A decade is a long time, in 2011 the Egyptian revolution began. Japan was hit by earthquake and tsunami. Charlie Sheen was fired from Two and a Half Men. Game Of Thrones premiered and Osama bin Laden was killed.
Some plugins were launched over a decade ago and are still being used in sessions every day. They’ve outlasted fads and fashions, some were just great from day one and they continue to be chosen because of this instead of the latest new kids on the block.
Here’s the ten plugins we’ve chosen that have been around for over 10 years and are still going strong, they are the ones we’ve chosen as our 10 plugins of the last decade.
Spectrasonics Omnisphere - Announced 2008
With decades of experience designing some of the most iconic synth patches around, including the Roland D50, Eric Persing knows a thing or two about great synth sounds. This is in essence what makes a great synth, the sound library.
From day one Omnisphere shipped with a monster sound library, around 50gb in size. It wasn’t bloatware either, nearly every sound in Omnisphere is usable. You’ll hear Omnisphere on pop tracks, EDM and almost every other genre and on some of the biggest movies ever made.
Add to that the great sound effects, a powerful arpeggiator and ease of use, it’s no wonder Omnisphere has retained the title as one of the best selling synth virtual instruments in the last decades.
However, Spectrasonics has not sat on it’s hands since the launch of Omnisphere. Omnisphere 2 followed in 2015 and a regular set of updates has rolled out to reward loyal owners. For many Omnisphere is the first plugin they reach for when looking for a killer sound, and it usually delivers.
Omniphere isn’t the cheapest synth plugin on the market, but it’s arguably the best.
Waves R-Vox - Announced 2001
Waves Renaissance Vox, commonly known as R-Vox has been a staple compressor and gate in studios around the world for 20 years. Some mystery surrounds exactly what hardware the R-Vox is based on but in some ways that’s largely irrelevant. What makes R-Vox so loved is just how simple it is to use, three sliders is all there is to it.
Hailed by Drake’s producer Noah “40” Shebib as “one of the most important vocal plugins ever made,” R-Vox is the go-to vocal compressor for countless Grammy-winning engineers. User-friendly and accessible, R-Vox has been responsible for an endless chain of award-winning recordings.
R-Vox makes levelling and cleaning up vocals a breeze. Waves has made hundreds of plugins over the years but R-Vox is arguably their best.
Celemony Melodyne - Announced 2001
It could be easy to consider Melodyne just another plugin for tuning vocals, but over the years it’s become apparent that Melodyne is far more than that. When we first saw Melodyne deconstructing a guitar chord and fixing an out of tune string that was amazing. We’re still not sure how it’s done, it’s as close to magic as it’s gets in the technology world.
Since release, Melodyne has been shipped in various incarnations, with an entry level version Melodyne 5 Essential costing around £100, it’s little wonder that it’s become a staple for those wanting to fix timing and tuning on tracks. Furthermore using Melodyne is a breeze, instead of staring at waveforms you get musical notes (or blobs) that make sense the minute you start working with it.
Melodyne has both automated features, based around sliders, or if you wish you can get forensic and go deep. The beauty is that the choice is yours. The tempo mapping algorithm in Melodyne is perhaps one of the best around, when used in DAWs like Studio One, it’s a breeze to tempo map.
Calling Melodyne a vocal tuner would be a disservice - it can do that, but that’s just the start.
iZotope RX - Announced 2007
Ask any post-production audio professional what plugins they have in their toolbox and it’s likely to include iZotope RX. RX has long been regarded as the audio voodoo plugin if you have a problem with audio.
When it comes to fixing audio there’s not a lot that RX can’t do. When it first came to market most of the tools were aimed at removing noise, hiss, hum and other errant audio that could spoil a great take. Since then iZotope RX has grown into a tool-kit offering everything from DeReverb, replacement room tone, tonal isolation and more.
RX is also used in music production too, offering tools to remove plosives, breaths, level audio without the use of compression and more.
There are other products on the market aiming to restore and repair audio, but RX still retains the top spot in the audio industry as the most respected audio restoration tool-box on the market.
Synchro Arts VocAlign - Announced 1995
The oldest plugin on this list, Synchro Arts VocALign is over 25 years old.
VocALign has been used by countless music and post producers to align the performance of vocals or get ADR matched with the original take. You can really say it is rocket science as VocALign is based on the same technology used in missile guidance systems. Furthermore, using it is as simple as hitting a button and it’s done.
During its lifetime VocALign has been released in various incarnations including VocALign Project, Professional, and more recently the acclaimed VocAlign Ultra. Ultra introduces a lot of new technologies that simplify the process further and give the GUI the makeover it’s needed for over a decade.
