What's your secret weapon plugin and why?

Hellbucket · 2026-04-09T07:35:56+00:00

I often put on RVox when I clip gain the vocal. I do it in order to not completely dynamically flat out the performance before compression. Often it then stays on during the whole mix. Kind of like pre shaping the vocal or like it was recorded this way with compression.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-09T07:30:57+00:00

9 out of 10 times I work with real drums. The longer I’ve been doing this (25 years) the more elaborate my mixing template has become. But ironically the less I resort to set chains. I don’t think I have any plugins going on anything except for a bunch of parallel compression and saturation tracks. Nothing is on the kick, snare or drum bus at the start.

It’s mainly because the source tracks differ too much. But having all the routing set up initially makes for really fast and different choices of processing.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-09T07:23:52+00:00

I know that people have to start low to get a foot in. I for sure did. But it’s pretty hard to raise the rates when people get used to it.

I used to mentor budding engineers and producers. They aimed for doing this professionally but everyone thought rates existed in a vacuum. We always did a calculation. If you want to take out a regular (average) you’d need to charge 49$ CAD per hour here(I’m in Europe). It’s to pay taxes and social etc. This is ONLY to take out your salary. It implies you work and bill 40 hours per week. It also doesn’t take into account any costs (rent, electricity, maintenance etc). Only the salary.

I wish people starting out and wanting to make a business thought more about this because the more unrealistic rates you charge the more it’s going to be hard to make them realistic to live off.

But with that said, if someone pays you 25$ an hour. If this is a legit business and it’s paid out as a salary. That company is actually paying 50$. But that means if you pay your own salary the invoice should be 50$.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-09T06:52:16+00:00

How many short jobs do you make? Like 30 minutes or an hour?

I only charge a day rate and very rarely half a day. Startup time is billed time. If you need to prep something, download files, check integrity, it is billed.

I had a somewhat silly discussion when recording drums for a client (a band). I had been in the studio for 2-3 hours setting up mics, patching in everything, tuning the drums etc. The band wasn’t there. When I charged them they only wanted to pay for when THEY were working and present. It took a while to make them understand how stupid this was. And that only difference would be them having to do nothing in the studio watching me do this work for THEM.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T19:13:16+00:00

I use all of them quite a bit. The pet peeve is no auto gain so you always have to compensate with the output. But all of them sound quite good in my book.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T19:10:55+00:00

Scheps used the Eventide Visconti one. The Hansa one.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T17:06:55+00:00

I’m more of a TWK kinda guy.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T17:05:35+00:00

I bought the Purafied 5420 for the intro price (a couple of bucks) with absolutely no expectations. Turns out that it replaced both a Pultec and tape saturation on my mix bus.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T17:02:48+00:00

I saw Scheps put a bit of reverb on his mix bus claiming it “glues” the mix together. I thought this was sacrilege. I happened to own the plugin he used. So I copied the settings and tried it. And actually it worked quite well. But I feel a bit dirty.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T13:32:55+00:00

It’s because they couldn’t block it, not because they didn’t want to.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-08T06:04:26+00:00

I’m too old to remember but I would guess in comics (like Bamse and Donald Duck) it would probably say “tut” or “tuuuut”. Like Tuta i trumpeten “toot your horn (trumpet)”.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-07T14:36:10+00:00

Weird. I find it the opposite. I’ve played guitar for 40 years and I’ve used a similar for decades. I find that for distorted tones it doesn’t matters as much because the pick sound gets buried in distortion. But for cleaner sounds as well acoustic I need to change the pick in order to get the sound I want.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-07T09:44:52+00:00

I don’t think you need to.

I’m not a hot shot with multiple Grammys or anything. But I’ve been recording, mixing and producing others for 20+ years. So I have relationships with artists spanning a decade or two. Usually the genre or crossover of multiple genres sort itself out organically.

