Yeah, I found that downsizing and trimming down my plugin collection to a few favorites always helped my productivity more than any studio upgrade.

Of course, it’s cool to try new instruments and effects (oftentimes I pick up a new synth and a preset inspires me to do an entirely new song) but there’s as thin line between looking for inspiration and hoarding plugins/gear.

TAL-Reverb 4 is a plate emulation is it not? I’m wondering if in future you’d be willing to do separated reverb comparison articles by sound style, meaning for example comparing all the free (& don’t forget the usually-paid reverbs that most of us keep getting free-gifted through BPB, tons of those! XD) plate-style reverbs in one page (whether algorithmic or convolution like Arturia Rev Plate-140), & so on and so forth. Part of my beginner option paralysis is: I don’t even know yet if a plate sound or something else will be more suitable for this track, and now i have to wonder which are the best-sounding plates that i can throw on this track to test, before comparing with a good hall (either algo or convolution), for example.

Then, some algo reverbs are hybrids, can do so many different tasks, but how well do they do each of these? Ugggghhhhh…. [mind exploded]

Since i’m already in “rant mode”, i’ve often heard how vocals go well with plates, & so i’ve been using the Arturia Plate a lot recently, but sometimes it sounds a tad too “vintage” instead of “modern” to my ears. I’m still wondering if it is because of this particular plate, or plates in general & i need to switch to something else (more fiddling, ugh), or if it’s just the fault of this weakly sound-treated room, or non-professional earphones (all my bedroom studio stuffs can only be properly set-up end of this year due to life business).

Hope i’m not too late for you to see my thanks? Thankyou very much for replying to me. I’ll definitely try out your advice. And i’ll fully pass on Epicverb since the consensus i’ve been hearing is that other options are better.

Real life kept me from writing this earlier, i hope i’m not too late for my reply to get noticed by you?

Want to really thank you (& of course Tomislav, always) for taking the time to clearly lay it all out for us beginners! While i’ve learnt much of this info already (my struggle is with sieving through the bazillion individual plugins), i’m still super appreciative for the caring advice & encouragement!

Didn’t mention this earlier, but as a beginner, i have yet to properly sound-treat this bedroom-studio, or get better in-ear-monitors, & so subtle effects like reverbs are still harder to test & compare with one another. I was still afraid of committing to a few (choosing my “core”) due to my inexperience, not knowing which reverbs (and their UI designs) would work best for my needs & “flow”. Adding to this dilemma, nearly every VST instrument out there comes with their OWN reverbs built in! Having to figure out if the included reverbs work best with these instruments, or would it sound messy if mixed together with other tracks using other reverbs? Beginner mental paralysis hahaha.

But yeah, i guess i need to just put my foot down & choose 2 or 3 reverbs to try & start mastering them, based on some of the recommendations by you all. My musical style is mainly modern atmospheric, acoustic, orchestral pop with light electronic elements, plus hard melodic rock for the heavier parts, whatever serves the lyrics/message of the song better. I’m a singer-songwriter first & foremost rather than a producer.

Cheers! :)

Of course you did, and thank you for that!
How many of us do you think wouldn’t know about them if it weren’t for BPB? :)

My thoughts are the same in regards to epicverb, just plain don’t care for it while I love the rest of their plugins.

I wanted to throw in my suggestion for giantverb if you’re not using that already. Super simple huge verb that sounds good on literally everything with it’s stock setting. I have the arturia plate, soundtoys plate, valhalla verbs, and giantverb is really my go to for a lot of things.

Also I really like convoxology and the free impulse responses of famous rack units that are out there that you can load into the plugin.

Sorry to hear about crashes in Live. Worked fine in Studio One (already used on several projects over here).

Great post! I completely agree that too many options hinder creativity. Use your plugins to make music instead of comparing plugins to find the best one.

EpicVerb is good, but I prefer OrilRiver and TAL-Reverb 4 (when it comes to freeware). My favorite VoS plugin is FerricTDS.

I covered Airwindows in the past and I’m including them in our free VST plugin round-ups. Chris releases new plugins quite often so I only cover major releases in the news section. Either way, loving Airwindows plugs!