SO3 comes with Melodyne Essentials, and the ARA integration makes it a heaven for tuning tracks... aside of that, it's a whole porpuse DAW, so nothing special or SO3 specific here

 

the best sounding stock plugin you can find in Harrison Mixbus, but its not good to handle. Followed by ProTools and Logic, then Ableton and Reaper, the worse is FL Studio.

 

my quality list
number 1 : magix sequoia&samplitude stok eq116( i think the best TRANSPARENT eq ever) + stok limiter smax11(hq) + analog modeling suite v2
number 2 : logic pro stok plugins

 

I don't know why you don't mention Digital performer 9 which has some really high quality plugins !

 

This sounds crazy to me. I know you're not the only one to say this but you're the first so off we go...

What does better sounding mean? Better at emulating hardware? Better presets? I haven't used fruity delay/flanger/whatever. I can believe that they aren't great, but they don't look much simpler than some of Live's native devices (but definitely way uglier)

Aside from The Glue in Live, I can't think of a better stock compressor than Maximus. And even then, it's apples and oranges. The type of 'better' that The Glue is, is something that Maximus is not even trying to do, and obviously the Glue isn't even the right type of processor to do some of the things Maximus is capable of. There is probably not a better vocoder than Vocodex anywhere. I mean have you really used these things?

Definitely not better stock synths than Harmor and Sytrus. You could make a case for Sonar or Logic, but IMO not a super convincing one.

shout to SliceX too, though I don't use it. In this vein, you could make a case for Ableton Sampler/Simpler though.

Gross Beat... way better than Live's looper, I'll tell you that.

Edison is one of a kind and a great concept.

Tbh the plugins made by Gol are some of the best of their kind, across the board. I would say this is subjective, but in some ways it's not. There are things some of these plugs allow you to do that can't be done with anything else I know of.

 

Logic Pro & Studio One - by an astronomical landslide - without a doubt.

 

Hands down Logic, you get drums that are actually good and multi-out, you get amp simulators (kinda like Guitar Rig but nice looking and included), you get actually usable piano that responds to velocity, you get a whole bunch of orchestral stuff, you get Space Designer - a great convolution reverb... tons of stuff to explore

Variety of Sound's Density mkII is your glue for FL, thank me later

 

Last edited: Aug 24, 2016

FYI: Some stock plugs from SampliQuoia are made from Sascha aka U-HE's main programmer.
Soundwise SampliQuoia Has the best.
Plentywise: Live & Fl Studio.

Everything is subjective always...

 

Glad you asked, First this is all my opinion. I think the the delay department is falling behind, (I believe)we have 3 versions:

fruity delay, is the best fl got the offer in my opinion very clean and all basic options,
fruity delay 2, is a total mess, I used a lot of delays but this thing has the weirdest response
delay bank, is total over the top, at least my first impression was it looks very intimidating, never really tried to grasp it

The eq department:

Again this is purely my opinion, but most of the eq/ filters are either weird or not that great sounding,
yes, the build in eq in the mixer is "allright", and eq2 is pretty ok I gues,

without getting in technical stuff, if one A/B it with fabfilter proq2 or to name something cheaper 6144 eq ddmf or something.
we will agree there is a difference in sound, good or bad aside

Finally the compressor department!, I can't really argue about maximus because I also think it's capable of great things
to be honest I used soundgoodnizer (light maximus) on a lot of tracks just a few years ago.

but at a certain point I gradually started to use ozone7 more. Yes, the cpu trade off is huge!
But the maximizer is top notch, the eq is great for rolling of the lows, the tape is emu is great for extra low tension
the vintage comp for pumping etc etc

But the biggest miss is that there aren't compressors with interesting transient responses, being release and attacks
again, without getting into all the bla bla bla about color and stuff,

we have categorized hardware compressors, for good reasons. I'm not saying they should start making emulations,
But I use a 1176 style compression on most channels and a delay+la2a combination on the groups.

I can't, I repeat: I can't mix a decent vocal in fl studio stock plugins I just can't. I won't take that challenge.
I've seen it a lot, guys struggling with stock plugins trying to record, I have tried myself recently.

It's impossible to compete on a decent level.

Sytrus is to much for me to grasp, To be honest my incompetence always makes me end up with "plastic".
Just like the presets it has to offer,

But I'm the first one to admit it's me and not the plugin, not a fan of fm8 either

Ps. have you noticed the script for auto slicing in slice x?

