Making efficient use of your audio resources

Let’s talk about being more efficient with our audio production tools.  Don’t waste thousands of dollars on some big dumb digital effects plugin bundle.  You’ll end up using less than 10 of the tools in there with any real regularity.

Let’s find just the ones that you like to use first, for free.

Practice your skills on free audio gear first

Download this free plugin bundle.  You don’t need to pay for any extended features, right now.  There’s 37 free plugins in there.  

Try some or all of them, and experiment as much as you like.  It’ll take some time.  After a good long while, you’ll find that you settle on just a few tools that you tend to use the most often.

Those few items that you land on after practicing are the tools that you should buy much higher quality versions of.

And only those, for now.

Once we’ve got our audio engineering skills up on free and simple tools, we can transfer those skills up to more expensive and complex tools. But, buying lots of complex gear would be useless if you don’t know how to use it yet.

Required materials to use this free plugin bundle

To do this, you’ll need a DAW that allows running third-party plugins: Ableton, Logic, Pro Tools, Reaper, etc.  Not GarageBand, tho the built-in tools in that program usually work quite well.

Hint: In this bundle, the only three items I’d personally start out with are the MAnalyzer, MEqualizer, and MCompressor.  These three alone can take you really far, and I wouldn’t move on until you’ve maxed out your skills in learning how to use them.

We learn proper audio engineering skills by focusing on the fundamentals, not by throwing a billion plugins at the wall until something sticks.

Be careful using that width meter on the MAnalyzer, the way its graphic interface is set up is super misleading.

Keep the width meter hitting on the lower end (33% and below), don’t aim for 100% width at the top.

Overuse of hard pans and stereo spreading plugins is the leading cause of thin sounding, 2-D mixes that only sound good on your one pair of headphones, and nowhere else.

Don’t do it!  We want mixes with 3-D depth that sound good everywhere.