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Less is more, so the old saying goes. But when it comes to plugins, are electronic artists better served by having a broad range of sound-shaping tools at their disposal, or keeping their options deliberately limited in order to better focus on the task at hand: actually making music?
Fred Again has positioned himself firmly in the latter camp in a new interview for the Tape Notes podcast, imploring listeners to spend less time seeking out the perfect EQ and and stick to a narrow set of reliable ‘go-to’ plugins, thus freeing up time and space to concentrate on more consequential creative decisions.
“This would be the thing I would most advise people to do,” Fred tells host John Kennedy. “I’ve spent so many thousands of hours wasted on plugins, getting into the weeds with these things. I’ve made it so that my Logic, I’ve just got this one menu that only has the eight plugins I use, or whatever that is, 12 plugins. It just doesn’t matter.”
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“You want to do the things that liberate your mind to be hearing well, not whether or not [you’re using] this compressor or this distortion or this distortion… the thing that’s most dangerous about getting into that is that you’ll forget about whether or not the chorus is wrong, or whether or not the chord progression is actually not serving the feeling right.”
Fred recalls a demonstration he gave to students at a university, where he created a set of sounds in his DAW, processed each track with equivalent mixing plugins from different manufacturers and then played the results to the class.
“It doesn’t matter what you choose. They’re all great”
“I made a session that made a few sounds, a vocal, some drums and a guitar thing,” he says. “I made the exact same sound with all Logic [stock plugins], the same sound with another set of plugins, the same sound with another one… and I played it for everyone and it was all the same. It just could not matter less.”
While Fred maintains that mixing plugins, by and large, produce indistinguishable results, he admits that experimenting with software instruments and synth plugins can inspire creativity. “There’s the category of plugin that’s really playful and random, like a crazy new synth that really surprises you,” he says.
“I think playing with things like that is a great thing to do. But in terms of your reverb, compressor, EQ, all these things, I would just say, delete everything apart from… choose one, two, three, four, five, it doesn’t matter what you choose. They’re all great. Choose which one you like the sound of most and just work within that, and then focus on writing songs.”
While we’re – perhaps unsurprisingly – inclined to disagree with the claim that every reverb, compressor and EQ plugin sounds exactly the same, Fred certainly has a point: there’s something to be said for limiting yourself to a handful of trusted tools in order to fight decision paralysis, speed up your workflow and sharpen your focus on the fundamentals of songwriting.
A well-chosen reverb plugin never made a number one hit, after all, and if you spend too long deliberating over which tools to use, you may never actually finish the song that has the potential to get there.
“I’ve seen people make the most incredible-sounding records in every way, so therefore all that matters is the ear,” Fred concludes.
“I’ve seen people do it in tape, analogue, SSL desk, and it’s incredible, and I’ve seen Sonny [Skrillex] do it all in a laptop. Clearly, then, it’s most important to just liberate your headspace and not be worried about A/Bing things like you’re a scientist. Just think, ‘does it EQ?’ Yes, great. ‘Do I like the way it sounds?’ Great. Next.”
Listen to the full episode or subscribe to Tape Notes on Patreon.