Still gobbles me that other developers didn't pick up on this, I'm using edison for years now for tons of reason: (here some tricks)

"infinite record" on a looped part of your track, set it to: start recording when playback starts and it will insert loop points in the wav so you can drag it inside your track when the golden take is there (Meaning: Kwiss is off to the toilet)

Convert audio to score is great for detecting the key on small parts, to bad it's it's monophonic.

Great for convenient cutting for better fade ratio's on the sampler
(notice you can do right click on the wave form in the sampler - click edit - cut it - drag and drop it back into your sampler.

Couldn't narrated it like this without your, critical thinking

 

Even if I wanted to debate you here I'm probably not qualified to. I just have never had great ears for discerning the differences between different EQ's. I can tell that the filters on some of u-he's synths do things that others don't, and that's about it. I'll take your word for it.

Yeahhhh. I bought Maximus not long ago, mostly because I wanted to cut my teeth with mastering. Then some izotope stuff went on sale and I picked up the bundle with Ozone advanced (which I honestly never anticipated being able to afford/willing to pay for). I'll probably end up using Ozone, as it's just more specialized to the task. So I'm with you there
Some of the reasons I love Maximus though:
It can act as a compressor and a de-esser simultaneously.
If you really abuse the steepness of the envelope it can so some waveshaping.
It can really be magical on vocals where you'd need two or three dynamics processors without it. The free-draw envelopes are a godsend for vocals that are recorded softly. You can subtly gate noise and breaths while expanding the low parts of the vocals and compress the living shit out of the higher amplitude stuff (or not... depending on the track obviously), and then de-ess with the HF band (or i usually use mid, to leave some of the 'air' frequencies alone)

And yeah, I get that IL doesn't offer any real analog emulation stuff. It's just really not their style at all, so if that's what you need, you'd be a little bit boned if all you had was stock FL stuff. I guess if you were really skilled, you could mimic some hardware comps using Maximus's envelopes (and the attack and release curve knobs), but that's way over my head.

I'm not a wizard with FM yet either. I'm becoming pretty decent but it's a tricky beast. I just like how some IL synths allow you to adjust pitch and phase of unison on a per-voice basis. That's a unique feature that can really thicken up sounds with very little effort. It's also super nice that you can add individual harmonics to a waveform, and even determine the phase on a harmonic-by-harmonic basis. It's very deep.
To Ableton's credit, Operator allows you to additively change waveforms too, but it doesn't have per-harmonic phase editing, which allows for some pretty neat tricks.




All told, I see your points. Different strokes for different folks, and undoubtedly they wouldn't be anyone's pick if you needed a nice hardware emu. If I were using FL I don't know how I'd feel, but I'm very happy with my set-up of having all of the native Ableton stuff at my disposal along with the best of Image-Line's plug-ins.

 

It depends upon personal taste, I suppose. I'd recommend Logic Pro X - in the latest update, Apple greatly improved upon some older effects, and the new compressors are really good. Some of the newer instruments are really good, too. LPX's effects are a bit old-school/conventional in design and purpose, but . . . I also like Studio One's effects and instruments. Each DAW's plug-ins are mostly different by the sort of instruments that come with them, though.

 

i like the synths i saw in motu i like the fx plugs in fl and cubase

 

maybe i'm wrong, but i don't think harmor is a "stock synth". it isn't included in any version of fl studio as far as i know (although you can purchase it as a part of the all plug-ins bundle). if we're just talking about plug-ins that are included with the daw, harmor isn't one of them. personally, i don't think anyone has anything close to alchemy, which is included with logic. but when you stop and look at all the other synths and samplers and romplers that logic includes, there's just no comparison. it's too bad that it isn't available on the pc platform. the only thing that could ever make me buy an apple computer is to be able to buy logic pro.

 

From a cpu point of view, i think FL's ones are the best for their basic plugs without high oversampling X16. The parametric EQ is great, hopefully resizable in the near future but it does lack a bit of cleanliness imo. Maybe i can just be a bit more surgical with things like ProQ2 which is what i primarily use EQ for. I need to do a few tests to be fair as i havent confirmed it. Obviously ProQ2 is such a beast, very steep filters (x6 times more than fl), linear phasing possibilities, visually key tracked EQ, high cutoff frequencies (up to 30k i think? cant remember). Mid/Side, bypass each curve, audition each curve and a bunch of other features. Its pretty ridiculous. The only thing its missing is different waveform analysis types, and a dynamic EQ. So its kind of hard to compare with a 3rd party one. But yeah i do need to test it to see whats going on.

