Oh away from hey what's going on out there I'm Sean Divine hope you all
are doing well today I have a new tutorial where we're going to do a
direct comparison of the stock plugins in Logic Pro X compared to some
third-party plugins some of them fairly expensive plugins
but this is a really popular question on the channel from those of you who are
curious you know do I really need third-party plugins
what are the strong points of some of the stock plugins and Logic Pro X and
what are some of the weak points so what are the first third-party plugins that
you should invest in after you've gotten used to the stock plugins but first
let's just take a listen I actually have set up this verse in sections and the
first section is mixed entirely with stock Logic Pro X plugins and then the
second is mixed with third-party plugins from companies like waves fabfilter I
think it's just those two and then we've got also some third-party reverb I have
the seventh heaven from Liquid Sonics and the echoboy on the delay and then
obviously in logic i have corresponding stock plugins and the settings are very
very close I tried to make sure things like the compression ratios are very
very similar across the board in terms of thresholds ratios all that stuff so
let's go ahead and play it back again the first section of the verse are stock
logic pro plugins the second half are third-party plugins
all right so let's do it one more time and I'm gonna solo our vocals here so
that you can keep an eye on the analyzer over here and the frequency you're gonna
see that they're very very similar but this will give you just a better idea
specifically some differences in the sound
alright so that gives you a good idea of just the different sounds
they're they're not that dramatically different there are some subtleties in
the different chains and I want to talk now about you know each of the
individual corresponding plugins that I use for the stock plugins and then
third-party plugins and kind of you know which ones are a little more the weaker
links in terms of the stock plugins so got a noise gate on both the stock as
well as the third-party and a noise gate you really don't need a third-party
noise gate this noise gate in Logic Pro X is a wonderful utility plug-in it
does exactly what it's supposed to do which is just attenuate that noise floor
and you don't need a third party noise gate in my personal opinion it's not
going to change a whole lot now getting into our deductive EQ let me pull up the
deductive EQ over here on the third party which is the Pro-Q and then
I'm using this stock Logic Pro X channel EQ now you see I've cut them at the same
points and to be honest with you for doing deductive EQ I think the channel
EQ and Logic Pro X is perfectly fine you really get more into the differences of
EQ when you start adding so you're going to have to
bring colors and the curves are really gonna affect this sound a lot more and
we're gonna get into that in just a second but as far as just cutting things
the logic stock EQ is is wonderful I don't have any qualms with it now let's
go on to the compression which is obviously a very very important part of
the vocal or any vocal especially with your hip-hop vocals so let's talk about
the stock Logic Pro X compressor versus some of the others like the proceed to
the waves r comp some of these those other popular third-party compressors I
will say that in my opinion the stock Logic Pro X compressor is one of the
biggest assets of the stock plugins that are included in Logic Pro it has a lot
of these different flavors up here so you can select different kinds of
compressors just by flicking the switch and it will maintain your ratio your
threshold settings so you can go through and get some different colors which is
really important with compression you want to experiment with different styles
because these are all going to affect the sound differently but in my
experience the the stock compressor in Logic Pro X is really great this is not
what I would upgrade first this is going to do you just fine for a while while
you're learning how to use compression and mix and it's also really handy just
with the way that you can use sidechaining routing within Logic Pro X
so now moving on to the additive EQ in the chain which you're going to see up
here I'm boosting pretty high on the channel EQ and what I've done is I've
just replicated what I had done on the SSL and generally with this EQ I just
like to kind of boost the the air or the extreme highs so I have this set at like
14 K and then I'm boosting pretty heavily so I've done really the same
kind of thing over here with the channel EQ and then I've just done some of the
the roll-off and the filtering once again just to get rid of even more lows
and low mids so this is the first or one of the first things that if you're gonna
move towards third-party plugins the
the additive EQs are really important and ones like this the SSL
they just have a certain color to them and they have a certain curve to the
frequency boost that just sounds really musical it fits well in the mix as
opposed to the channel EQ it's not that it won't do the job but it's just a
little bit harsher and it's a bit tougher to be really precise and make
musical types of boosts without having to get in and be you know extremely
surgical with how you're you know creating these boosts so just something
to be aware of but I would highly recommend investing in an EQ as one of
your first third party plugins once you get to that point ones like the SSL
EQ the the pro-q - for boosting your frequencies especially high end is going
to be really helpful for you and very musical alright next up we got the
