What's the most underrated piece of equipment you've ever used?
Hardware or software. I don't need to hear RVox is a great for the 1000th time, or how the latest 1176 clone gets even closer to the real thing.
What's that obscure thing you picked up in a junk shop, or paid a few pennies to a sketchy website for, or the thing everyone else says is rubbish, that turned out to be a key mixing tool for you?
About 25 years ago I stretched a pair of tights over an embroidery ring as I couldn't afford a pop shield, and it's still every bit as effective as my K&M filters I use today.
I have it on the wall of my studio to remind me not to over-complicate things. It doesn't do that by any means, but it's a good pop shield.
I have a “haunted” 80s clock radio with lots of hum and weird noise on the headphone output. I send synths and whatever else through it over the air using one of those cheap FM transmitters for your car. I have the output running through a Monotron Delay for even more crunch and weirdness. Being able to fade in and out with natural FM radio sound by adjusting the dial on the radio is super fun, and this setup gets used frequently for sound design in my studio.
Clean, hi-fi, and easy to tame it is not, but it has been one of the most creatively inspiring things in my collection.
Unsung hero. Why buy a bunch of fancy colored plugins from Thad, when this is the sauce? Tbh it feels like most plugins now are just repackaging things people already have in their default plugs
Totally agree ! I know it’s a common trope now but I really do find myself using a lot of stock stuff , or like 3-5 total of my third party stuff haha.
Timeless classic. Also, it may not be popular with the music crowd, but post loves the Avid Channel Strip. Probably my most used plugin of the last 15 years.
It’s based on the System 5 strip so it integrates well with consoles used for post/broadcast and Avid Control. CPU and latency free and nulls when defaulted so you can basically drop it on 200+ tracks and never think about it. It’s perfect for dialogue!
For studio mixing, it's a single fader control for writing automation. Absolute gamechanger. I barely compress vocals at all now, and they sound so much more alive and compelling. Also all of the tiny little musical flourishes on any instrument, it's easy and fun to pop those up for a second to highlight them and then push them back into a supporting role. I happen to use a first gen Presonus Faderport that I picked up for $35, but any of them will do the trick.
For live events it's a good multi-tool. Never go a day without using it countless times.
FFS, I can’t believe I’m responding to this reddit twat.….. You know the distance light can travel in a year? That’s how far ahead this technique is. I didn’t fucking mention time, you did. Learn how to apply nuance to your comprehension. No wonder you’re lonely 😂.
I have a little Faderfox that's been a huge timesaver for me. Mainly for mixing and editing, even moving clips around.
In Reaper (probably others too), I discovered the Track Manager, which is like a small spreadsheet that lists all your tracks. For larger track counts, it's a great way to jump from track 2 to 30 without scrolling and scrolling. It can also solo and mute. It's even more compact and useful (for me) than the Mixer view in some cases.
That’s funny my trick recently is nothing BUT compressors and maybe a little eq on the low end. I just started added wayy too many compressors to like every single stage of the vocals (partly because I just don’t care anymore, and partly because it’s funny seeing 13 compressors working at the same time) somehow it fucking works
I use Pro Tools, and it has an awesome automation feature called "convert volume automation to clip gain". So generally i'll set a rough starting point level with the track fader. Then ill put the track into touch automation, and make very detailed level rides. Like crazy detailed, down to the individual syllable. (I'll sometimes use this same process for manual de-essing at the same time). I'll generally roll back and hit words or sections multiple times until I get it right. Once it all sounds appropriately even for the genre and on top and cutting through the right way but still sitting in the right way too, I convert volume automation to clip gain. That resets my track fader back to the starting point, and now all of those detailed fader moves are a part of the clip gain: pre-fader, pre-insert. Generally after that it might still need little bit of compression for the final touch and some smoothing, but nowhere near as much as it would otherwise need. And now it sits consistently in the right place, but it doesn't sound compressed and harsh because it isn't. Then I can still use the track fader for larger section-by-section level changes as necessary.
And that, dear fellows, is what old school engineers used to do with mixing consoles when recording singers, and called it 'fader riding'. Jokes aside, that's what clip gain is for (or equivalent in your daw of choice) and is a real eye-opener. Taming macro-dynamics lets you use compressors afterwards in a much precise way
Primaltap, but as a distortion box, not a delay. Mix at 100, Delay Time and Feedback at 0, push the input gain up until it crunches right.
