Perhaps I have the wrong settings on my social media accounts, but it seems a day rarely goes by when I don’t see an advert for another ‘magic’ plugin.

What do I mean by this?

Have We Run Out Of Good Ideas?

It seems we have so saturated the plugin market with emulations of classic, and sometimes, not so classic hardware. We joke a lot, but anyone who brings out another 1176 or Pultec plugin either has to do something very special and add things not possible with a regular one, or they should reconsider their calling in life.

So where can plugin developers go next, once there’s no hardware left in the old studio cupboard to resurrect? Well, how about the seemingly endless supply of plugins that add some ‘bite’ or ‘thump’ or if it’s a really special plugin then the effect is so magic it can’t even be put into words. It reminds me of the digital equivalent of the Emperor’s new clothes at times.

Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about some of the excellent plugins that have managed to distill complex processes into a single control, I love some of them as much as the next one. However, there’s a lot of unknown brands pushing out pretty crappy plugins to try and grab a share of the market.

On April Fools day 2022 we made our own, it was so close to the kind of silliness that people pass off as innovation that some people fell for it. Gullwing Audio Vintage Mutes Announced - Classic Console Mutes

Check out the video below from our friend Woody Brown, it’s a parody of this industry but there are product videos out there which make even less sense!

The Same Old Cliche

The marketing usually has the same kind of cliches; “the secret weapon of mastering engineers” or if they really want to go Daily Mail (National Enquirer) on you then the line is; “the plugin the professionals don’t want you to know about.” As if there’s a cabal of professional audio engineers and producers who meet monthly to agree on the list of equipment they use that they don’t want you to know about. As to the “secret weapon” line, I’ll tell you what the secret weapon of top engineers is; experience, hard work, and great ears.

You see that’s the problem with this kind of selling, and it’s not limited to the audio world, it’s used to sell get rich schemes, or ‘successful business in a week’ schemes and has been around for decades. It’s based on a SINGLE LIE, the lie is that there is a short cut to doing things right. There isn’t. It’s certainly not a half assed plugin!

If you want to get great recordings and great mixes, there is not a magic plugin. There are some legendary plugins, as Julian wrote about, but rarely is there a silver bullet that you throw across a mix and all your audio problems are fixed in an instant.

Good plugins stand the test of time, some of us are using plugins that were invented over 25 years ago and they are still the best plugin for the job. We Name Our 10 Audio Plugins Of The Decade.

Lots of these ads for the magic plugin also use another common trick, that’s the discount trick, perfected by furniture stores over decades. It quotes the ‘normal price’, which it’s never sold for, versus what you can get it for if you buy it today, a never to be repeated price… until next week. If they have a live countdown on their site then that’s another give away.

The Mark Of True Innovation Is Quality

It’s great to see people being innovative in the audio technology space, but this current tsunami of plugins that offer to be the magic your mix is missing, but rarely live up to the hype is tiresome. Worse still, it’s cynical and tempts those who are trying to get better sounding tracks to part with money that would be better spent on equipment with an established and well deserved track record.

I also want to be clear this isn’t about small developers = bad, large developers = good. Some of the worst culprits for pushing out close-to-pointless tat are the larger brands. There’s some excellent small brands making fantastic useful plugins, brands like DMG Audio, Blue Cat, and Kazrog to name three. The churn of new ‘plugins you never knew you needed’ to power the growth of a brand helps no-one, not the brand or the buyer. It might give their income a short term boost, but it just adds more stuff into an already over-saturated market.

Less Is More

Is it possible to be successful without the constant churning of new products? Yes it is. Spectrasonics are a case in point. Less than half a dozen plugins in around 20 years and still regarded as one of the best VI brands on the market, both by users and industry alike. There’s a reason for this, it’s not that they’ve been lucky, instead they’ve taken time to craft each instrument until they think it’s ready to ship. The Spectrasonics brand speaks for itself.

One of the benefits of growing up in the pre-plugin era, was that it was too costly for anyone to make hardware that wasn’t very good. It didn’t stop it happening, but on the whole less so. Now plugin development can take a fraction of the cost when compared to hardware which means, like on the Apple app store, there’s some diamonds, but a lot of coal you have to dig through.

One word of advice, never buy a plugin that you can’t try first, and even then take your time to make sure it is doing something that nothing else in your plugin collection can’t already do.

Perhaps I need to change my social media settings, but it seems there’s a new plugin that does very little, hitting the streets every day!

Discuss.