As 2022 ends, hardware vs plugins?

1) The Tokyo Dawn plugins. The only complaints come from people not using the GE versions and people unable to set them because Molot let’s you control the transfer curve of the attack portion of the smoothing algorithm and all 3 (Nova, Kotelnikov, and Molot) let you control the release program dependencies. Insane must be on for faster attacks.
2) Most of the Goodhertz plugins especially Vulf but HQ must be on. They’re super colored and can be finicky to set clean tonally but sound great.
3) MDWDRC2 but it can be finicky to set at first and blend the dual detectors if you want to adjust the attack times. The key is to soften the rms knee and keep the stock attack exponents at first on 2 and 3 and make the auto release not respond to bass content too much. Kotelnikov is better thought to not pump.
4) Pro Audio DSP DSM 3. This is amazing and one of the only good dynamics plugins in the plugin alliance. Use the timing automations for low and high frequencies and don’t do stupid amounts of gr just becuase the gui lets you because you’ll get some big spikes on slow attacks. Also consider not capturing the “curve” on a bus to not change the sound tonally and setting your own very mild rolloff
5) U-he Presswerk and Klanghelm MJUC with hq on and set them to not pump. These are very cool and can be smooth if you don’t do stupid things with it but you can make it misfire. Presswerk has some phase shift from minimum phase oversampling.
6) Ray Dratwa programmed varimus for Fuse and Plugin Alliance. Smooth behavior at a low price with none of the issues of owning tube hardware in a transistor world.
7) Sound Radix Powair. Very cool on vocals but too thin on drums.

Almost there:
PSP Impressor. Use auto attack and release or feedback but not both. They need to fix the bugged 16x oversampling setting, which is where itreally comes through. The earlier psp plugins sound trashy in comparison
Eventide Newfangled Invigorate. Really cool sound but pumps like crazy so it sucks at controlling fader movements on the two bus versus the Glue, Presswerk, Kotelnikov, Molot. It needs a better release
The Glue just doesn’t have the tone of hardware vca compressors at all. There’s not a lot of plugs other than what I listed above that I would even consider controlling my fader movements on the two bus while there’s a bunch of cool, sturdy hardware still being made with care.
Pulsar Modular 1178. The behavior starts cleaning up at 8x oversampling and they need a sidechain oversampled more than the main path like PSP Impressor to make it cpu efficient for adding to buses in heavy sessions while keeping the good behavior. You end up selecting one of the saturation distortions in most use to clean up the behavior a bit but they’re not as good as dedicated plugins for the same type of distortion.

That's exactly what I'm doing - Marinair on keys and mixing up the others. Carrell says he hears additional separation when "his" busses have differing saturation like that. Brauer uses VCC Neve and SSL to the same end, sort of.


Apologies to be name dropping, i'm in a research mode for additional learning.

I bought a bunch of their plugs to try out.  Horribly crashed my PT system over and over.  Had to remove all of them from my hard drive(s) to rid the crashes.  That was a couple years ago.  Won't go back....  It's been a decade since any plug was that detrimental to PT operation.

No worries. Name drop away. =)

For me 2022 was very helpful thanks to the recent Beatles release of Revolver. All those alt mixes and demos were super incredibly insightful: Especially tomorrow never knows, the original alt mix where they stopped the LP presses and changed to a different earlier mix. I love that alt mix, the FX are louder. But after a few listens they were right to go back to the earlier mix. The earlier mix sonics are less impressive, but the flow and message of the song makes more sense.

And then all their found crap demos and unfinished stuff. They had to actually sit down and figure out better everything. Compare that to me trying to polish a crap idea. I need to stop playing video games with plugins all night with my mouse and focus back on the songwriting, holding a guitar, pen and paper. flow.

And so that relates to staying OTB and keep my head away from the temptation of endless “but what if I try this plugin?”

One of the issues with every day use of plugins vs hardware is that hardware is always staring you in the face when you're in the studio - reminding you to use it. Plugins are a little more "buried" and are not constantly reminding us to use them. Nature of the beast.

Dude. 100% spot on.

both
always

Hey Dan, have you tried anything by Tone Projects? (Unisum Compressor, Kelvin Saturator, Baselane, etc)?

I think you might like that stuff. Bob Katz worked on those plugins with Rune (lead designer).

They only have a couple plugins but they're all super musical and HiFi.

Tone Projects Link

Every year plugins narrow the quality gap, and add new tricks we never imagined in hardware (for better or worse).

The Tone Projects plugins are my recent discovery. Unisum and Basslane Pro are pretty wonderful tools. Kelvin can be great at times too.

I’m still running things through hardware chains when mixing, but I’m not stuck feeling like I need to. Mostly that comes down to what hardware I’ve got vs what seems right for the project.

I've had to make a physical list, I'm going to go further and print out a sheet of little GUI's to look at as a reminder - like a tiny rack of plugins I can see.

Hardware is my reference but I already have 3 racks of hardware and I've literally run out of space in my project studio room, in that respect high quality plugins are a boom and I'm very grateful they exist.