Considering that VocAlign remains unchallenged and that it’s still using the underlying tech for over 25 years, that is some feat.
Native Instruments Kontakt - Announced 2002
Kontakt is the ubiquitous sample player engine that powers many of the sound libraries on the market today. It has earned the industry-standard reputation for samplers.
Shipping in both paid for and free versions, Kontakt gives sample developers powerful scripting tools and customisation options. It is perhaps this that has made Kontakt the underlying engine for so many of the most popular sound libraries in the world. With over 2000 commercial sound libraries available for it, Kontakt could be considered as much a publishing platform for sound developers as it is an instrument.
It’s not the prettiest or simplest sample player around, but in the last two decades Native Instruments has established Kontakt as the King of samplers.
PSP Vintage Warmer - Announced 2002
It should come as no surprise that Vintage Warmer is PSPs best selling plugin, even after 20 years.
Now version 2, PSP Vintage Warmer replicates the sound of putting your mix through a high-quality analog-style, single- or multi-band compressor/limiter. What makes it so effective is that it’s easy to use and almost instant gratification!
It’s loved by many professionals and often their secret weapon for mixing and mastering. In a review for TapeOp some years ago said this; “The engineer was running a 2-track mix I had recorded from two-inch 16-track and mixed to 1/2" analog through the EQ on a UA-2-610 pre and an Avalon 747 EQ/comp. I asked him to try Vintage Warmer instead just to see how it stacked up, not really expecting too much. To our surprise, we both felt that the Vintage Warmer version sounded better than the version going through $5000 worth of high-end analog gear. We made CDs of both versions for the band and in a blind listening test they picked the Vintage Warmer version as well”
In a nutshell, Vintage Warmer is a plugin that should be in every mixer’s plugin folder.
Fabfilter Pro-Q - Announced 2009
FabFilter’s EQ plugin redefined what we could expect from a utility EQ. Since Waves Q10 introduced us to the idea of a flexible multiband EQ with a detailed EQ curve, not a great deal had changed until FabFilter took the best of everything and just did it better. In the current Pro-Q3 incarnation we have a completely comprehensive feature set: any filter shape, any number of bands, dynamic EQ, linear phase, EQ match, the list goes on.
That would count for a lot but the masterstroke and the reason Pro-Q3 has crossed over from premium third party plugin to almost mandatory is the supremely simple user interface. How FabFilter manage to create such feature-rich yet intuitive and navigable plugins is easily taken for granted, until of course you go to an alternative plugin which doesn’t hit this sweet spot between features and simplicity.
Sonnox Inflator - Announced 2007
Writing about Inflator is difficult because it’s hard to describe what it does and impossible to explain how. Sonnox Inflator is a magic plug-in which does something mysterious which just makes stuff sound better. Pop an Inflator across a few subgroups rather than just on the output and run each instance gently. You hear it, then you become less aware of it but when you bypass the Inflator(s) you really hear what it was doing.
The best thing about Inflator is that, unlike a multiband compressor, distortion plug-ins or even just HF EQ, it takes some very heavy handed use to go too far (don’t take that as a challenge though).
Sound Radix AutoAlign - Announced 2010
Auto Align is one of those plugins that you don’t think you need until you try using it.
Part smart coding, part magic, Auto Align takes audio signals that are out of phase and aligns them. This is necessary when microphones are placed in different positions creating different phase relationships. This can have a significant bearing on the sound. As most of those relationships are not simply 180 degrees out flipping the phase switch on the mixer isn’t going to help… it requires a clever and simple way to fix them. Auto Align is that way.
No more zooming in on audio waveforms and nudging them around on the timeline of your DAW.
The result is punchier tracks and often more clarity. Once you’ve used it you realise that a significant time in pre-AutoAlign mixes was spent trying to EQ your way out of phase problems.
Auto Align works on drums, guitars, basses and more. If you mix a lot of acoustic recordings and you’ve never tried it then you should.
A Common Thread
As you read through this list of great plugins a common thread emerges, many of them just work out the box. They help you get the desired result with very little fuss. A great sound is a prerequisite, but simple and effective workflows make them a winner.
It’s worth remembering that some of the biggest and most popular plugins brands today weren’t around a decade ago, so that’s why they’ve not made the list. We feel some of them will make it into our next one in 2031. Perhaps in the comments you can suggest other legends to come.
So what have we missed in this line-up of ‘classic’ plugins… remember they need to have been around over a decade ago.