Top five utility plugins to aid your music production
Having a collection of helpful utility plugins can hugely improve your workflow in the studio, eliminating a lot of guesswork.
Whether you’re looking to speed up the creation of chord progressions and melodies or the final mixdown, utility plugins might just be the answer. Here’s a list of our top five utility plugins to aid in your music production…
Scaler
What is it:
Scaler is an intuitive utility that helps you create musical variety in your productions, quickly detect scales and modes and choose from a huge amount of preset chords to drag-and-drop into your DAW. It comes with a variety of Songs and Chord sets built in, and it’s got a tone generator making it super easy to audition new chords.
Best feature(s):
- Over 100 built in Artist Chord sets from Carl Cox, MJ Cole and more
- Over 100 genre-based Chord sets
- Easily visualize the available notes in your current scale or Drag and drop ideas into your DAW
- Built in arpeggiator and strum generator
- Works with most popular DAWs on the market and can trigger notes in any VST/AU plugin
Price:
USD $49 (Around R700)
Where to get
Levels
What is it:
Levels is an intuitive plugin that takes the guesswork out of crunching the numbers during the mixdown process. It allows you to focus more on the sound rather than the technical aspects. Levels has an accurate True Peak Meter (Most meters don’t account for the intersample peaks, so if you have a signal slamming 0dB, the chances are there are very short peaks poking through). Levels also has LUFS meters for loudness, Vectorscope for stereo imaging and a correlation meter to monitor your phase.
Best feature(s):
- Great tool for quickly monitoring dynamic range and loudness
- Very intuitive interface, made to be easy for beginners and pros alike
- Levels is very customizable, there are settings to fine-tune the accuracy and peak for various application from mixing to mastering
Price:
USD $59 (Around R850)
Where to get
faTimeAlign & faSampleDelay
What is it:
faTimeAlign is just about the most accurate Time & Phase alignment tool on the market, where most plugins work within a single sample-range, faTimeAlign can adjust at 0.001 of a sample. You can group several instances of faTimeAlign and adjust them all from a single plugin, and it’s available as a watered-down free version as well. faSampleDelay has a few less features, you can group instances and it doesn’t go backwards in time (Yes, faTimeAlign allows you to go back in time, well at least shift your audio track slightly).
Best feature(s):
- Very intuitive and easy-to-use
- Completely customizable value range
- Accepts value input in Samples, MS, Feet and Meters
Price:
EUR €69 (Around R1100)
Where to get
LFO Tool
What is it:
LFO Tool is an incredibly flexible utility plugin, it is technically an effect as well – it extends further than just a utility; however, it is so handy I couldn’t leave it off this list. LFO Tool allows you to create Sidechain effects, sweeping filters, tremolos, autopanning, trance-gates and much more. Its able to send MIDI output as well, allowing you to create LFOs for almost any parameter in your DAW.
Best feature(s):
- MIDI CC output
- incredibly intuitive interface
- Save individual LFO shapes separate to plugin presets and create banks of shapes to recall
Price:
USD $49 (Around R700)
Where to get
Span, AnSpec & Curve EQ
What is it:
A spectrum analysis tool is invaluable in music production, it helps to give you an insight into the frequency response of elements in your track and helps you to reference and closely mimic the frequency response of a reference track. Voxengo Span and Voxengo AnSpec are free versions allowing the basics you would need in a spectrum analysis tool, while Voxengo Curve EQ takes it a step further allowing you to capture a snapshot of the frequency content of a reference and overlay it over your current track, making it super easy to see where adjustments are needed. Curve EQ is essentially an EQ, so you’ve got those controls as well, however it really excels at reference and analysis.
Best feature(s):
- AnSpec is perfect for users looking for a simple and easy-to-use analyser, it’s an analog-style one/third-octave analyser which mimics the look and feel of the spectrum component in the popular RME Digicheck application
- Span is an FFT-style meter, it has an additional a correlation meter, stereo, mid-side and surround capabilities, and an RMS / Peak meter.
- Curve is similar to Span with an advanced EQing and reference/comparison system built-in
Price:
Voxengo Span and AnSpec are Free while Curve EQ goes for USD $79 (Around R1300)
Where to get
These are what work for me…
Keep in mind there are a ton of utility plugins on the market, these may or may not suit exactly what you’re looking for, however they work for me.
They’re all very well thought-out, have incredibly easy-to-understand interfaces and definitely improved my workflow somewhat.
