An the eve of their Australian/NZ tour, we had a quick chat with DC Breaks about their current top 3 plugins…
Xfer Serum
I wasn’t going to choose this because although it’s pretty much my go to synth for basses now, everyone’s found out about it and its getting used A LOT (like NI’s Massive a few years back). It does tend to have a bit of a signature sound, but the things you can do with it are amazing. Recently I’ve been getting into making my own custom wavetables. You can import audio into the editor so, for example I recently bounced off the audio of a bass-line from an old tune (SWAG!), imported that and used that to create a new wavetable. By scanning through the intervals you could find some really nice granular rich sounding waveforms which you could then use as the basis for a whole new bass sound. To start with the synth can seem a bit overwhelming but a lot of the presets are very high quality so if you’re just starting out you can get good sounds going quickly. There’s a ton of flexibility with the matrix and macros and the FX are all really good. Make sure to check out the Distortion and filters! If you really want to get to know it in depth there’s a series of YouTube tutorials where the designer (Steve Duda) goes through the whole synth from top to bottom – highly recommended viewing!
Waves Factory – Trackspacer
Got to shout Teebee for putting me on to this one. It’s a very simple little tool that allows you to duck any channel with a side-chain input, but you can choose which frequencies you want to duck and by how much. You can also set the Attack/Release and choose between L/R mode or M/S. Essentially it allows you to create space in your mix by cutting out clashing frequencies of competing channels. The main way I use it is to get a snare to punch through a mix by having the snare duck the competing frequencies of all the musical content in the track usually in the 180-220Hz range. But you can use it in lots of other ways like creating space for vocals and in other creative ways too.
iZotope Ozone 6
The definitive mastering plug-in software for us (although 7 is now out we’ve not tried it yet!) Ozone 6 offers a huge amount of flexibility in the way you set up your signal path processing but also many useful ways to enhance your workflow to see and hear how the mastering is affecting your music. We tend to use it to add extra character, balance or punch to final mixes, often adding some top-end ‘sheen’ at the end. Even if you are new to Mastering it is incredibly intuitive and easy to use and however you use it, it always gives your tunes that extra polish.
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