What are some of plugins that stay in your regular rotation that you feel help to define your personal sound or to recapture some of the magic that permeated the classic era's of hip hop?

E-MU Emulator X, D16 Decimort, Goodhertz Vulf Compressor, Camel Crusher, Voxengo Span, Tonsturm FrqShift are some plugins that eat regularly when I'm making music.

 

- Novation V-Station
- Applied Acoustics Lounge Lizard
- Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2
- Spectrasonics Trilian
- Lennar Digital Sylenth1
- reFX Nexus
- Native Instruments Monark

 

I have Nexus 4 but I cant get the expansions recongized even though I put them in the preset folders

 

Synths

- Omnisphere 2/Trilian/Keyscape
- Arturia V Collection
- Native Instruments Synths/Kontakt Banks
- XLN Audio Addictive Drums 2
- Serato Sample (sampling)
- Groove Agent, Battery 4, etc. (for drums)

FX

- FabFilter fx plugins (Pro-C, Pro-MB, Saturn)
- Waves fx plugins (RBass, L2)
- XLN Audio RC-20
- Plugins that Knock - KNOCK
- Gold Clipper
- Native Instruments fx (Raum, etc)
- Valhalla Plugins (VintageVerb, etc)
- Soundtoys plugins
- Softube fx plugins
- IK Multimedia T-Racks
- Cableguys Halftime
- Goodhertz Bundle
- Output fx plugins
- Voxengo plugins

 

Synapse Legend. TAL-DAC. A lot of duplicates already.

 

unpopular opinion... unison's midiwizard and drum monkey. Hear me out. I hate unison as much as the next guy. Their predatory marketing, preying on up and coming producers, selling basic midi chords etc. Trash. That being said, a friend of mine gave me those two plugins. I took them thinking they would suck, but they are honestly great for quickly whipping up an idea to run with. Midi chord wizard is a little more finicky in the results, may take more finessing than drum monkey, but i can have an idea up and running in minutes with the two of them. I seriously cannot recommend them enough. There are other similar plugins, Scaler 2 for melodies, Triaz for drums, but neither are as immediate. Unison's just work. Scaler and Triaz are both more advanced.

Besides that, i would say

Analog lab - Huge selection of sounds, when used with Arturia midi controller, it all automaps, so you can quickly tweak things.
Sketch Cassette - Boom bap !
Lunacy Beam - great for melodies
Output portal - also great for melodies

Theres plenty more, but thats what comes to mind without me digging through all my plugins.

 

Shaperbox, All Arturia Plugins and Effects

 

regarding plugins i dont know but i like EMU MO PHATT.. and sonic specialists urban fire sample packs they are really sick
also sounds in HD and big fish audio

 

If you're talking classic era of Hip Hop being the 80's, then the only 2 vst you need to make the sounds and FX (including the drums ) are Hypersonic 2 and PSP Lexicon 42. If you wanted there is a Ujam plugin called DOPE which will be good for drums also. I think that's free now.

You'll also want to use a limiter like the Sony DAL 1000, which wasn't a brick wall limiter so much but it coloured the sound somehow. Maybe a Fairchild 670 emulation will give something similar.

I forgot to mention.. Hypersonic 2 also does the scratch emulations.

 

Last edited: Oct 20, 2024

If I'm strictly making a classic-style beat?
Fuse Audio Labs' Flywheel, as well as the darker VPRE-31A preamp. Sometimes Mathieu Demange RX950 to throw on busses, each tweaked a bit differently until they become... separated, kinda? Kazrog's True 252 is nice as a buss EQ, so is PSP's E27, and Kiive's FilkChannel MK2 and Tape Face. Nembrini Audio's Lofi Clipper (with both the distortion and saturation barely even there, at about 0.1-0.3, using it just for some warmth,) is often on my pre-Master, though depending, that can easily be replaced with NEOLD's Wunderlich lately. And Kiive's ADC1 is in every mix somewhere, often with compositions that are beats using it as a lite limiter on the instrument buss and the second Compressor setting on the drums. And I have too many saturators so I won't even go down that road.
It really depends equally on the composition and the drums though. I make my own stuff so I might have a warm, or crunchy, or solid, or whatever enough sound going into a mix, that I might not even need that much coloration throughout. But, those are some of my go-tos (though certainly not all,) for the type of sound I think you're talking about.
The plugins mentioned in the thread surprised me; the only ones I use from those lists are Voxengo, Valhalla and The Legend.

 

@eXACT_Beats_

+1 for the RX950. I love that filter.

 

Prob glitch fx like gross beats and sound toys etc. anything else you can find I’m not worried

 

appart from ad-da shizzle and hw sampler saturation all mentioned tools here are universal

sketch cassete and similar has bit more niche use , but also not really in the end
///
if you ask which is best hiphop beat ever ,you will get totally different examples...

better ask howv to design or find/use certain sound aesthetics ...

not wrong but when i hear glitch , i think of other stuff

 

MPC, Serato Sample, Stylus RMX, Looptrotter SA2RATE 2, Audioease Speakerphone, Black Box Analog Design HG-2, Vertigo VSM-3

 

eh eh like always at the end of this sort of threads will be all plugins on earth got mentioned ...

 

subjective ...need to determine exact time and even subgenre ...britcore is direrent to eastcoast boombap to westcoast...
for me the classical era was 90ies for others 2000s and theoretical its 80ies

 

I figured the best way would be to make something (yes I know it's crap but) merely from Hypersonic 2.. drums scratch bass and keys.


https://vocaroo.com/13tnAy7ujIym

 

Very true that.. ALWAYS

 

For 90's style Hip Hop i use a profilers a lot (with AKAI converter captures), IRs, 7.5 IPS J37 tape, Waves SSL 4000E, RC-20 and two special Airwindows plugins: Channel9 (Teac mode) and DeRez3. I'm good with that regarding FX.

With VSTi i use the same thing i would use to any other genre, but printed to audio and sliced on Serato Sampler to a DJ Premier/J Dilla style of sampling.

 

I only added 2 so far. Another to add, because it is such a staple would be the CL 1B compressor of your choice. Softube Tube Tech or UAD. I only have the old 32bit Softube so I won't say I couldn't live without it. But it is up there for many.