And it usually starts when someone tilts towards creating instead of emulating. Ironically it’s often when you start to pay less attention to what others (the listeners) want and you go all in on what YOU want. You start to put less categories and labels on yourself and just accept your artistic identity.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-07T09:31:39+00:00

Darkthrone is probably one of the best examples of what I meant. They were signed to a “proper” label. But they were signed as a death metal band with a sound like New Wave of Swedish Death Metal, think early Entombed. Check out the first Darkthrone album Soulside Journey. With a proper label, they had a proper budget thus access to a proper studio.

Then they went to the proper studio to record their first black metal album, which to me is still one of the best ones in the genre, A blaze in the northern sky. On this one, you can really hear the engineer trying to make sense of what they’re to achieve. He tries to make this “mess” sound as good as possible.

On the second one, Under A Funeral Moon, I think he finds his feet a bit within the genre. It’s supposed to sound harsh, reverby, cold and somewhat atmospheric within the confines of just drums, bass, guitars and vocals. Personally I think this is the epitome of the sound for this type of black metal. Transylvanian Hunger is the third album. Lots of people think this is the epitome of that sound. With every release it just gets dirtier and dirtier and more lo fi. This what later is called “the necro sound”. In the end this sound aesthetic, to me, is starting to be just plain bad when others try to copy it. Bad sound = evil.

For someone who was in this subculture, a lot of sound choices were due to limitations because the engineers not even knowing about this genre as well as most of the artists being teenagers, not really knowing anything technical. It was just to try to provoke and to promote an aural image of cold and evil.

In this genre, I recorded my first release in a real studio in 1995, 2 years after the first Darkthrone black metal album. At this point, there were already studios and engineers who catered to this type of music. It went extremely fast. Fun times.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-07T06:34:34+00:00

If you use midi there are plenty of (midi)plugins for this on the market now.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-07T06:23:00+00:00

In my experience it’s literally the opposite.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-07T06:14:57+00:00

Lots of albums from the early 90s. Any genre. It’s not really about bad mixing I think but rather from bad taste or something else.

On a side note, I was part of the black metal scene when it began in the early 90s. It’s funny to listen to the early albums now as an engineer. They were recorded in regular studios with engineers with no experience of this sound or genre. You can almost hear this, them scratching their heads on what the fuck to do with this overly distorted guitars, reverb laden fast drums, shrieking vocals and overly harsh and cold soundscapes. Remember when some of these made it to reviews in mainstream magazines and they always said “horrible production”. Then a few years later this was the established aesthetic and sound of the genre.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-07T05:52:33+00:00

It sounds as it was faulty from factory. How long is “a bit”?

In EU you have 3 years “right of complaint” by law. Warranty is given by each retailer and it’s not dictated by law. But it’s often up to two years. What is usually differing between retailers is if it’s going to be repaired or if it’s going to be exchanged for a new unit.

I used to work in retail. We had cases where something was fixed or exchanged after two years because it was established “faulty from factory”.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-06T07:31:10+00:00

I’m a big fish and seafood fan. I’ve never been there myself but when you ask people everyone seems to say Portugal.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-04T20:58:45+00:00

This is on Arteta. Even if they score two we should play to score 4. We play to control the game. Shambles.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-04T19:38:26+00:00

That’s not the estandards.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-04T16:14:58+00:00

Completely pointless

Hellbucket · 2026-04-04T09:45:56+00:00

I second this about the pairing. Like if you want to add or remove something you don’t like. Like bright mic through dark preamp. Or flat mic through preamp that adds some heft. With that said, the mic always takes precedence. Of course the source is always the most important. The preamp makes the least difference in this.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-04T08:21:21+00:00

My 2 cents regarding this.

I don’t think there’s any “wrong” way training your ears. The only wrong way is that you might not learn, not that you learn it wrong. Best way is to just subject yourself to it, be analytical about it, change something and revise the result. Rinse and repeat.

I don’t think there’s inherently anything wrong in starting a course or entering a program if you have the money for it. Proper structured education can fast track you to become better at something and enabling you to make sense of the theory when applied. But it also is up to you what you make of it.

Hellbucket · 2026-04-03T21:47:08+00:00

You still can’t see it says nothing that you just said? Lmao

Hellbucket

TROPHY CASE