de-esser and I'm gonna tell you right now this is the first plug-in if you're
using Logic Pro X that I would invest in third-party because the de-esser in
Logic Pro X it's not very user-friendly you can get a decent kind of tone out of
it but it takes a lot of work and as you heard I personally don't think that it
sounds nearly as smooth and it's not doing the the same job as the waves
de-esser so you can generally get this waves deesser for a really affordable
price and it's totally worth it especially if you're using these digital
maybe a USB mic or you don't have a preamp you're just running through you
know a really kind of harsh sort of signal chain then this de-esser is going
to take care of that sibilance that you really want to tame with your vocals
especially in hip-hop so that it's just you know that is one of the most
annoying things in a vocal is having too much sibilance so definitely check out
third party deessers like that or also the fabfilter Pro DS is a good one I'm also
using this Manny Marroquin Triple D which again is just great for those of
you who are recording with a very digital
kind of clean signal chain this is gonna warm things up a little bit de-harsh it
let's get to the last thing in our chain which is just a limiter and all I'm
doing with this is just preventing us from going above zero if you're using a
limiter just in this way on your actual bus I think the stock limiter does just
fine now if we start talking about master limiters then I think the the
Logic Pro X stock plugins are really limited no pun intended in that way
because I believe it is the adaptive limiter yeah or even the multipressor
just the limiter if you're using this for mastering it's just not going to be
as transparent as something like ozone or even the fabfilter Pro L
the waves l2 is even going to give you a cleaner sound so I would recommend one
of those before running your mix through one of those processors in Logic Pro X
because it is going to affect your transients in a not-so-pleasant way so
last let's get to just our send effects or some of the auxes that I have set up
here I've got the space designer for the the reverb in Logic Pro X which honestly
it's a great reverb I really don't think that you need to venture too far out
from that for a while I do like this 7th heaven and some of the other third party
reverbs the lexicon is a really nice reverb but again I wouldn't get ahead of
yourself I would start off with the space designer and even some of the other
logic reverb plugins like platinum verb are you know they're generally pretty
nice tones to them so that's not really a troublesome area at least when you're
starting out and then go into our delay I have the third-party plug-in as
echoboy which is a really strong echo and delay processor processor in my
opinion it's probably the best out there it's tough to beat but if you're just
doing like basic you know delay throws and maybe subtle delays like in the
verse like in this one we just have a 16th note delay that's just giving us a
little bit of a stereo effect so for stuff like that you know again
this is going to do you just fine the tape delay in Logic Pro X let's just
talk about metering really quickly we you know were able to look at these
meters as we were checking out these verse vocal chains and I have the waves
I have some other metering you know I used the logic excuse me I use the ozone
metering sometimes I have one from plugin alliance called BX meter that I
used sometimes and to be honest they all really tell you the same thing like this
one's measuring RMS right now and peak this one's doing peak and RMS and they
generally are gonna give you really close readings to each other this is the
same thing peak or rms it's more about what you're kind of used to looking at
and what's going to be the easiest for you to reference during your mix so if
you just glance at one of these you can really get a quick idea of what is going
on so more than anything else in terms of features they really do the same
thing it's just what is your personal preference so just keep that in
mind but for at least when you're starting out again the stock metering
and logic is going to be just fine for you alright y'all so we talked about the
stock Logic Pro X plugins specifically for mixing and compared them with the
third-party plug-ins a couple from waves fabfilter we've got some stuff in
there from soundtoys some really nice third-party plugins they're gonna be
more expensive and my advice to you would be get really comfortable with the
stock Logic Pro X plugins and then some of the first ones that you're gonna want
to check out once you do get comfortable with those would be a additive EQ
something that's going to give you some nice clean boosts give you a
professional top-end and then I would look into the de-esser because that
again is a gaping hole in some of Logic Pro X's plug-in chains and finally you
want to invest in a good master limiter or brick wall limiter so that when
you're doing your mixes and you want to bring things out at commercial levels
and you just want to keep things in check
not peaking on your master bus you're going to want something like this it's
not going to drastically affect your transients and it's going to keep
your dynamics in check so definitely check out something like ozone or even
the L2 to the L1 in some cases is OK from waves as well so a lot of good
options out there that are gonna serve you better than the Logic Pro X master
limiters hope the video is helpful for you if you have any questions about the
stock Logic Pro X plugins or third-party plugins that we compared here feel free
to leave a comment below if you learned anything in the video please like and
subscribe and we'll talk to you soon