Cost effective VST\'s

Are $20 synths worth it? I have one but I wonder if it would suffice to use freebees until I can get a $200 plug.
Quality drums can be aquired through samples. Quality synths are free. The only thing I can't readily come by is powerful high quality pads/strings. So yeah. I guess I'm always looking for the best way to get the highest quality out of my songs. Driven by the media and the sounds of what Nashville considers great. Yet, who's to say my song stinks because I couldn't get a 24 db peak out of my bass at 100hz with the waves big $ comp.?

Feed back.

-Brian

p.s. I need a blog. Hope no one minds me talking out like such. Sometimes its good to think out loud.

p.p.s. Trax in space is my new favorite site.

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Music goes beyond the limits of personal expression.

DSK strings is a pretty good strings VST. I suggest you try that for your string sounds.

http://dskmusic.com/blog/?page_id=3

Some of the synths there are pretty decent there too.

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the shadow runs form the light, but can never be fully driven back.

I have that one. It is pretty good. I was talking about more movie soundtrack type fullness that is difficult to get using free stuff. Closest thing I have found are soundfonts.

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Music goes beyond the limits of personal expression.

save your 200+ bucks for high end VST effects/mastering tools like Ozone.

you can use a combo of many awesome free vst instruments and effects plus some inexpensive but awesome $ vsts.

Nexus, for example

umm, Directionless, that appears to be an illegal (but still paid) site for nexus (i.e. they are selling a cracked version of nexus). The real website is http://www.refx.com/?lang=en&page=products/nexus/summary and nexus costs about 300 USD.

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www.quantinuitymusic.com

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Original by TranceMyriad
umm, Directionless, that appears to be an illegal (but still paid) site for nexus (i.e. they are selling a cracked version of nexus). The real website is http://www.refx.com/?lang=en&page=products/nexus/summary and nexus costs about 300 USD.

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So, save up for the mastering side of things? I guess so. Does it make that much difference? Could someone with ozone, soundforge, or the like clue me in.

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Music goes beyond the limits of personal expression.

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Original by Beacon_Lights_of_Jupiter
So, save up for the mastering side of things? I guess so. Does it make that much difference? Could someone with ozone, soundforge, or the like clue me in.

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well i'm no expert, but here's my 2 cents:

First off, it depends on the style of music you wish to make. For example, orchestral and high quality dance musics will require higher end soft synths. But for hip hop, alternative, grime, basically a lot of the 'dirty cool' genres, I think you can make better use of the many awesome free soft synths like the analogue warefare series, etc.

but beyond that, mastering effects is what brings that sound to life. Like SAS told me when I was trying to make more dirty electro: 'You have to make it clean, then make it dirty'. I think he meant you have to balance your pre-mastering mix well, then in the mastering stage, emphasize the sound you want.

So what the right effects and mastering does is polish off your sound so that it represents the very best frequencies. Mixing can only do so much. I think if you had a good, well balanced mix of one of your songs, and then heard the mastering treatment applied to it, you'd say: Oh yeah!

Hopefully someone like SAS, TranceMyriad, or Takia-Kim can explain this better. It's all pretty new to me.

Hmm, to be honest, I think the mixdown stage matters more than mastering. Ideally, mastering should just be like the final polish - a little EQ adjustment here and there to, for example, make it fit better with the other tracks on an album.

To my understanding, the mastering stage is more focussed towards things like maybe cutting the bottom 20 or 30 Hz or something (which you probably should've done already!) and tiny EQ adjustments. Compression or limiting is also applied at this stage, but imo, if you've mixed down your track well, only limiting should be necessary if you're producing for the dance/pop market (to squash the dynamic range). If you WANT the dynamic range, this step is probably not even necessary.

Btw, for others reading this tread, a bit of general advice with reference to the choice of VSTs etc.: my advice is to just try a bunch of synths (don't judge them necessarily by their presets, but give them a good tweak!) and especially don't forget the fun to be had with effects - it's amazing what you can do to an original synth sound by applying some 'simple' effects like distortion, chorus/phasing etc. Basically, just download the demos (or free synths), and try them. It is better (imo) to get to know a few synths well and their capabilities, rather than just using presets from everywhere and never learning how to play around with a synth to get the sounds you want.

In terms of strings & pads - my best suggestion is to either using a synth with multiple oscillators OR use several copies of the one synth if necessary. Multiple oscillators (and a bit of detuning/chorus/LFO doesn't hurt either) work really well.

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www.quantinuitymusic.com

Last edited by TranceMyriad on 15.02.2008, 22:57 o'clock.

Hmmm.... good bit of advice about the presets. I tend to chunk a vst if i find out it doesn't have any. My mistake...

But I'm not a huge fan of twist a thousand knobs trying to get the right sound... but I tend to end up doing that anyway. So I guess it's no loss.

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If you don't like manual experimenting you can always randomize for some interesting sounds...
When you get something cool it is a simple matter to tweak it slightly to make it usable for your purposes.

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the shadow runs form the light, but can never be fully driven back.

I do different methods :

Tweaking knobs for hours, use presets with a little twist and randomize. In this way I learn about making sounds with synths.