboComp is an outstanding set of compressors.
I am in the process of testing compressors and settings, namely:
The best compressor up to now seems to be the “plain” (non-grey, non-silver) Teletronix LA-2A. It has some presets, and the bass preset is a good starting point. It instantly souded cool!
In fact, @howard, this is thanks to you. I must have skipped this one in previous testing, as the word “silver” made me expect that this one is the best, so I skipped the others.
Note to myself: if you buy something, test all options and don’t be influenced by bling-bling!
I have one issue though: I want to use the software outside (in the park), where I do not have a WIFI connection, and the VSTs keep nagging me to activate, even though it’s already activated.
Is there a way to not use UA connect for activation? Like an offline activation file or something like that?
IIRC UA is pretty lame in this regard
Also don’t rule out Kilohearts Compressor. I use it more than any other, and it’s free.
I got this cause of your recommendation. Haven’t used it cause it looks so … uninspiring
Question’s:
EDIT Just a reminder to myself: https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/what-is-audio-compression.html
Ha.
Makeup gain is a critical concept in compression. When a compressor is doing its job, it is attenuating the peaks of a signal. This will reduce its dynamic range, but also reduce its level. Applying Makeup Gain makes up for that and is how compressors make the overall loudness of a sound go up - this has the effect of boosting the body of the tone at the expense of the dynamic range.
No. This is the mode for tracking the signal level against the threshold, coincidentally also mirrored in the level meter.
Sidechain modulation is a critical concept in music production to allow causing an effect to be triggered by another source’s level. Since you are only playing to backing tracks, do not worry about this for now.
they may look bland but K 
s does functional UI very very well.
Cool, thanks!
I wish somebody would do a tutorial here, using the Kilohearts Compressor as an example. But who, @howard, who??!
I think most beginners have the same issue, especially when making a cover.
A compressor can make your cover go from “WTF?” to “I rock!”.
But it is quite overwhelming, even with only three or four parameters (Attack, Release, Ration and Treshold), as changing one parameter could also require to adapt others.
After the Beato discussion in another thread I watched this:
That was quite helpful, but still I don’t feel like getting it 100%…
FWIW, it takes a long time to wrap your head around it - at least it did for me. Also, never forget - this is not porcelain, you can’t break much by trying out stuff! Above all, trust your ears!!
Also, read and re-read Howard’s replies to your answers above again and again - while there is a lot to unravel, there is a lot of wisdom to be gained if you dig into it.
Yes! Inspired by Beato’s videos I started recording/playing back stuff yesterday and change parameters in realtime to understand what it does.
Some things are quite subtle, others have side effects, so if I change parm 1 I need to modify parm 2 to make it sound good again.
Yeah, in the end, all remarks from @howard (at least for VSTs :-)) make sense … but you need to have a grasp of the basics to get it!
Makeup? Sidechain? That’s not intuitive for a beginner!
Good thing: as long as I dive into the VST stuff, I don’t mod my bass. So that’s a relief for everybody. And should keep this discussion going, for the sake of all ^^
I dunno, even just making covers with backing stems it can be useful to compress the drum track with a sidechain input from the bass to make some room.
That’s true, if you have a separate stem that is a good use for sidechaining.
In that case I would probably use sidechain to proportional EQ instead of compression but compression works too.
Actually in retrospect I think this might work pretty so-so at best. The reason being that most of the stem separators are separating out into complete drum tracks. These have also already been mastered and mashed up into compressors/limiters (sometimes to extremes if we are talking '80s/'90s). This means there’s lots of sharp transient peaks, not just the kicks but also the snares and sometimes cymbals, all across the frequency spectrum.
Ever wondered why drum plugins have 16 outs? This (and also mixing/compressing) the individual drums is valuable for things like sidechaining, not to mention the overall mix. For bass you would want to sidechain only the kick.
I didn’t elaborate but the reason I would choose proportional EQ over compression here is that with proportional EQ, you can duck only the frequencies the kick lives in, not compress the whole bass track. Though you could also do the same thing if you had a multiband compressor that let you sidechain each band separately too. Or with something like Multipass.
