What Are Your Go To Plugins?

When you sit down to mix a song it’s wise to have a handful of “go-to” plugins in mind to help you sculpt your sound. I’m sure you own more than a handful, but do you really want to be spending precious mixing time scrolling through plugin menus and testing out effects? I know I sure don’t.

Your Weapons Of Choice

Mixing music is challenging enough as it is, so I don’t want to divert what little energy and brain power I have away from creative decisions and instead towards plugin sifting. And with many DAW owners easily clocking in upwards of 100 or more plugins on their systems, there are plenty of distractions to be had.

My advice, pick your top 5 weapons to damage to your mix. Identify those 5 or so plugins that you will use to do 90% of your mixing work. For me these are my favorite EQ, compressor, reverb, delay, and saturation plugin. With those 5 effects I can sculpt one rocking mix in no time. I’m familiar with how they sound, what they do to my audio, and even what the graphical interface looks like. No manuals or experimentation need. Simply well known tools just waiting to be used.
 

The Fresh Install Perspective

This became even more apparent to me earlier this year when I upgraded my studio computer. As I spent the better part of a weekend re-installing all of my software onto the new machine I was in a hurry to get to work on a mixing project I was in the middle of. I installed a fresh copy of Pro Tools and just a couple of my extra plugins, telling myself I’d install the rest in a day or two.

You can guess what happened next. I never got around to installing those extra plugins and bundles and instead mixed an entire record with primarily the stock plugins in Pro Tools. I worked fast, efficiently, and creatively. As it turned out I was pretty much using the 5 plugins I mentioned above. It’s amazing what limitions will do for you in the studio.

The Other 10% Of The Mix

Now before anyone hounds me for being overly simplistic and utilitarian with my suggestion of using only 5 plugins, let me be clear. These “go-to” plugins will likely get you 90% of the way to a finished mix. The other 10% should come from some experimentation and risk. Every song is different and every mix unique from one to the next, so you should never fit your tracks into a complete grid with no variance.

Your core plugins and processes should get you most of the way there, but then you can be freed up to jump in whatever musical ideas fill your head. And if you have extra plugins that you’ve never used, then by all means drop them in the mix and start turning knobs. You might just stumble on your next “go-to” plugin!