Linear Phase
the vst plugin thing, "in general," is starting to loose a lot of its luster to me.
A. Todays DAW plugins, are nearly just as good, and just as good as the ones you can buy. ( Really the quad curve eq, is like, "one of the best," eq's around. Ok, well its not an LP eq, but Cakewalk provides that for you anyway in the form of the LP64.
B. It just seems like, "the plugin market," was a very inexpensive market for a lot of these developers to enter. They themselves, "for the most part," do not have that much of an investement in the market, and we are really beginning to see, "how detrimental that is," to the end user.
C. We are starting to see plugins that, "reinvent the wheel," and have no real addition to mixing or mastering music, and really exist to sell themselves.
D. There is so much out there to buy, and each time you buy something you have to learn it, you are so much better off not buying a thing.
E. When these companies go bankrupt, and several of them inevitably will, because the market place simply can not have, "200,000," best Eq's ever.. Your plugins become absolutely useless; the combination of copy/anti-piracy protect, and lack of further updates.
Ditto.
When Waves announced REDD recently, I surprised myself seeing how little I care. I should have been all over that thing. But, no...
In fact, whenever I start to fool around w/ a song mix, most of the time I try and stick to the bundled plug-ins as much as I can. And if I use a third party plug-ins, whenever I have a bit of time to experiment, I'll go back and try to substitute w/ my native plugs and match the sound.
What I find is that in many cases, it's a matter of design and workflow - some plug-ins will kind of push you into a certain direction, because of their limitations and particularities, which means that you may get certain results quicker. And for people like me, starting w/ a bunch of restrictions can be a good thing. But if I
knew in the first place that that particular sound would work for the song, and how to get it, I'm pretty sure that I could do it w/ my bundled plug-ins in the first place.
I guess that's where experience comes to the rescue. Which is why I like to go back and try to match settings w/ my bundled plug-ins - I'm learning how to make them do what I want. But of course, this can only happen when you can figure out what might work in the first place. That's the toughest part.
In my case, that's particularly true w/ EQs. For compression, I did my homework, and I can get what I want out of Logic's compressor 99% of the time, for everything, from opto type of comp on bass to vca-type mix buss compression.