What demo expired? Yeah, I'll buy it. This is me back at my old ways of buying almost any plugin that pops up in my instagram feed. I wasn't always like this. Well, actually, no. Yes, I've always been like this. Except for the one year I committed to not buying a single plugin. And despite what I learned from that experience, here I am, right back at it.
Welcome back to the show. My name is Travis Farence. I'm a recording engineer and mixer with a Grammy nom, a few number ones, and a huge plugin problem. I have so many plugins I even forget some of the ones that I couldn't live without. Now, don't get me wrong, I think it's important to have quality tools to get the job done. But I think a lot of us are taking it a bit over the top, and I'm not sure that the audio companies are helping us out here. Are they scamming us out of money and giving us
a product that doesn't work? No. But are there some snake oil sales tactics going on? Definitely. So now that I've eliminated every company in the industry from being a potential sponsor of the show, please consider hitting the subscribe button to support the channel. And while you do that, I'm going to get into why I didn't buy a plugin for a year back in 2022. I had just finished building this studio and
was still carrying some of the debt from that project. So the logical decision at that time was to obviously cut unnecessary business expenses and to pay that debt down as fast as possible. Among those expenses were plugins, obviously. But there was also a part of me that felt that I had invested so heavily in giving myself a tool, this room, to hear properly that I had to use it to its fullest potential. No more searching for new plugins to give me a specific sound. I
had enough plugins. I should be able to make any sound I want at this point, especially now that I could hear such small moves with such great detail. And so I went a full year without buying a single plugin. Now, I'll be honest, I did get a couple of endorphin hits off of the plugin alliance subscription, right? They always add a few throughout the year that are already included. But other than that, I was off the new plugin train. No demos, no nfrs, nothing. So what was
the result? Obviously, I saved money, but I also got so much more than just that out of it. First off, I learned the tools I had better than ever. I was digging into stuff the way I should have when I first got it. It's almost embarrassing how basic and surface level I was with some of the tools that I already had. Take something like Saturn two from fabfilter. I was using maybe 25% of the power of that
plugin. Now it's become one of my go to saturators. I also ended up doing a lot more plugin comparisons without the option of searching the Internet for, I don't know, the vibeiest tube plugin I could find. I now had to take the ones I already owned and compare them, hear the difference between them, and decide what I liked about each and where I could use them. You know, listening. What a novel concept. Right now you might be
thinking, wow, this guy sounds super lazy. I can't believe he's never done that. But as you do this job longer and longer, you find that you end up collecting plugins that come in on sessions or are part of a bundle or a subscription and use them, like one time. And I definitely fell victim to that, because having more tools than you need in your arsenal has just become the way of the studio. You find yourself buying plugins just to have them. Like, what if somebody comes to the studio and wants
to use contact? I better pick that up. But it's more cost effective if I buy complete. So I'll just do that. Yeah, do that. Spend $800 just in case. Great idea. So where does this mindset come from? It comes from the fact that it's been here since the beginning. Recording studio culture has always been very much about the gear, especially if you spent a lot of time in
some of the big studios like I have. I came up through Capitol, and I spent countless hours in a lot of the LA Staples places, like Henson, east, west, Westlake, or wherever. I've been to pretty much all of them at least once. And in those rooms, the tools of the trade are like characters of the story. Look at the sound city documentary. It's basically a love story about a Neve console at capital. We had the Frank Sinatra U 48. Was it Frank's personal mic?
No. Did he sing into it? Yes, but he also sang into half the mics in the mic locker. But that one. That one was called Frank. So, coming up in that gear centric culture, you just had this attitude that whatever you needed to make the record, you just had to get it. Engineers would come into capital and need to rent things. How outlandish does that sound? You're in one of the best studios in the world. The M omni wouldn't work for your string
rooms. You had to rent the M 50s or you needed to have a Telefunken 251. None of the other mics in the mic locker would work for your vocal. Now, obviously, if you've used these mics and you've got a trained deer, then you understand why somebody would be making those requests.
But still, the fact that that is part of the culture, I think, feeds into the way the audio industry targets engineers and producers like you and I. They know how idolized the tools are, and they want to play into that to convince us that we need them. All of them. Oh, the artist wants a vintagey Motown vibe for this one. Well, let me just grab that Ua hitsville stuff that'll be perfect for this record. Once again, if you want that sound and your ears are trained, I
get it. But really, you can't make that record without buying a plugin. Nothing else in your plugin list will do that job. Which brings me to what are we really searching for here? And to be honest, we're searching for shortcuts. And I'm not going to leave myself out of this one. I have bought more plugins looking for a sound than I care to admit to. And that sound, it was already in my daw. And now that I've spent a year not buying
plugins, I know that. And I'm not just talking about shortcuts to find a sound. It's shortcuts to inspire creativity as well. This applies to sample packs, soft synths, guitar pedals, analog synthesizers, outboard gear, everything. We are all guilty of buying something at least once because we were bored. The interesting part is that the old school engineers that many of us aspire to be like, they weren't buying or
renting gear to find shortcuts. The reason that gear is such a character in the recording studio story is because they knew it so well. Those engineers knew the tones of pretty much every tool they had access to. That's why they were so specific in having everything they wanted and working at particular studios for certain projects. Now, I'm not trying to imply that the newer generation of engineers doesn't know their tools, but I do think we collect them for different reasons.
We have so many options at our fingertips. How could we possibly know them the way the previous generation did? Have you ever sat down, be honest with your four SSL channel strip plugins, or your 511 76 plugins, and picked your favorite? Have you? Have you really done that? Also, it's possible you've never even worked on an SSL. So how do you know which one is the best other than from what the marketing tells you? So don't buy shortcuts. Put a couple different versions up and test them
out. Pick the one that you like, regardless of whether it sounds like the real thing or not. This is how you develop your unique taste, your sonic identity. That's what people did in studios for decades when they were learning, and I feel like the emphasis on that has faded. There are so many options now that I think it becomes overwhelming, and we're inclined to just watch a YouTube video on which one is the best and then take that
person's word for it. But their opinion is based on their taste. You want your opinion to be based on your taste. So this brings me back full circle to my no plugin experiment. That's what I really took away from this full year of not buying plugins. I finally started to pick my favorites and develop my taste even further, and I learned that you can make any sound you want with any tool you want if you put the work in to train your
ears. So if you're watching this and you can't afford all the tools that some of the other engineers around you have at their disposal, don't be defeated by that. I think you'll actually discover your own sound faster because of those limitations. So I hope this makes you question why you're collecting the tools you're collecting and encourages you to really master the gear and software you have before buying anymore. And I want to be clear, I'm definitely
not anti options. I love having options, but I think it's important that we all add to our options for the right reasons. Doing this video has actually made me question the plugin I bought in the intro. But hey, got you to watch this far. So if you are still here and you think I'm wrong and you want to buy all the gear in the world, but you don't know how to afford it, check out this video on how to set your rates as a freelancer.