VST Plugs (Now for Pro Tools Too!)

[Charles Dye]

Two months ago Joe Gore in his excellent LE Boot Camp column in DIGIZINE wrote a great two part series about VST plug-ins for Pro Tools:

• VST Plug-ins and Pro Tools
  
  More VST Plug-ins and Pro Tools

The release of the VST to RTAS Adapter, a $99 program that converts VST plug-ins into RTAS ones, greatly expands the pool of Pro Tools-compatible plug-ins.

The first part discussed the the adapter along with 13 FREE (!!!!!) VST plugs, and the second part discussed eight commercial ones (only $30 to $180). All of the descriptions included mp3 examples of what the plugs do. (Again, really great article.)

I haven't found the time to dive into this whole new world of plugs, but I am really looking forward to it. I've always loved down + dirty, funky sounds, and I've often heard high praise for the different (and sometimes free) approach the VST manufactures take coming up with some unique plugs.

Let's talk about them. For my self, I've got a few questions for those of you who have been fortunate enough to already use VST plug-ins:

• If you regularly work in the VST environment (Cubase, Nuendo) please share with us your thoughts about VST plugs. What are some of your faves + why? What do they do? And how much $?
  
• If you're a PT user and have the VST to RTAS Adapter please tell us how well it works. What are some of your fave VST plugs + why? What do they do? How much $? And how do they compare to RTAS/HTDM/TDM ones?
  
• If you haven't tried VST plugs yet are you planning on it?

But don't limit yourself to my questions, please feel free to contribute anything you'd like. Hate'em, love'em, whatever.

Thanks.

[DanV]

Favorites:

Wacky Fx:
Smartelectronix.com; Free and Awesome - I use their fx more than anything else!
Tobybear.de is another cool developer of freeware fx.

Eq:
Sonalksis
Elemental Audio
Voxengo
My Uad-1
PSP

Verb:
Sir; free impulse response vst
Ultrafunk makes a great one
Smartelectronix makes a great FREE one as well
I use the term great only in relation to what is available to pc users as vst plugins!

Compression/Dynamics:
Nomad Factory
My Uad1
Sonalksis
PSP
Digital Fish Phones - free and not bad
Ultrafunk

Distortion:
PSP
Nomad Factory
Ephonic; they make a great freeware one named lofi

Mastering( kind of a joke in vst land) but if I had to name names...

Voxengo and Timeworks have some ok stuff you could throw on the 2buss at mixdown.

Instruments - noise makers:
Fxpansion dr-008
Native Instruments battery
Gmedia music makes some nice emulations.
Superwave - excellent freeware and payware stuff.
GreenOak Crystal
Arturia is banging out some amazing synth emulations now.

As you can see I am mainly listing Company names instead of their specific products. There are a handful of really great developers out there and a sea of crappy ones. The ones I've mentioned I consider to be the cream of the crop.

[silver_shake]

Cool thanks, very imformative article charles!

Ok ill give feedback on some of the plugs i use. I can't speak on how well they work in protools because i use Cubase SX.

FM7 Softsynth is great for DX7 synth type sounds, for dance music (particuarly nineties dance basses) this synth is really great and does not use much processor power on a native system.

Z3TA softsynth is a truly great sounding softsynth. I have noticed that this synth in particular is free of certain artifacts and aliasing you hear when playing in the upper registers. Wonderful!

Steinber Hypersonic is basically a great software sound module. I could easily compare this to the korg triton where sound quality is concerned. I would actually rate it even better simply because of an dead on easy interface and such a wide variety of sounds that use can make a full song using just this software module. However the most important thing for me is the speed at which u can assign different parts to you arrangement. So basically if I need to produce a piece in 20 minutes for whatever reason this is definetly the first module i would go to.

SIR Reverb is basically a freeware reverb that u can load impulses into. So basically u can load impulses from a 9k reverb into SIR and it will sound identical. Another + is that impulses are easilly found for free over the web. Uses moderate amount of processing power.

Ambience is also another great freeware verb. This does not load impulses so incertain instances it will not sound as good as SIR can sound but is much more flexible, there are many more parameters to tweak. However is does use a lot of processing power.

I would say these are my 5 favorite plugs where softsynths and fx are concerned. I really enjoy using soft synths because tracking right is no longer so much of an issue. Moreover bouncing the file to audio is usually much much more quick than recording the outputs of a synth. This can save a lot of time when bouncing 24 midi tracks to individual audio tracks as opposed to recording all of them from a hardware synth's outputs...........especially when the song is close to ten minutes long.........
So basically i get into the mixing stage a lot quicker. :)

[nikki-k]

Hi!
I actually created a section on my forums just for this:
Click and scroll down to "VST(i) Reviews" section

While I am a Win XP user, a Mac user was kind enough to add a VERY good post pertaining to Mac use/experiences.