D-Verb. It's the most boring reverb on its own but it fits right into the mix.
Peavey made a two-channel tube pre way back when, the VMP-2. Tons of color, sounds great.
I have a discount knockoff Strat copy from a maker called Riverhead. It was $50 at the pawn shop and I haggled them down to $40. I don't even think the body is hardwood. It's my favorite studio guitar, gets more usage than my $5k Les Paul.
Not surprised about the Peavey. My first tube amp was a Peavey Classic 30, that thing sounded sweet. Absolute nightmare to work on (and I had to work it over a few times) but now that I have several really nice amps, I'd still have to say it held its own.
You might not know (or maybe you do), but that's a really old trick from the days before other distortion and tape plug-ins were anywhere near the level they are today.
the company I work for handed out these cheap shitty pocket notebooks. They're like A6 sized roughly. I keep that plus a pen and a sharpie and some e-tape on me at all times. Take a note, leave a note. It's incredible. A+ communication between past me and present me and future me.
Not so much equipment, but I used to make impulse responses of every studio I would work in. I made an impulse response of a hallway at a small studio in Memphis and ended up using that IR on most projects. It would add a width to vocals without sounding like ambience since it was such a small space. Didn't sound like reverb or chorusing, but made a fantastic sounding space to a mono source.
As oppose to the better rated IR I took of some rooms at Hensen studios in Hollywood. Which I used a lot, but not nearly as much as the hallway IR.
this is actually really great. I'm new to making IRs and always wanted to open my rehearsal room door late at night to mic reverb down the hall. This might be a more attainable solution!
There was a studio I did a lot of work out of in Hollywood. It had a huge indoor garage that sounded huge. I stayed up all night once trying to get an IR. But in that busy part of town there was not a single second of the day without traffic noise. So I was never able to get it. I think it would have sounded like Led Zeppelin if I could have pulled it off.
Yeah, i would say, for me, my folder full of real-studio / real-places IRs is such a big deal. I have two on sends in my template and usually add more. (One is a very short ambience IR from a small studio room, the other is a slightly longer studio ambience.) Mixed in just loud enough to add character/dimension but not loud enough to be heard as ‘reverb,’ once the whole mix goes through some dynamics processing, everything just sounds more physical.
I like to try out slightly longer IRs with the envelope shortened as well. I often use an EMT plate recorded on the shortest setting, further shortened in the reverb plugin.
The kilohearts clipper is my go-to clipper for basically everything, and it's free and absurdly simple. I love plugins like that, you don't need a fancy decapitator or anything like that. Just a simple tool that gets the job done.
In my experience Kclip is a bit cleaner, you can push it a bit further without audible clipping. That being said, the KiloHearts Clipper is also really good and incredibly light weight, so if your processing power is limited and you want to shove limiters in multiple places around your project, it's a great choice.
I never gave kilohearts a chance even though I owned the entire bundle because the UI looks so cheap, but after using a few of them I can say they’re def super high quality
I have two cheap pieces that I’m surprisingly fond of. The Behringer spring reverb 646. It distorts real cool. I rarely use the verb. I just smash shit through it. I also have a fatman stereo tube compressor that I love. It’s one of those purple ones that sits desktop.
About 15-16 years ago a mate handed me 2 pedals that he didn't use any more. One of them was a berhinger vintage delay with an echo chamber and I can honestly say it's made it onto more records in our studio than our Strymon timeline or boss delay pedals lol
Not strictly music production, per se, but my Logitech MX Master 4 mouse has really improved my workflow. If you've never used a weighted infinite scroll wheel, omg it's a total game changer. Plus, having the side scroll wheel and the programable buttons has really made audio production so much easier and faster.
You can program the buttons to do whatever you'd like, and they can even be program-dependent based on what application is active. For example, for everyday use I have one button configured as a "back" button so if I just want to go back on the webpage instead of navigating to the back arrow on the browser I just click with my thumb and I'm there. (This is undoubtedly one of the two buttons that I use most often in everyday non-audio use along with the Mission Control button (Mac) that spreads out all of my open windows so I can see them all and select the one I want). But that same button when i'm working in my DAW is to toggle the metronome on/off. Some other buttons that I've configured: Play/Pause, Record, Stop, Open Mixer, Return to start, Undo, Toggle Loop, Bounce, Crossfade, Quantize, Nudge, Split, Duplicate, Solo, etc.
