What are some of the most user friendly (noob friendly) out of the box Vsts?

maddnotez

maddnotez

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Edit: not sure if this should be here or in the Digital/modeling forum.

For my personal scenario I feel that Drums and Bass are the biggest issues.

I'm beyond tired of having my recordings sound like complete shit. I've learned that whatever product I buy is not going to sound even close to the video that I watched that gauged my interest on the product to begin with.

I've spent many hours over the years watching tips and videos, reading forums and I know all the basic BS but I just simply suck at mixing.

Im going all digital here and currently I have found that Tonex may be the best guitar option for me. I'm actually halfway pleased with the free trial and probably going to purchase the max version although I'm definitely open to suggestions for other guitar plugins.

With that said, as mentioned earlier my Bass guitar sounds horrible and the drums could definitely be better.

I play death metal, it's pretty straightforward and I'm just looking for some options that sound good out of the box without needing to be a professional mixer to get good results.

Sorry if that's a rant, it is......I'm frustrated.

Here is in my opinion maybe the best mix ive done to date and I can already hear a few things I want to change but just to give you an idea.




I am leaning toward buying the urgitone everything deal because it's on sale for a great price and I'm poor but are those going to be the best drums for me? Definitely open to suggestions, just not sure what I should be using.

I record in Reaper but willing to switch DAW if that will help. Literally open to anything here.
 
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EZDrummer and Neural DSP plugins would be my shout for ease of use and quality of sounds. The main thing is really picking the right sounds from the start rather than bulldozing your way to it. Its really just about being able to hear what you have in your head and choosing appropriately.
 
For drums nothing beats Toontrack EZdrummer 3 in terms of ease of use. It comes with a ton of MIDI grooves and the integrated grid editor makes programming your own grooves extremely easy. You can also use it to control other drum libraries (like the ones I mention below). I'd also recommend to buy the Death Metal EZX expansion for EZdrummer.

For bass... if you want to actually play bass, I'd recommend Neural DSP Parallax. It has lots of very good, mix-ready presets that work really well in a Metal context. But you could also just buy Toontrack EZbass to program your bass lines. Sounds really good and is just as user-friendly as EZdrummer.

Other user-friendly, metal-mix-ready plugins and virtual instruments I can think of: Bogren Digital drum libraries and OneKnob plugins, ML Sound Lab ML Drums Essential, Stigmatized Productions Fotis Benardo Drums & MDL Tone Ultimate Heavy Drums (both work with the free NI Kontakt Player). For guitar Neural DSP's Nolly & Gojira are great starting points. They are very versatile and come with some of the best presets I have ever used.
 
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General question regarding both bass and drums: Do you want to roll your own or would you prefer pre-made patterns that you would then combine and modify?
 
Based off that recording, I’d think you most likely already have everything you need and the only thing that’s going to improve on it is time and you sorting out the things you don’t dig about that mix and adding that to the pile of other things you haven’t dug along the way and corrected.

I do think everyone getting into mixing kinda has to go through the whole “Let me try every plugin because there’s surely something I’m missing with what I have that’s going to deliver what I want” only to find after some gained experience that you’ve had everything you need all along and end up using far less plugins moving forward.
 
Sascha Franck said:
General question regarding both bass and drums: Do you want to roll your own or would you prefer pre-made patterns that you would then combine and modify?
Click to expand...
A little of both, for drums I program every note and it's gotten easy however I skip programming fills because it's a PITA so I do like a big library of pre made fills.

One day I'd like to get a midi pad or ekit to use instead and just play it myself.

For bass I'm using a cheap Sterling Sting ray into an ampeg pedal into a Moto M2
 
HomespunEffects said:
Maybe the true VSTs were the mixing tips we gained along the way.
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Probably more to do with it but idk.

I've tried a lot of them, nothing is as good as a real amp to me but I've found several that are highly regarded or at least advertised that way that sound like shit compared to tonex or whatever
 
Id go ndsp for amp plug ins


I do agree with others though and said it over at GGF too, I think you're stuff already sounds pretty good :idk

Orvillain said:
Grab BFD Player. It is free. Whatever else you get, you'll have a high quality DW drumkit for completely free.

(Full disclosure, I'm part of the team who made it)
Click to expand...

Oh really! That's awesome, I can't program drums for crap but I utilize those "post rock" loops for building drum tracks quite often!
 
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