It’s a common complaint that we all have too many plugins. When talking about premium third party plugins for many of us that’s true. And because we’ve spent good money on them we feel appropriately guilty at our wastefulness. It has to be said that we often don’t feel the same about plugins we didn’t directly pay for though.

Anyone who has a Pro Tools subscription already has a ton of plugins, and there are probably some you haven’t even opened. I just checked and found one, you’ll have to read on to find out which though.

The best premium plugins are just brilliant. If you have Fabfilter’s Pro-Q3 I totally get why you don’t use the 7 band EQIII, the same goes for someone who has Cinematic Rooms who hasn’t opened Revibe II in a while. However just because a premium plugin is better, it doesn’t follow that the stock plugin is bad, and something stock plugins have over third party plugins is ubiquity. Anyone with a Pro Tools subscription or update plan has these plugins. That’s really useful if you collaborate.

Then there are the people who don’t have premium alternatives. There is some good stuff here so before you convince yourself that you can’t do good bus compression without buying something, actually you might already have what you need.

Here are five plugins Pro Tools users might have been neglecting.

BBD Delay

I love delay and particularly character delay, you could also just call it ‘bad delay’. If it’s coloured, distorted and generally ruined it ticks all my boxes. I’ve had a few go-to delays for this. These days I’m using Valhalla Delay as it just does everything brilliantly, but before I found this I was really into the BBD Delay, which is one of the plugins which came from the Eleven Rack.

It sounds gloriously terrible. My first experience of delay was a blue Frontline stereo analogue guitar delay and I absolutely loved it. This has all the fidelity issues of a bucket brigade delay, with a veiled HF roll off which tucks the repeats in behind the dry signal in a very useable way.

Add to this the fact that the plugins which come from the Eleven Rack support MIDI learn and can be controlled from a standard MIDI controller via CCs and this gets even more interesting if you don’t have a Eucon control surface.

Pro Expander

The Pro series is great. I use Pro Compressor on every session. I have third party alternatives which are really, really good but for everyday compression tasks this is the one for me. However I think its relative the Pro Expander gets forgotten about. For cleaning up drum tracks I’ve been a huge fan of Sonnox’s wonderful DrumGate, which because of its AI wipes the floor over any conventional gate for drums. However for more general use Pro Expander has some really useful features. One of the big ones for me is a dedicated Ducking mode. Read Luke’s recent article in which he draws a distinction between the external side chain compression which is so often what people mean when talking about ducking and ‘real’ ducking which for clarity he refers to as an ‘inverse gate’. Or check the premium tutorial in which I illustrate the difference between these two, very similar, processes.

However for general gating duties get to know the hysteresis control. This control is much easier to understand than its unfriendly name suggests, its an offset between the threshold value when the level is falling compared to the value when the level is rising and can be used to avoid chattering and false triggers. Find out how to use it below.

Impact

Unlike much of the classic hardware which is endlessly modelled in plugin form, I’ve spent a lot of time hands on with an SSL bus compressor. Without having used the real thing its possible to build up your expectations a bit further than is fair because, while it’s a really useful compressor which, when used right, sounds great on some material. It’s not magic.

The important thing about an SSL style bus compressor is to get to know it and to mix into it the whole way through your mix, don’t just pop it in at the end. In truth I usually tend to do one thing with this style of compressor - a couple of dB of compression on the peaks at 2:1 with a 30ms attack and release set to Auto is my regular starting point for anything which is driven by a backbeat on the snare. I love the UAD G series plugin for this but Impact does a great job with the same settings. It sounds different, it isn’t as mid-forward to my ears but this doesn’t matter if you’re mixing into it and if you’re using a bus compressor you really want to be mixing into it from the beginning of your mix. Try this compressor and you might be pleasantly surprised.

Autopan

This is the one I was referring to at the beginning which I’ve never actually opened. I love electric pianos, and stereo tremolo on a Rhodes is basically auto pan but if I want to autopan something other than electric piano I’d typically automate it. This plugin, originally from Trillium Lane has been there the whole time, completely overlooked by me.

The idea of auto panning sounds other than electric pianos has been very literally in front of me since I bought a Nord Electro 6D. The very economical effects section of this offers, in the ‘Effect 1’ section, tremolo, ring modulation, wah and autopan. This has prompted me to try autopan on lots of sounds I wouldn’t typically try it on and the results have led to me looking for something to bring this convenience in to Pro Tools. It was there all along!

Autopan can be used in channel widths from mono-stereo up to mono-5.0. No there isn’t a mono-mono version!

LoFi

Some people might see this on the list and wonder why it is here. This is a case of those who know, know. There are so many options when it comes to saturation. From premium offerings like Soundtoys’ ubiquitous Decapitator through all the free options. There are just so many free saturation plugins! Some are actually pretty cool too. Softube’s eternal Saturation Knob has to get a special mention here. But I, and many other people, keep coming back to Avid Lo-Fi.

If you just dive in you’ll probably conclude its not for you. There are a bunch of controls relating to bit crushing duties that I simply never touch but if you want to add a little fur to drums or basses, or anything else, but it’s usually low end stuff which gets the treatment for me, then dial in just a little distortion, not saturation but distortion. I never go further than 1.0 but if you haven’t tried it, give it a go.

Are there any Avid plugins from the Complete Bundle which you think get passed over? Share your thoughts in the comments.