It really depends on your workflow and which buttons you think you'd get the most use of out, but holy shit has it become second nature to me and I can't imagine going back to the old way of doing it. It is way more efficient for me and keeps me in the flow of things.
All of the acoustic panels I built this year for my home studio. At this point I have plenty of nice microphones, but I never had time to properly treat my studio room. Now my drum recordings sound much tighter, and vocal recordings have barely any noticeable room sound. Not only that but my mixes translate much better when I use my monitors. There used to be a lot of low mid build up in the room and that is mostly gone. The stereo imaging also sounds more defined out of the same speakers.
For those who are curious this is a list of the panels I built. I used rockwool for the absorptive material in all of them.
4 1’x4’x4”
10 2’x2’x6”
5 2’x4’x4”
1 2’x4’x6”
A good tip I discovered is to use one layer of rockwool comfort board right up against the front layer of fabric. It holds its shape very well so the rest of the insulation does not make the front fabric bulge out. The panels I used this technique on look better than some commercially made panels imo.
Back in the early 2000s when my dad was still working as an engineer, he bought a pair of DynAudio monitors and got an Aphex 204 Aural Exciter free with the purchase. It sat in my parents attic for almost two decades before I grabbed it and added it to my studio. That thing can do some miraculous stuff, truly. It has really helped me breathe life into mixes in a way that nothing else has been able to do - at least not anything in my arsenal. Doesn’t work on everything, but when it works it really, really works. I’ve encountered Aphex exciters in many studios, but never the 204.
Aberrant audio has some fun effects that are quite cheap and useful - I love their Lair reverb for ambience, Sketch for lofi tape stuff, and I was genuinely surprised how good Shapeshifter is for crunchy color compression. Used it to bring out the room on drums in an R&B track and it sounded great.
Apple's AUMatrixReverb is a plug-in that I have used for a decade, and I haven't found something better (at what I need). It doesn't give you a smooth ring-out, and if you set ddensity and reflection too high it clips on itself, but if I need two things to sound like they are in the same room, I just set it to 1-3% wet signal and suddenly the people speaking are right next to each other.
Heritage Tubesessor. Not a cheap or junk piece of gear by any means, but certainly one that did NOT sell well and was very overlooked/ "trashed" online. Not a specific emulation/ totally it's own thing.
I don't think i've tracked a bass guitar that WASN'T running through the Tubesessor since i've bought it. Monster on bass, very cool on vocals too if you want a smooth but gritty sound.
A vintage 19 sixties Horugal Japanese guitar, some know it as Teisco, wasn’t great initially, after cleaning 60 years of finger gunk off it and sorting out the intonation issue on it, I found that the pickups on these guitars are actually fantastic
Also recommend the actual hardware box. I still have mine. It’s pretty crap but that’s the point, it sounds great, decent for that ugly cheap solid state clipping distortion as well.
It depends on the application. I have an old Shty Realistic mic with a 1/4 male unbalanced cable i plug that into GTR pedal either some type of dirt box or maybe a single tap delay and throw it on the floor between a floor tomorrow and the kick. It's a nice crunch mid punch to blend in for attack on the kick and snare. Old Symetrix Compressors is another. I picked up a couple CL150s for $68 (for the pair) then found out they are Stupid Fast and have the old Valley People Dynamite VCA chip. So I bout a couple of their 501s which are really close to the DBX 160 in behavior and sound. And lastly (for this list) a 1979 Crate IIR 1x12 guitar amp. I does One thing. It sux so bad it's beautiful. Dime it out (Treble dialed back a bit) with a Big Muff in front of it and it sounds it gonna fall apart at any moment. I like to use it as a thing to blend in to another guitar track. It's Magic.
IF IT MAKE A SOUND, RECORDED IT.
That article/post is about balanced outs only -- the ins are still unique in that they are designed to either be used with an insert (which is why the input jack ring carries the output) OR with an unbalanced TS connector.
Nice, well I guess I’ll have to try that again. When I first got it, I just assumed it had balanced i/os and was so confused why it didn’t work for a while. Then I finally read the manual and was like ooohhh duh!
