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

[maddnotez]

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.

 

[MirrorProfiles]

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.

 

[Orvillain]

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)

 

[Sleezy E]

TSE Audio - Software

TSE AUDIO

www.tseaudio.com

The Tse bod is a great FREE sansamp emu for recording bass di

I always had great results with it.

 

[TheTrueZoltan!]

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.

 

[Sascha Franck]

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?

 

[HomespunEffects]

… without needing to be a professional mixer to get good results. …

Before switching DAWs or adding VSTs try carving out some space for the bass and drums. Less gain, less lows and more mids for the guitars to leave room for the rest. You don’t have to be a pro mixer to do those things.

 

[DrewJD82]

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.

 

[maddnotez]

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?

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

 

[maddnotez]

Thanks for the tips, will be trying and checking out these suggestions.

 

[HomespunEffects]

Maybe the true VSTs were the mixing tips we gained along the way.

 

[maddnotez]

Maybe the true VSTs were the mixing tips we gained along the way.

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

 

[Devin]

Those guitars are sounding beastly man


Also

The sale continues

 

[spawnofthesith]

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

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)

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!

 

[maddnotez]

Those guitars are sounding beastly man


Also

The sale continues

Everything is for sale bro lol

 

[maddnotez]

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

Thanks, I appreciate it. I don't think it's horrible or anything but I also wouldn't say it's great or something I'm happy with.

 

[[Nathan]]

What you've got there is great pre pro sort of tier recordings. I would have killed for that stuff when I was in bands, our recordings sounded worse but it got the job done to work on songs and keep refining things. Many of us guitarists have gone down the rabbit hole of recording music and trying to get it sounding as good as possible. There seems to be an inflection point of "well I got it this good, surely a pro sounding recording is a bit of knowledge and weeks away....." (LOL). I find at that point you have to ask yourself do I LOVE mixing and production, do I want to keep refining these skills and learn learn learn to start incrementing my mixes by 1% increments or am I really just a guitarist and this kind of gets the job done and I'd rather play more guitar / write more music?

Also to directly answer your question about drum/bass libraries. Submission Audio have the best bass libraries imo... I've been using EuroBass3 and it rules for rock/punk/metal super versatile. For drums something like SD3 or EZD3 is technically the best fidelity and if you buy into their ecosystem then all the stuff plays very well with each other... but Kontakt libraries can also be one hit wonders. Krimh Drums, Counterkit, Josh Middleton Drums, GGD PV, Mixwave Lorna Shore... any of those will give you quicker/better instant results because they have a lot of processing baked into kontakt. I've personally been using Counterkit for over a year and love it. Have a look at the mixwave stuff (start with lorna shore) or krimh drums, I think you'll be blown away with their examples.

I wrote some massive diatribe about not spending too much money on plugins/virtual instruments but the reality is if you find the right drum and bass libraries that you're 100% stoked on every time you use them, then that's money well spent... it can just be a process finding them.

 

[tgchan]

KRIMH FREE has absolutely melted my face when I connected my Roland TD-07 to my PC...

I have recently bought DEVIANT DRUMS as well and I can recommend it as well. There's just so much... but if you don't want to spend any money and get amazing sounding drums with your e-kit or not. KRIMH FREE is an absolute monster and it is a major sin not trying it out before buying anything else.

I was super scared buying DEVIANT DRUMS as KRIMH FREE was already absolutely fabulous... Thanks god I found it helpful ;p but it was a close call.

KRIMH FREE is more of a natural sounding. DD is definitely more processed sound. I'm a big Fear Factory fan and I found that DD actually fit my style a little better.

 

[BFRaid]

I am another Toontrack EZdrummer user. Most of my use is to make quick-and-dirty demos of new songs for my band to learn. I find it to be incredibly easy to use for 90% of what I need to do.

 

[Solarflares]

Join the Reaper forum for extra tips and pointers.

Other DAW’s these days have quite simple sample-based kits, and Electro-pop emulations (808, 909 etc.)
Cubase Pro has Drumkit, Groove Agent, and Halion sampler. Huge libraries, and tons of soft-synths. No real need to purchase any better plugins, to get more experience, and a working discipline. A second-hand licence for Cubase 14 Pro would be £250?
A Mac Mini M4, with 24GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD, would be a perfect partner, and give seam-free operation in Sequoia with Cubase 14 Pro. Just don’t update either, whatever you do. Or add huge 3rd-party libraries. Then the 512GB can store your songs, and everything is lightning fast. (Obviously you back up stuff externally, but an M4 Mini standalone is a beast.)
A Motu M4 interface is ideal here. Will give 1.1ms latency each way at 96Khz/128 samples. Grab a 1.5m Supra USB-2 audio cable with C terminations too.
That might transform your rate of progress, stop your time-demanding search for separate plugins, provide real audio quality, and there are a wealth of instructional videos on YouTube.
Ableton is pretty good on that score too, but I only know Ableton 8 suite from years ago.

If you go EZ Drummer - get the “Drumkit from Hell” version.

BFD 3.5 is ok too I guess. It’s what I use - but you’ll need to deep-dive to build a good kit, and it does insist on validating every time you fire it up online.

Running a real bass, with a good setup and decent strings, through a cheap Hi-Z in channel-strip with compression and eq, can be a good start to proceedings.
A Focusrite Platinum is £100 used. But a £150 Joe Meek VC3Q will give some nice grit when input gain is pushed.