In todays video, 10x Grammy Winner Darrell Thorp spills the beans about his favourite mixing tools!
Darrell is an incredible producer and engineer who has worked with the Foo Fighters, Radiohead, Switchfoot, Molotov, Beck and countless other a-list artists. A 3 time TEC Award winning Producer, Mixer, Engineer with over 22 years experience and many multi platinum and records to his discography.
These 5 plugins are the tools he uses to create outstanding music every day, and they’ve made it onto his most popular productions.
Without further ado, let’s dive in!
#1 UAD Neve 1073
As a fan of UAD entire library the Neve 1073 sticks out for Darrell. Not only is it still part of the UAD platform using their DSP but is now available as a Native Plugin. As an emulation of Darrell’s favorite Pre-Amp it’s a go to grab for him. With the ability to not only gain up the signal it of course comes with its 3 bands of EQ with its great frequency points. For Darrell it’s especially great on tracks that haven’t been recorded quite the best.
#2 LiquidSoics Seventh Heaven Pro
This is the go to everyday Reverb plugin for Darrell, It’s on his vocals, guitars and drums. It ca be used plainly using its Decay Mix and Gian knobs or can be opened up for more control and EQ. Most importantly this Reverb sounds great!
As Darrell says,“It’s such a simple great layer out plugin”.
Liquid Sonics Seventh Heaven (Reverb)
#3 Oeksound Soothe2
A must have harsh removal plugin. You can slap it on stock to get to 80% of what you need right off the bat. Or you can use its loaded Presets (including Darrell’s own included Presets) and get more in detail of it’s features to smooth out what you need. Darrell will use this on just about any instrument that needs frequency taming from Vocals to cymbals of drums.
#4. Fabfilter Pro Q3
With it’s ability to map EQ settings, matching EQ settings, map tonal curves of outboard gear and more Pro Q3 is a versatile everyday working EQ for Darrell. For Darrell it’s his general everyday EQ to remove mud, harshness, add air, bump low mids, highness and more. As his go to EQ he already has his go to EQ points loaded onto it by default making it even more work flow friendly and fast. A favorite feature is it’s subtle smooth sound that won’t introduce crunch.
Fabfilter Pro-Q 3 (Highly versitle, colorless EQ)
# 5 DDMF Magic Death Eye
Having come across this plugin in a session Darrell had to have it. Darrell uses this compressor on drum parallel, guitars and vocals mostly. Unlike some other compressors, with using the Magic Death Eye Darrell gets the hard compression he wants without losing control of the low end. “It’s an instant tone box”.