I do have a pretty good collection of third party plugins but everything I have done for clients or myself has been in the box with Cakewalk products for many years. The only thing I used outside for a while was a compressor inserted in a Soundtracs board channel on a Project 8 board to even out the vocal mic going in to the interface.
Now, since having two of the Roland Studio-Capture 1610 synced, I have 24  of the 32 channels with built-in compressors on each channel. No need for the outboard gear at all anymore.
I must be doing something right because I always send my ITB masters to a couple of reputable companys for bulk copys and they have always responded by saying they wished that all their projects were so easy. They barely have to do anything if at all for their end of the work.
Not tooting my horn, just saying it can be done.
BTW, the Soundtracs board has been in storage over a year and I have 4 racks of hardware that haven't been touched in almost 15 years! Yard sale time!

maximumpower
Just curious, you all use a vocoder that much in your music?
 
I love them, I just never worked them into anything.

I almost never use them for vocoding, but for cross-synthesis where one instrument modulates another (e.g., drums modulating rhythm guitar). The Pentagon vocoder works well for that.

scook

Anderton
I still need to go outside SONAR for a vocoder. 

Curious which one you have settled on. I am currently a fan of the xlis 5000.

I'm still evaluating the ones in this thread. I need to delve further into the NI options; unfortunately I've had very little time to do anything "non-essential" lately, so keep falling back on the Pentagon one because I don't need all that much resolution to do what I do.

This is an interesting thread to read!  I,  like many of you, do most of my mixing "in the box".  (Shortly though I will be making some studio improvements that will lead me back to being able to do quality analog summing outside the DAW.) But getting back on topic I use mostly the Pro Channel modules and the processing tools that have been provided by the various SONAR versions through the years for my mixing tasks.  The two notable exceptions would be that I sometimes kiss the Master Bus with a Waves Puigchild Compressor and /or a Waves Pultec plug.  I always export to SONY Sound Forge where I use Ozone for Mastering.  I do all of my CD construction with SONY CD Architect.  The mixing portion of my work however is done mostly within SONAR.

I use Sonar X2. I don't use any of the Cakewalk effects anymore and my mixes improved dramatically. I got decent mixes using Cakewalk plugs but I guess we all learn differently. Who knows? I may go back to Cakewalk plugs? Life is a learning experience and everyone is different and does things differently.

I would say whether or not you can mix ITB with Sonar also depends on the kind of music you're producing. If it's straight ahead guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals etc with nothing in the way of "wacky" effects and sounds then Sonar includes everything you need for a great mix, no doubt about that. However if you want to get creative and/or work on contemporary electronic styles with lots of synths and wackiness, then you'd be mad not to check out what's available in the way of 3rd party tools. Even if you don't want to spend any money there are some terrific freebies out there, I always research them first though to see if anyone's having problems with them.
 
I guess over the last 2 or 3 years my biggest investments have been Komplete Ultimate, the Waves Gold bundle, Trilian and Geist. Got them all on sale at one time or another (except for Trilian) and have never regretted it. Apart from things like sound quality (which may or may not be better in 3rd party plugs), two of my favorite reasons for using 3rd party stuff are:
 
a) That they have a better interface than what's included in Sonar and I find them easier to set up - I'm always going to reach for the Waves H-Delay or Native Instruments' Replika (which was free for a while last year) because I find I can dial in the sound I want so much quicker.
 
b) That they inspire creativity, simply by virtue of being different. I know it sounds shallow but sometimes something as trivial as downloading a new plugin is enough to get my creative mind moving, even if what that plugin does could be reproduced quite easily with stock Sonar effects. What can I say? I just love new toys. But aside from that, there are so many interesting 3rd party effects out there which have been written by creative individuals who weren't bound by the usual constraints of working for a large company. I could browse the Reaktor user library all day downloading some of the weird and wacky effects and instruments that quirky individuals have created. Some of them are extremely whimsical. Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't. But there's no denying that they fire a creative spark in me.
 
I certainly could not do without Geist. Once you've played with that baby there's no turning back.

For band mixing work, I increasingly use mostly bundled stuff. And for the buts and bolts stuff like EQ and compression, mainly ProChannel modules.
 
For the remix work I do, where there's a lot of original synth stuff, I use z3ta+2 and NI Massive a hell of a lot, and some other things. I also use BFD a lot. Oh, and the d16 Group synths and effects, which are fantastic.
 
But no, for the actual mixing component, there's nothing much third party that I think is particularly more special that what you get bundled with DAWs these days. At least in terms of the core stuff: EQ, compression, reverb, delay, basic modulation. I also don't think the Slate console emulation has anything significant over the Sonar console emulation (which I think might be a minority view, but I'm not bothered about that).
 
The only third party stuff I use a lot is very specialist stuff: Zynaptiq Unveil is an amazing plugin for tweaking recordings from non-optimal acoustic environments. Izotope RX is useful for all kinds of stuff.

I use the Sonitus EQ, gate, and compressor - the visuals on those are very useful.
 
Beyond that though, I use almost none of the bundled plugins. I use external amp sims, cab sims, algorithmic reverb, guitar pedal sims, Voxengo's Spectrum Analyzer, limiter, and vocal channel strip, plus some nice freeware for chorus, delay, de-essing, clipping, etc.
 
In general I have found the post-Sonitus bundled stuff disappointing, since it seems to be overly focused on being a simulation of old real-world hardware and lacking much of the useful precision and visualisation that software approaches can bring. The exception might be the ProChannel EQ which looks like a great eq - just a shame it's in the ProChannel which I don't use as it doesn't suit my workflow.

All in the box. The only third party plugs for me are Ozone 5/Alloy 2.
 
My last project went like this...90% Sonar, then 10% Ozone 5, and I did not even use Alloy 2.
 
 

Anderton

scook

Anderton
I still need to go outside SONAR for a vocoder. 

Curious which one you have settled on. I am currently a fan of the xlis 5000.

I'm still evaluating the ones in this thread. I need to delve further into the NI options; unfortunately I've had very little time to do anything "non-essential" lately, so keep falling back on the Pentagon one because I don't need all that much resolution to do what I do.

I would love Fabfilter to do a Vocoder. 5 Volcanoes and a 20 band Crossover and just need them to wire it together. I'd be so interested in a Supervolcanor™