Daking Preamp - high gain, lightly colored, everything sounds good with it
Kush Audio Tweezer Compressor 500 series - Super versatile and can be utilitarian or add significant vibe or anything in between. I have two for my drum bus, but they work on everything.
Locomotive Audio Power Mu 500 series— gorgeous and lush sounding vari-mu bus comp. Full of tube goodness.
An old Alesis large diaphragm condenser I bought used two decades ago. I'll dig it out and give you the model and specs. I've recorded so many voices with that and it always seems to come through well. I think I paid $125 for it
In the low budget world there was a single channel preamp (like the Behringer mic500) that had a dial for sources (guitar, vocals, bass etc. etc.). I was reliant on my interface pres but I wanted something standalone because I wanted more control on the way in.
Anyway, believe it or not, that preamp taught me a lot about recording. First there was the gain and output dials to control the amount of saturation. The gain staging element, the fact that some sources were so quiet that you have no alternative (without better gear) than to dial everything up to max.
Then there was the sources dial - that was basically a tonal flavour. I didn’t necessarily match the source with the setting. No, it got me listening to the sound it made and thinking about which was better. A/B testing until I found what I liked.
I know that a cheap preamp might not have been better than my interface pres, but I wanted optionality, and if you’re starting out and are super curious but super broke, this was one very good way to get that.
Incredible if you drop it on rumblesque basses on a return. Obviously make sure that you only leave through the bands you intend and take care of the phase when doing so. Guess you know yourself how to do so.
If you have any voltage fluctuations at all, you might want to consider one with voltage regulation. Unfortunately most conditioners only stop spikes and don't do anything for voltage drops.
fabfilter pro c3 cant just do tons of different kinds of compression well, you can make a preset that nulls with Rvox down to -100db if you just match the threshold of the preset to rvox, and can even oversample
means you dont have to fight with the shitty waves installer, upgrade plan, nor the delay compensation issues some waves plugins introduce when realtime printing in protools
They simply don't put out bad/mediocre products. While I don't own everything, the seven* I own from them are all extremely musical, easy to use, sound incredible, and have so much character.
*I own Panpot, Vulf Compressor, Tupe, Trem Control, Tone Control, MidSide, and CanOpener
A djm 850 to produce music. Passing all my stems through it instantly brought everything together in a way I couldnt do on a daw for years to come haha.
Hardware: the original GoldMike by SPL it’s pretty cheap second hand, great on vocals but also on buses. Software Lavish it gives you the warmth and impact of expensive Mastering AD-Converters for like 20 bugs.
I love my Sebatron VMP4000e. It’s a pretty clean tube pre that adds a great sheen to the sound, and I’ve modded mine to add an attenuator to each channel which makes it easier to push the gain a little more. I also still occasionally use an old Presonus Bluetube preamp as an effect, it can add a fun distortion when you slam it with signal.
For me it has to be the Drawmer MX60. I’ve never used any piece of gear that can compete with the low end the MX60 has. It’s the richest and fullest low end I’ve ever heard it’s beautiful
I have three now, so I feel like I can safely say the Alesis Micro Limiter. It just has the sauce. Purafied Audio has a great plugin emulation, but still ain’t nothin like the real thang.
I got a pair of these for about $15 when I bought some microphone stands a couple of years ago, never bothered giving them a try since I had other (better) options and I've never really trusted battery powered microphones. I gave them a try about 6 months ago using them as a stereo set up for my acoustic guitar and OH MY LORD, they sound clear and powerful, I should also say I'm running them through a very good interface (Antelope Orion Studio) but the fact that I've chosen these over 414s or SM7Bs over the past few months should tell you how much I've started trusting them. If you ever come across these mics for a cheap buck definitely get them.
Every cheap piece of gear I’ve ever bought usually comes with tons of noise or barely works, so only nice hardware has made its way into my daily workflow. I’ll use my rack of cheap gear on occasion, but it’s for creative sound design and far from underrated imo. As far as plugins, I suppose Camel Crusher and Sausage Fattener are the two I still use all the time either as a parallel distortion or directly on bass and 808s, and it’s usually between Sausage Fattener and Decapitator when I want a parallel vocal distortion. So I still love and use Sausage Fattener
Behringer HA400 headphone amp connected to the headphone output from my interface. I use it to test my different speaker setups besides my monitors quick. 1 output goes to a cheap Bluetooth speaker in mono to get a feeling of how it’d sound on a phone/small speaker, 1 goes to my VSX headphones, 1 goes to my subpac to check bass, and the other is for anything else I want to connect
It's not really a "key tool" but when I was first starting out like 9 years ago I picked up a pair of the Neewer SDC mics. ~$80 at the time, and they're pretty cool. For a beginner they're fantastic!