On the Win XP side, a very interesting thing was discovered:
Wrapped versions of VSTi's with an RTAS version also available had significantly lower latency. Typically, wrapped versions exhibited 2-12 samples of delay, while the RTAS versions of the same instrument exhibited 300+ samples.

With PT and Win XP, Native INstruments stuff has a wild bug: only MIDI channel 1 is available! While this isn't to much of a big deal with most instruments, B4 really needs to have channels 1-3 available. The VST-RTAS wrapped versions of the NI plugs did not suffer this bug- all 16 channels available!!!

VST's I like: PARIS EQ, Ambience, SIR, PSP stuff, BladePanner, and Slower.
VSTi's: Delay Llama, the NI stuff, Arturia stuff, Crystal, CosmoGirl, Morpheus, Oberon8, SuperWave P8 (free one), and V-Box-2.

If I had to narrow things down, I'd have to keep the NI and Arturia stuff (Arturia MiniMoog is too sweet!!!). If you can find the old free version of SuperWave P8, grab it. One of my fav freebies.

[title]

Once you've installed the wrapper software, you click on the app and basically do a search/wrap function it will then go out and look for vst plugs in the system folder or the fxpansion local vst folder, whatever it finds it converts to rtas. then once PT is loaded you go to RTAS plugins and VSTW shows up before every name. pretty neato.

i have had great success with it, nothing crashes PT that wouldn't crash anything else, so its been good. if your looking for free plugs i found a ton at www.kvr-vst.com. KVR VST

-LP

[b-magical]

Hey Charles,
I'm Nuendo user and the Universal Audio plugs are great. 1176, LA-2A, Fairchild, Pultec. UA just annouced that you will be able to use the UAD-1 card in all Pro tools systems and the plugs will show up on RTAS plug menu. Good news for me as I'm about to go HD. Heres the link to the UA press release.

http://www.uaudio.com/news/releases/rtas.html

Brian

[filarion]

I mainly use VST plugins via fxpansions VST-AU adapter in Logic. Some of my favourites are:

-Elemental Audio Firium

-PSP Plugs in general, especially the new Nitro multifilter is awesome (most of the PSP plugins are about to be released as RTAS though).

-Smartelectronix - a collective of developers offering mostly free plugins, some real gems there. I especially like Buffer Override (by destroy FX) and SupaTrigga (by Bram). Mostly suited for glitchy drumloops.

-Pluggo by Cycling74 - basically these are max/msp patches as vst plugins and instruments. an immensely long list of plugins (way over 100). Some bad, some okay, some awesome. plus, lots of user-created stuff all over the net.

-u-he More Feedback Machine - already covered in those articles, a real gem as well.

[Charles Dye]

Originally posted by b-magical
UA just annouced that you will be able to use the UAD-1 card in all Pro tools systems and the plugs will show up on RTAS plug menu.

Brian,

Great news!!! Thanks for the link. Having all of these new plug-ins available for PT is such a great thing, as well as a new source for DSP. What are your fave UAD plugs that aren't available as RTAS/TDM that you're really glad will be available now in PT?

Anyone else? What are your fave UAD plugs + why? What do they do, etc.?

And thanks everyone for all this great info!

[tptman]

This will allow a real head to head test of bombfactory vs. uad in the PT environment. Those who prefer the UAD models to the bombfactory ones will now have that added choice (thinking mostly of LA2A, 1176, and Pultec).

For LE users, it finally allows them to offload some processing power without upgrading to TDM/HD rigs.

[charleslee]

Hope this is not too off topic. I'm just wondering, is the UAD-1 + VST-RTAS wrapper very stable on PT LE ? Do we need the latest PT 6 versions in order to run this?

I've got two rigs, a MAC and PC. But I would like to install the UAD-1 in my PC instead of MAC. coz i do more music stuffs with the PC. However, my PC Protools LE is only 5.3.1LE. I'm just wondering do I need to upgrade to ver 6.x for the PC?

Thanks & Regards,
[Charles]

[Rail Jon Rogut]

The VST Wrapper requires Pro Tools 6.1.1 (or later)

Rail

[richiecc]

When Digi announced VST support there were a couple of threads on the DUC....But it was hardly an event..........Which didnt suprise me in the slightest. The snobbery coming from many a pt user is quite remarkable. Many simply wouldnt even bother giving any VST a chance.

PT users who choose not to have a look at VST FX are missing out on a whole new area of exciting development. How many esoteric FX plugins are available for PT's? Maybe 3, and even then they have that same cold clinical sound as every other TDM plugin.

