Hello No Avenger. For once youre one of the people here (including some of the others) who is very objective. Ohh and btw, Thank you for always helping me by answering some of my ridiculously noob questions here sometimes lol. You're amazing my friend.

 

Thank you! Are you the guy on the picture? That poster of drake is sick man. Where did you get it? :D

 

Biggest scam of the century?

Try UAD‘s Varimu or Fairchild on the 2-Bus and make that claim again. The differences in audio with these things are indeed subtle, but when you add up a lot of subtle differences, the whole that comes out sounds significantly different and often better. Stock plugins are great these days, no doubt, but you still can‘t compare eg Ableton‘s reverb to eg a Valhalla reverb or UAD’s EMT140/250 plugins.

Not to say that you can‘t make great sounding music with stock, you certainly can and many people do, but to pretend like there are no qualitative differences between some of the most renowned digital tools out there and eg your Fruity Loops compressor does no one a service.

Glad you are enjoying your DAW though, and sometimes less is more - the best plugins don’t mean sh** if there’s no music to apply them to.

 

I agree with the sentiment, but there are a few notable exceptions.

1) DMGs Equilibrium is the only EQ you'll ever need. Learning the difference between minimum, analog, and linear phase can be tricky, but once you do the possibilites are endless. I don't even mess around with 90% of the different curve shapes. Analog mode in particular is something you won't find anywhere else. Crank the impulse length up to 65536+ and prepare for ultimate smoothness Essence is pretty good too, but much more situational.

2) Tokyo Dawn Labs Kotelnikov can cover 95% of your compression needs and do it cleaner than stock plugin. Again, wrapping your head around concepts like the peak crest knob and frequency dependent ratio might take some time and critical listening. The rewards are worth the effort.

3) Airwindows puts out some of the most creative code in DSP. These are things stock plugins can only dream of. The Console series, the Purest series, all of his clippers, crazy gadgets like Acceleration, Loud, PowerSag, Slew, Starchild, all of them completely unique. Chris is truly a saint and deserves every dollar he makes.

4) Who doesn't love reverbs? Exponential Audio for ultra clean, Lexicon/Relab for colored. It's that simple.

5) Cytomics The Drop and The Scream are pretty cool. That's about as far as I'll dip my toes into analog modelling because Andy actually does it right

I guess that ended up being more than a few. Oh well. I still agree with OP that stock plugins are as good or better than most of what is being hawked these days. Crappy oversampling is everywhere and kills your sound. If you like the tools your DAW provides you, don't let anyone make you feel inadequate. If you're looking for that extra 1% polish, try out some of the things I listed. They're all available on the sister site.

 

Thanks The Phank. You've saved me from a lot of typing.

Except that people forget one thing: digital is not so different from digital and analogue can be quite different from other analogue. Meaning if you use digital plugins they are not so different from their 10xprice ones. Your freeware plugin is excellent in quality and the 10x more expensive one is excellent just a tad more. It is entirely possible to make excellent mixes with any stock plugins or freeware ones. We live in great times, mates!

Analogue hardware can vary in quality so much more than digital. But there is also a different kind of quality that analogue imparts on the audio that digital cannot do, yet. Especially saturation, distortion and compression up to a point is a whole different thing with analogue. I'm not saying that digital compression and limiting is trash, though. It is great in its own way.

One has to understand what these plugins and analogue hardware does to sound completely to be able to use them well.

 

Last edited: Apr 22, 2018

Then you have to choose your words more carefully if you're really here to learn.
By naming a thread "Biggest scam of the century" you're basically calling out anyone that uses third party vst plugins as an idiot that has been scammed, so this kind of reaction is to be expected when you might come across as an arrogant person who barely knows about the matter at hand. Maybe that's not the case, but surely that's how someone can picture you with such statements.
I'm not personally offended because I know how to "read" some posts (especially when there is costant shitposting, but I digress), I'm just disappointed because this is supposed to be a professional audio forum, isn't it?

As you can expect, I ask for proof.
Show me a stock dynamic eq with per-band selectable harmonics.
Show me a stock unison plugin (even a chorus) with per voice delay/pitch/formant/stereo placement modulation.
If you're really here to learn you shouldn't throw around half-assed statements, unless you can actually back up what you're saying without going on the defensive when you're being called out.

Oh, and coming back to what you said in the first place

I am starting to think you don't even know how to use these external plugin you made comparisons with. Maybe you can show us some examples that definitely could help understand what you even mean, and if you did something wrong people can tell you what's wrong with your comparisons and why. This is how you learn, if you're really here to learn.

And by all means I'm not saying that stock plugins are shit, but they are different. And the fact you think stock plugins sound "more professional" than stuff like UAD plugins can really make someone think about the validity of your statement. Who knows, maybe you were expecting that using compressors with different algos were going to give you the same outcome :D

 

And that's just for effects.
Getting me started on actual instruments is pointless because they are obviously on another level.