Are there any edm musicians here?

If so, what's your favorite plugin (and software)?

I use garageband (I'm too cheap to buy a 600$ software for music), and my favorite plugin is Hive by u-he (I'm a beta tester). It's freakin beautiful.

pro-53 is pretty based
FireBird is the closest thing to free Sylenth1 you will get, it is pretty amazing
Junglist, CS Bass One and EVM Bassline are my weapons of choice for bassline
Tyrelln6 is weird but sounds great sometimes (it is by u-he aswell)


Cyanide2 does some very nice distortion
7InchNails is weird but i like it sometimes
i love FLOORFISH, best expander ive used (although i havent used many)
epicverb
fnequalizer
and of course the absolutely based CMT Bitcrusher

camelphatfree (really respected distorter although i have only used it in a few occasions)


stuff i use rarely: Jup7 (cant find link, its not that great though), DSK CHOIRZ, medusa2


gonna check out Hive, it looks pretty nice

I forgot to mention my other favorite synth by u-he, called Zebralette (and Zebra 2, but I only have a demo and rarely use it because it sometimes just decides to take a vacation and not play anything). Zebralette is free, and has (I'm estimating) at least 200 factory presets, with the ability to save your own.

My favorite filter has to be Rough Rider. It's a stereo compressor (I think that's what they called it) designed for drums, but it can make any track punchier or softer. But it does sound amazing on drums. It can make the Garageband default drums sound realistic (sort of).
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I found one called MAutoPan. I got nauseous using it on the master track (though it was funny). It is an autopan filter, but it runs by default at a pretty high speed. It feels like the sound is splashing back and forth.
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Also I figured out a neat little trick to make volume go past the limit. Put an overdrive filter on something, turn off the gain, turn up the output, and keep the tone the same. You'll be deaf afterwards.

auto pans are cool if you want to spread some white noise in the mix to give it more air
speaking of that, i need help giving my tracks more air, i always end up half assing it like adding a track with soft white noise. like if there were a way to set some compressed high frequency reverb for the whole thing it would be great


man i never get why people intentionally make everything past the output limit and then add a brickwall limiter on purpose to make it sound "intense" or something. the only time i ever accepted that was with this album and thats just because its distorted as shit already




also my daw is refusing to identify Hive lol
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trying hive right now. going through the presets it sounds like Sylenth1 if it wasnt amazing. not bad, i might keep it

I only did the volume limit thingy for an MLG version of a song I made. (I took a track and made it blast out the X-Files theme with air horns instead of the drop.)

oatmeal or sytrus are probably my favorites

I'm using Ableton Live and personally, I really like the Analog and Operator synths (both come with Live).

I also like most of Native Instruments' stuff, however they are quite expensive and I'm somewhat faster creating the sounds I need with Live's synths.
(xfer's Serum and KV331 Audio's SynthMaster 2 are also two quite nice synths)

In general, I'm more focusing on the kind of synth I need for the sound I want to create and then just pick the synth I feel like using at that moment (except I'm in need of a certain feature only a certain synth has, ofc )

I also got to say that I'd probably (If I had enough money) buy a modular synthesizer or some kind of Minimoog and I'm definitely going to buy a TR-8 somewhen in the near future, together with some other hardware things, such as NI's Maschine Studio, NI's Kontrol S61 and Ableton's Push, so I guess I'm aiming for a more hardware based production workflow in the future.

In terms of hardware, I'm hoping to save up for a Novation Launchpad or something.

I have a Nord Stage 2 setup , it's really expensive. I'm very inspired by Au5 , Haywyre , and artist like Varien and pegboard nerds.

the best synthesizers are the ones you like using

i've been making do with 3xosc for 6 years now... it's puny and hardly powerful but i can probably do a thousand things with it that none of you can