Whats a good delay for PT's? Nothing!

In VST land there are tons and in particular the OHM force ones which have more character and oomph than any TDM plugin I have ever heard.

recently I sold my TDM HD rig..and very happy I am to. Now my mixes have real character and punch. Processing is all done by VST's in my studio now..

Some VST's that are Brilliant:

Isotope Ozone (wow, this thing is amazing for mastering) Beats T Rax hands down. Its difficult to make this plugin sound bad.

SIR Impulse reverb.....Its Free and blows away my Reverb One that I paid 1100 for.

Ohm Force: All of them, simply great.

Halion Sampler: I used to be an ESX24 user........Hmmm emagic have a long way to catch up on this sampler. Its got a great sound, excellent functionality, and has a massive library available. Without a doubt the best soft sampler out there....But ask any PT user if they woul dbe interested and soon as they hear its from Steinberg they will run to the hills. Their Loss my gain.yeh go and use MAch 5 which is a total loss imo.

Theres so many more I could list. An eg of a $49 plugin (i forget its name) but its a sequencer noise gate. You simply patch it in to any track and move the little blocks around for sooem serious gating Effects. I couldnt belive how good this sthing was..and so effective, inspirational, and easy to use........

Thats what many VST plugs do for me INSPIRE..I cant recall a single TDM plugin inspiring me in any way.

Of course this is all my opinion........

Charles, you go get those VST's. I think you like to play around with plugins and I can gurantee you will love many VST plugins......and so will your clients I suspect.

[axtrak]

UAD-1

i think all the dynamics and eq on the uad are great, a lot better than powercore.

The Cambridge EQ is a very sweet EQ, not so precise as the oxford, but it has a tone i like a lot.

I even like the small Eq/Comp EX-1 , especially the compressor is very nice to make percussion tracks really snappy.

as mentioned before, the fairchild/la2a/1167 & Pultec pro are really good.

I don´t like the reverbs, because i think the userinterface is too strange and often i don´t get pleasing results with them.

Alex

www.axtrak.com

[morpheus]

Originally posted by title

i have had great success with it, nothing crashes PT that wouldn't crash anything else, so its been good.

My experience was to the contrary. The adapter crashed and burned on me several times, despite numerous updates. There is no way I would use it in a session in front of a client.

It seems like a lot of the free VST plugs are the most unreliable. But I would be concerned spending a lot of money on commercial VST plugs because I doubt they would support their plugs being used in this way. If FXpansion can't help you, you are SOL.

My general impression on the DUC from people who bought it was the LE users (esp ex Cubase people) were happier and the TDM users were not.

http://duc.digidesign.com/showflat.p...=&fpart=1&vc=1

http://duc.digidesign.com/showflat.p...&Number=578824

[tptman]

Try these

[morpheus]

Originally posted by tptman
Try these

Quote from that site:

I started developing these plugins in 2001, putting the focus on dynamic signal processing (volume compression / expansion) and on recreating the sound of analog circuits in the digital domain.

Recently, I took the source code, looked at it and thought I should be doing more with it. As a consequence, I decided to give up the freeware idea.

For you, this means that all plugins at this site have been discontinued. Users will have to live with the state each plugin is currently in. The code might be enhanced, debugged and developed further in some way, but not as freeware for the public domain.

Sorry ;)

This doesn't look like something I want to rely on for sessions.

Even if I did think they were somewhat unique, what do you do if you use a compressor plugin like this and then you come back to it in three months for a touchup or remix but the compressor broke because of OS X 10.3.4? Do you start from scratch?

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Even if I did think they were somewhat unique, what do you do if you use a compressor plugin like this and then you come back to it in three months for a touchup or remix but the compressor broke because of OS X 10.3.4? Do you start from scratch?

You should be in the habit of duplicating your playlist and printing via AudioSuite or BTD an "effected" version of your track if there's a chance you'll want to remix or recall the session at a later date on a different system or OS or even version of the host app.

Rail

[magnetic]

Does this mean I can use tc powercore within protools?

[Shan]

Originally posted by magnetic
Does this mean I can use tc powercore within protools?

Yes. You can also use the UAD-1 which is supported by Universal Audio and comes bundled with a special version of Fxpansion VST-RTAS wrapper.

Shan

[magnetic]

thanks

[Mike Jasper]

Unfortunately, some of the plugs I'd really be excited to hear -- such as SIR -- are unavailable for Mac users like me.

Jasper

[magnetic]

yep, i'd love to be able to try that sir reverb on my g4.

[Teacher]

yo chuck

i see you love all these analog emu plugs have you tried antares tube? what do you think of it?

how about PSP VintageWarmers?

thanks