Create Better Music, One Plugin at a Time
How to EQ Vocals: A Beginner’s Guide to Clear, Professional Vocals Learning how to EQ vocals is one of the most important skills you can develop as a music producer or mixing engineer. You can have great drums, beautiful chords, and an expensive collection of plugins, but if the vocal sounds muddy, harsh, thin, or … Read more
How to EQ Vocals to Sit in a Mix: A Beginner’s Guide You can have a great vocal recording, a great beat, and a collection of expensive plugins—and still end up with a vocal that doesn’t sit properly in the mix. Maybe the vocal sounds too far forward. Maybe it disappears behind the instruments. Maybe … Read more
How to Make Your Mix Sound Professional: 10 Things Beginners Get Wrong You don’t need an expensive studio, a collection of analog hardware, or thousands of dollars in plugins to create a professional-sounding mix. What you need is a solid understanding of the fundamentals. One of the biggest mistakes beginner producers make is assuming their … Read more
Getting a mix ready for Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, and other streaming platforms doesn’t require a special EQ preset. You don’t need to boost a particular frequency because you’re uploading to Spotify. You don’t need an expensive mastering EQ. And you definitely don’t need to carve frequencies out of every track simply because an … Read more
What Is New in Zebra 3? Everything You Need to Know Zebra has long been one of the most powerful software synthesizers available for producers and sound designers, but Zebra 3 isn’t simply Zebra 2 with a redesigned interface and a few extra features. It is essentially a new synthesizer built around the ideas that … Read more
Portico II Plugin Review: Is the Master Buss Processor Worth It? When Rupert Neve Designs puts its own name on a software version of one of its hardware processors, expectations are understandably high. The Portico II Master Buss Processor plugin brings the company’s hardware Master Buss Processor into the DAW, combining bus compression, limiting, harmonic … Read more
If you’re looking for a powerful software synthesizer, Zebra 3 Vs Serum 2 is an interesting comparison. Both synths are capable of creating everything from atmospheric pads and aggressive basses to plucks, leads, keys, sound effects, and evolving textures. But they approach sound design in noticeably different ways. Zebra 3 is built around a flexible, … Read more
Mix With Stock Plugins For Beginners: A Complete Guide If you’re learning how to mix music, it’s easy to believe that professional mixes require expensive plugins. You watch producers on YouTube using premium EQs, vintage compressor emulations, analog saturation plugins, and mastering suites that can cost hundreds of dollars. Before long, you may start wondering … Read more
You do not need a folder full of expensive plugins to make a professional-sounding mix. That might sound strange coming from Pluginera—a website that spends a lot of time talking about plugins—but it is one of the most important lessons I’ve learned about music production. Premium plugins can be great. I use them. I enjoy … Read more
Do You Really Need Expensive Plugins to Get a Professional Mix? If you’ve spent any amount of time watching music production videos, browsing plugin stores, or scrolling through producer content online, it can start to feel like getting a professional mix requires an endless collection of expensive plugins. You need this compressor. That EQ. This … Read more