[philwinkle]

Oh, and I forgot to mention plugins for vocalists:

It sucks to have to say it, but if you actually drop the $$$ on the UAD system you'd be quite impressed. The only problem with the UAD is the price for the hardware, plus additional plugins aside from the 5 that come stock with the UAD-1e. I really believe that with CPU power being what it is nowadays in the multi-core world of audio processing, you can get Waves Native plugins that will add life to your mix. Here are some I like to use:

Waves Native Vocal Bundle.
It retails for about $750; but I've seen it go on eBay for ~$400. The Vocal Bundle has a vocal comp and an EQ; but the best part of this is the pitch-correction. It's pretty awesome and stands up really well to AutoTune. You get extras like De-Breath and Doubler, too.

If you catch a good deal on the Gold bundle ($650 on eBay recently with Buy it Now) pick it up; because it has 3/4 of the Vocal Bundle, but with about 25 other plugins you'll use; including 2 that I can't live without for quick and dirty "mastering". They are:

C4 Native
This multi-band compressor allows you to mimic Opto and Electro compression and set compression/release and attack independently for up to 4 seperate bands. I like to use this as a stereo bus compressor in a mix and I use it to pump up drum room mixes too. Remember, you can sorta parametric EQ as well as compress across multiple bands with this one.

L2 Native
While most people would argue that L3 sounds/performs better and also comes with a multi-band EQ as well as having low-latency monitoring ability; I highly recommend the L2 plugin. This performs double-duty as well, being a Master Bus limiter and will perform IDR quantizing as well. Pretty handy and this goes on every mix I do.


For the bundles, you're looking at just under $1000, but you can find these ~$750 pretty regularly. And for the price you can get a bit more bang for your buck than the 5 included plugins with the UAD-1e entry-level pack. I'm sold on Waves, but you can also look to the following companies for similar bundles:

URS Audio
McDSP
WaveArts