I’ve mastered some great tracks this year, but one of the the stand out Australian acts I’ve had the pleasure of working with are Karboncopy. Here’s their current top 3 plugins they just can’t live without in the studio right now!
Karboncopy’s Top 3 plugins!
Specifically this is our list of the three plugins that we absolutely MUST have! We always like to buy and experiment with new plugins, but these three plugins are the ones that we really love and have used in every track!
Cable Guys – Volume Shaper
Ever since we discovered this plugin we said goodbye to compressors for side chaining. It’s basically just a volume automation plugin. We use it in every track and on almost every channel, since these days almost all parts have some form of side chaining on them, either to make room for the kick or to add some groove to straight percussion lines. It’s super easy to use, and you can draw the perfect length and level of side chaining for each element. We have a few presets that we made and use in order to save time. We also use this sometimes on kick channels (with the dry/wet set to 0) when we’re making kicks just to visualise the waveform to get the length and shape of the kick exactly how we want. This is similar to a plugin that Nicky Romero has released, but this version is better for us, because you can customise the slopes and shape of the automation exactly how you want, instead of being stuck with presets.
Audio Damage – Eos
This is our absolute go to reverb. We have gone through so many different reverbs, from the stock logic ones, to Redline, Waves, Lexicon and more, but this one is so quick and easy to use, and sounds great! It doesn’t have that harsh metallic sound that many of the stock logic ones seem to have, and the controls are really easy to use to get the sound you’re looking for! Quick tip, we will normally only use 3 different reverb settings for a track, a small, medium, and large and then sometimes custom ones if parts need it. You can use a delay calculator and the BPM of your track to find the right pre-delay times for each of your three reverb sizes, and then you just tweak the length, room size and EQ to get the right sound. Sometimes we have these three delays on a buss and send tracks to them, other times we will just copy the plugin on the individual channels and perhaps fine tune the EQ a bit. Having three main reverbs helps put your sounds in the correct space, such as further back in the mix or up close, but helps prevent the mix from sounding muddled when you have lots of reverbs all with different lengths and pre-delays etc.
PSP – Vintage Warmer 2
This plugin is truly incredible! We always use it on our drums buss, bass buss and sometimes synth and vocal busses. It is the king of fattening up sounds and giving some nice compression and saturation. The key is to be subtle with it though. On a buss we will normally push the drive until we’re getting about 0.5 – 1.5 dB of gain reduction. Then we will increase the knee to around 5-15% to gel the sounds with a bit of compression. We decrease the ‘speed’ setting to around 50% on our bass and drum busses to give it a bit more subtle distortion/saturation, or leave this quite high if we’re using it on vocals. The EQ shelves on it are great for adding a bit of shine up high or warmth to sounds. Lastly we will tweak the mix control to get a nice balance between the new fat sound, and some of the sharp transients of the old sound. We also always have it set to ‘fat’ and ‘multi’ although admittedly we’re not quite sure what this does!
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