Best/must have plug-ins for DAWs that have enhanced your productions?

[kman58]

To the producers out there:

Anybody have any favorite plug-ins they can't live without or they consider are must-haves? And in what way have those plug-ins improved your productions? Looking to expand my library with (preferably free) some stuff I might not necessarily know much about yet.

Just to start things: I found Ambience which is a free reverb plug-in that gives a lot of flexibility in pinpointing the variation of reverb you're looking for, and doesn't use much CPU. Downside is the audio quality isn't optimal but definitely still good (just not something perfect like a $100 plug-in would get you).

**disclaimer I use Ableton

 

[mithu]

Dada Life Sausage Fattener
Waves (little bit of everything)
iZoptope (Ozone, Alloy, and Element)
FabFilter (all of them)
Soundtoys (again all of them)
BozDigital (mongoose)


I also use some couple random ones from Acon, Audio Damage, and Steven Slate

 

[shwinerz]

Yaaas Sukhi aha.

I go for a subtractive EQ, where you can have a really narrow Q and remove problem frequencies in each stem/instrument. It makes such a HUGE difference and clears up the mix, but I almost never see mixers doing it with bhangra. Theres a free one by Melda if I'm not mistaken.

 

[kman58]

Dada Life Sausage Fattener

Definitely one of the simplest yet effective compressors out there especially to beef up a dhol or even vocals

 

[smp]

the izotope suite is ridiculously powerful! The multiband compressor is so much fun to work with. It's a bit confusing to learn but once you get it down subtracting instruments becomes a breeze. I've always viewed that plug-in as having an entire studio at my disposal. Too much power