In haven't met anyone else in the live world regularly using an EV ND68 (or previously 868) kick mic, but it's my favorite by far. It activates the subs so nicely while staying extremely tight. Barely needs any eq if any at all. Even sounds good on kicks with no hole. Thing rules.
I pulled out my old ART TPS-II and ran my guitar through it before going into the interface, and it warmed and saturated my sound very sweetly. Now I miss it if I don’t do that.
A pair of relatively cheap GAP 3A-jr opto comps. Great on bass, love the sound across a 2 buss. A nice glue. Also great that it has 3 different attack and release settings, rather than just a fixed one.
Using guitar pedals as outboard gear for live sound. I carry a GFI system Solisventus to pretty much any show where i know i wont have a high end console or waves, and use it for whatever reverbs or delays i might need. Also sometimes it actually helps me having the controls for the reverb at my feet instead of on the console.
1970s - 80s Realistic / Radio Shack Baby Monitor. Basically a 3" speaker with a crude amplifier and a volume pot. Great for Bryan May 'Deacy Amp' impersonations. Highly compressed, boxy sound, full of character.
my pearl piccolo snare. dual mic it and add a ton of reverb and it just does the sound, i never need to sample blend it, even ghost notes come through in a dense metal mix.
back in the early 80s I was gifted a couple old, cheap, electric organs that didn't work and were pretty much falling apart. I harvested some parts, then scrapped them. some years later, I was moving & found the box of parts, got inspired to use the spring reverb tanks & volume pedal. It worked out great, and still gets used, having cost almost nothing (solder, wire, a couple inexpensive components, two hours time). What I ended up making was a stereo spring 'verb pedal that sounded surprisingly natural at low-moderate levels, and enjoyably "sproingy" & lo-fi when over-driven. Sometimes "junk" does cool things.
In my case its a loooooong list of Max4Live Devices. Gumroad is your best friend and people are releasing genius level stuff everyday for under $5 and maxing out at $100 for stuff that would be thousands as VSTs
The free airwindows plugins. In my opinion they bring the quality of UAD plugins with almost 0 cpu usage. It is absurd what these plugins can do. And especially in the genres that i make i just never heard anyone talking about it. It feels very underrated to me.
I do understand it though. There is quite a learning curve to it and the plugins are not self explanatory at all. The creator has written descriptions for each plugin but they are more like blog posts. Hahah they are stories. Not straight to the point explanations of what the plugins do.
The reverbs, distortions, tape simulation, saturation.. all top notch, atleast to my ear
cant say pieces of equipment and say software ... plugins are not pieces of equipment, tools ? yeah not equipment though.
i dont think your going to get anything good for cheap or pennies as a "key mixing " tool esp for hardware
when a plugin will sound 1000x better and be able to be much much cleaner/ less noisy etc
this is were maybe a plugin would be considered underrated tool - Free, cheap, sale etc
but i can assure you nobody is looking to add "cheap" to a mix when trying to have a modern full sounding mix, maybe if your sound designing and you wanna really experiment but def not in mixing
i will say my Cranborne Audio he-2( for its price) gets used in more and more and in different ways with me, so i think its pretty underrated, plus with the inserts for me as a hybrid guy- can use it on a single track, buses, or the mix/master, pair that with my GL Empress and now i have the empress in mono/stereo/ mid side.
Edit: Actually i lied ( now that i thought about it)... only cheap thing that i def use would be -
Track or buses - send into TC Electronics M100 (fx box) into the KT bbd 320 3rd dimension, the effects/controls are very limited so they don't always work but when one of the verb, delays, chorus or w.e works it does do it pretty good. Prob could achieve it with plugins but the controls are so simple its easy to change FX and either get what you want to try something else
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u/Chilton_Squid 3d ago
About 25 years ago I stretched a pair of tights over an embroidery ring as I couldn't afford a pop shield, and it's still every bit as effective as my K&M filters I use today.
I have it on the wall of my studio to remind me not to over-complicate things. It doesn't do that by any means, but it's a good pop shield.