Tools that are actually making life better

It seems that the plug-in ennui has set in. For many, the Black Friday sales were as welcome as post-Thanksgiving indigestion. For others, they were a seeming treasure trove but which left an aftertaste of excess and consumption in their mouths. But it wasn't all bad, was it? I'll start. H/t lowlou for the idea.

Black Salt Audio Low Control.  Upright bass can be a bitch, especially when it's recorded in a small booth, or the bass is weird, or the player's technique is weird or the action is too low. If conditions aren't right on the day, you can get a pretty funky tonal balance or you get a over-dynamic low end that sticks out no matter what you do to contain it and HP filtering doesn't always work. Low Control is really just the low band of a MB comp and Renn Bass shoved into one plug-in, but the people who wrote this thing really got a lot of things right, and one of those is how fast it was to dial in a problematic, lumpy bass track that I was having trouble taming. First you sort out the woofy part of the signal with compression and level, then you can add harmonic enhancement to bring back some of what you put on a leash. Could I have done the same thing with software I already own? Yes. But to me it's a quick dial and I'm on to other things. I'll use it on every bass track now to some degree, before reaching for a compressor or EQ.

Izotope RX 10. I've owned RX since version 4 but rarely used it unless I needed to de-noise a guitar amp. But having got into the batch workflows and the spectral noise editor, it is a great tool to affect your original files (making safeties of course) so you don't have to mess with relinking or replacement. Great to prep takes for comping. Great to get rid of almost anything unwanted, except lack of talent. There is nothing else quite like it.

Not a plug-in, but a tool definitely making my life better: Hardware EQs. I've rejected the hybrid mix thing for a long time. Recall recall recall, I keep telling myself. But I started buying (and borrowing) a small collection of hardware EQs and my general feeling is that I not only get there faster, but I can go further and it still sounds better. I can't brighten with digital EQ like I can with analog ones. Now to start filling a rack with them! Don't get me wrong, I use plug-in EQs all day and there are great designs, but there is a finishing touch the hardware puts on the tracks that is elusive with the software. It's been a real revelation.

EDIT: gotta say something about the way the plug-in makes me behave. It says "you've got a million choices of how to process this or how to solve a problem. Go on! Try them all. Combine a ton of crap until it sounds good. The HW EQ just outdoes it all in one box somehow. It's maybe just a different mindset.