- 3XOSC is clean and easy to use, very low cpu.
- The delay plugs are trash imo, flat out. Except for delay 1 if you are doing simple guitar delay.
- Reverbs are trash too, sounds so boxy, good on cpu though. (Not including convolver, which is amazing).
- Fruity granulizer is very very good too, awesome for mangling sounds for FX sound design, also low cpu.
- I dont use directwave so i cant speak on that, not delay bank filter.
- FPC is good, but i personally dont use that in my workflow. I like being able to see the waveforms, unaltered by any filters or automations. I guess it could force your workflow to be surgical with your hits before putting them into FPC, but like i said it doesnt fit my workflow.
- Sytrus is great, but its missing some internal hookups in its matrix that FM8 does have. There are things you can do in one that you cant do in the other, but imo FM8 has more capability. Things like setting timed curves or using effects per OSC and having overall more detail when shaping or feedbacking an OSC. But i havent even learnt all the things in both FM synths to their max capability so i cant 100% confirm, but im pretty sure...
- Vocodex is amazing for lots of different uses, visualization and parameters to mod make it a very shape-able effect
- Theres a myriad of other plugs i missed but these are the first ones that come to mind.

Their compressors are very digital, which is obviously great for a lot of different things, but imo they should consider an analogue style compressor in the future, it would be a lot more approachable for things like vocals, or more organic features within music. There are like no overdrive settings or warmth settings for adding harmonic saturation. Maybe they looked at the compressor at face value and just took the most technical approach they could. I mean for example maximus has a compression curve that you can draw in your self. Its pretty amazing what you could do with that alone, and its multiband.

Slicex has the potential to be great but i really like looking at the waveform in a big resolution, its super annoying to look at this thin fucking waveform. the features within it are great though. They definitely need a scroll wheel and place marker shortcut. So you could hook it up to a midi wheel and a button and use it like an mpc. That would be my dream along with a resizable interface.

I think the effects you can put on, aside from analogue style distortion (which it seems to miss), are one of a kind in FL. Ive seen no other DAW be able to do what harmor can do. When combining it with FL's workflow you can get really cool results.

TBH overall if you know your plugs well enough in any DAW youll be able to get a quality result. Its not a problem of the tools, its a problem of how they are used.

Sidenote: Sytrus is part of the bundles producer and above, but harmor is only available as separate purchase or in all plugins bundle. Like you said Alchemy is a beast, im surprised they didnt increase the price of logic when they acquired it. Very good move by logic devs imo, im jelly :P

 

Last edited: Aug 24, 2016

I'd say the "BEST" native plugins/synths/effects are in the DAW that you use and abuse.
It's all subjective, all relative. The grass is the greenest where you are most comfortable.

 

ahah like this thread! everyone's pushing his own DAW ^^

somehow reassuring, it means you can produce radio-ready music with any pro solution out there

 

Another one of those "my dick is bigger than yours" threads.

 

Yet I went through all three pages, and guess my surprise when missing you telling us that nothing beats Cubase! I kind of miss it

 

Well, you're wrong. They just don't advertise it much as they would probably need a license to call it 1176 and LA-2A, and also it would feel kinda out of place along other FL plugins, but there ARE analog emulation plugins in FL. Here we go, the stock compressor which you skipped entirely:



Have a look at the manual! Type knob changes the knee, quote from the manual:

You also have fancy auto-release

The only thing that kind of sucks (in my opinion) is they allow you to do anything - you can go with a ratio of 30:1, attack time of 400ms, makup gain from -30dB to +30dB, and so on - way too much control, they could have set the knobs so you can more easily see where you're at instead of throwing everything including the kitchen sink there

It is. What you're lacking is being familiar with FL plugins

Well, it's made to sound like the DX7 which is famous for sounding plastic and digital in like millions of 80s ballads - I'm sure you know most of the sounds

But FM synthesizers can really pack a punch, this is FM8, it's just quite tricky to learn

Overall Sytrus is quite sweet, you can make lots of custom waveforms with its mini-additive synth engine, way more flexible than FM8's preset waveforms. Hear for yourself - first FM8, then similar patch in Sytrus.