EQ TIPS

Free Plugins

Free VSTs and AUs for Mac

Most of the plugins you pay for are available in PC and Mac formats. A lot of the free ones are only available in PC, so I will try to build up a list of good plugins for macs. 

Some of these plugins are 32 bit and will probably stay that way. For the moment I am staying 32 bit as I only have 4GB RAM. You need more than 4 to use J Bridge and 64 bit Live.

Brainworx BX Solo 

This is a handy tool you can get for free when you register with Plugin Alliance. You can use it to boost stereo width or switch to mono to check for phasing. Actually it's quite good to work in mono anyway, as it's less taxing on the ears. It's a bit like Utility. 

Flux Stereo Tool

Useful visualising the amount of stereo as well as controlling it. Get it free here. 

s(M)exoscope

Useful for checking wave forms. Available free here.

Triple Cheese

From U-he.  A very tasty if slightly fattening free synthesiser,  quite different from your normal subtractive and FM synths.Patches.

TyrellN6 2.0

Also from U-he, a top quality virtual analogue subtractive synth, shown here with the '1978 skin'. Scroll to the third and fourth downloads for the current version, the procedure to change it is given on page 2 of the thread. Preview. Tutorials1, 2, 3. Patches.

RMS Buddy

Displays RMS level. Download here. You can compare your Peak and RMS with a reference track to make sure you have roughly the same dynamic range. The Analysis Window controls the speed of the continual snapshots, ie slows it down. I compared the RMS Buddy other measuring tools and they all gave the same results except TT Dynamic, which is no longer free anyway.

Sonalksis Free G 

See comparison above under RMS Buddy, download here.

Voxengo Span 

Again, see the comparison under RMS Buddy above. Span can show the EQ of several instruments at the same time, see the tutorial on kick and bass tuning. Get the VST version for the Mac, it allows more inputs. Span also has K System metering. Download. 

X-ISM  

Download. "X-ISM is a state of the art VST/AU plug-in which can interpret inter-sample peaks, allowing engineers to make informed judgements about the resultant sound quality of the mix."

Waveshaper

Download "A simple waveshaping plugin with various transfer functions (tanh, sin, atan, fold back, saturate, etc.) as AudioUnit Universal Binary for Mac OS X from 10.5 upwards." Can cut stray transients. Discussion thread. Use withs(M)exoscope. 

Synth1

Available here. This well known and loved free synth became available for Mac in late 2011. 89 sound banks here. To install the patches create a presets folder in user documents and stick the folder in there. Then open Synth1 in Live and click the button called opt. Click on Browse and load each bank, takes a few minutes but you get 9000 presets. You can change the colours and size etc. It's still a beta I think, as of May 2012, but should work ok, seemed to for me. Apparently you have to trim the soundbank file names to less than 23 characters including spaces, or it will crash Live if you try to save (write) your own presets. If you get this problem, delete the jp.daichi.synth1.plist and load the banks again with names of less than 23 characters (including spaces). I did find that Live sometimes wasn't remembering what preset I had been using, but if you group and then ungroup it, that seems to work, or even just leave it racked up and maybe save the rack. Synth 1 is also recognised correctly by Automap. Manual here. 

Keep checking back, more stuff will be added regularly.

Audio Notes

A free plugin from Mountain Storm which can go on any track to allow you to write notes.

                  CLICK HERE FOR DOWNLOAD