How many plugins do I own?

Too many.

How many plugins do I use?

Just a few.

But lately it has gone way out of control. Like a guitar player buying yet another overdrive pedal, I have fallen into the shiney new toy syndrome. SSL had been running an essentials bundle sale: a channel strip and a bus compressor. Only $49! Sold.

So I went to find the channel strip plugin to give it a spin.

What? How many EQ plugins do I own? Too many to list. I eventually did find it of course. But then I went looking for the bus compressor.

My, my. This has gone way out of control. When I need an EQ, most of the time I reach for my FabFilter Pro Q3. This one:

It has everything I need. And yet, every once in a while, I reach for a different plugin. Why? I don’t really know. Maybe it is a plugin that adds some colour, or is voiced a certain way. Whatever. Too many choices means I go for the tried and true.

Compression? Well, that is a bit of a different story. There I could justify having a few different types of compressors: VCA, FET, optical, tube and pulse width modulation. Or maybe just use this one:

At this point in my life it is not worth the effort to comb through all of the plugins and toss the ones I never use. Avid does not make plugin management easy. Aside from some basic classification settings (flat, category, manufacturer) it takes work to dive into some arcane folders hidden deep within the machine and to pull out the plugins you don’t want and throw them into an unused folder just in case.

A bit like the 30 plus terabytes of data I have stored on my NAS. Easier to leave it there than to go and organize it.

Now, where was that SSL bus compressor?