It’s not the tool, it’s the user. But as a blogger and content creator, I get to play with a lot of cool tools. Here’s a few of them that I highly recommend checking out.

1. The Plugins From My Walkthroughs.

Obviously anything from my recent product videos, and not just because I did the product walkthrough. Boz Digital Labs’s Pan Knob and Provocative, Audio-Assault’s HQ-2, and the 5dB5 bundle. You get to learn the power of a tool when you have to teach others how to use them, and these are truly cool tools. Here’s a playlist with the videos.

On Drums, this thing is absolutely insane. Been using David Bendeth‘s recommendations he gave me on facebook about throwing the room mics into it in parallel as a drum crush, along with the drum shells, and there’s just nothing like it. I’m also using it on the drum bus itself.

3. Kush Audio’s Goldplate. I have this in my template in 3 places. One is a “Tom Lengthener”, which I use in parallel on toms. Filter out the highs, set it to the darker plate, and use it just to add a sense of extra sustain to your toms. The other two I’ve been using on vocals for huge amounts of ambiance. One’s driven into overdrive, and the other isn’t. “Clean Plate” and “Dirty Plate” respectively. 4. IK Multimedia’s Precision Comp/Limiter The Precision Comp/Limiter is a Neve 33609 model. I like to use TDR Nova on my 2 bus as a glue compressor, and I’ll use that first. But then I follow it by stereo unlinked Precision Comp/Limiters (in REAPER, that’s done by using 2 instances and sending the left channel to one, and the right channel to the other). I picked this up from Andrew Scheps recently on a Puremix tutorial where he described how the 100ms release setting just adds something, and boy is he right. This is likely going to be added to my template when I update it today. 5. iZotope Neutron Elements. I got it free yesterday from Plugin Boutique when I picked up a $5 synth, and I just revisited an abandoned “screw around” mix with it in no time. Track assist is pretty damned cool. But my favorite thing was the eq and the “learn” function. I like activating all of the filters, hitting “learn” and then adjusting the bands only like it’s a graphic eq. It’s identified the good and the bad, and now I get to decide from a flat curve how much of the good to keep and how much of the band to get rid of. It’s similar to how I use Eiosis’s Air EQ, and SPL’s EQ Rangers (which is a graphic eq).

There’s a few I’ve been embracing lately. What about you? Any cool gems you’d recommend? Let us know in the comments!