Outside Scoop: 8 of the Best Mastering Plugins, How to Create Thicker Vocals, and More

8 of the best mastering plugins on the market. Can you name them all?

Music production interviews, plugin roundups, and tutorials; this Outside Scoop has it all. Catch up on the latest and greatest content published over the past week, including articles and videos. Check out an interview with Justin Bieber’s producer, create thicker vocals, make a living creating royalty free music, learn about 8 of the best mastering plugins on the market, and more.

8 of the Best Mastering Plugins on the Market

Black Ghost Audio rounds up 8 of the best mastering plugins that money can buy. These devices include EQs, compressors, limiters, and several different essential meters. Some of these plugins may be familiar to you, while some may not. For example, Loudness Penalty by MeterPlugs just hit the market in the form of a plugin that allows you to see how much different streaming services will bring down the level of your music. Check out the other unique mastering tool that made this list by reading the full article.

Interview with Justin Bieber’s Songwriter / Producer, Poo Bear

Pensado manages to get some of the greatest music producers onto his show. This week on Pensado’s Place he sits down with Poo Bear. Poo Bear has worked with artists like Justin Bieber, Skrillex, J Balvin, and Chris Brown; he talks about how his sensitivity and self-critical attitude allow him to create hit records.

Thicker Vocals: Doubles Vs Duplicates

If you’ve been struggling with creating lush vocals lately, Matty Harris of mixandmastermysong.com has the solution for you. He demonstrates the difference between doubling vocals and duplicating vocals, along with when it’s appropriate to use each technique. To top it off, he runs through how he uses Waves’ Doubler plugin to duplicate and pan vocals quickly.

How to Make a Living In Royalty Free Music

Matt Hylom shares with Graham Cochrane of The Recording Revolution how he’s turned his songwriting, playing, and recording skills into profit. He makes his living as a full-time producer writing royalty free music; this includes music for commercials, jingles, etc. It turns out that Hylom’s sister got him interested in creating royalty free music for websites like Audio Jungle. He describes his slow come up in the royalty free music scene and walks through his steady growth as a producer.

How to Contact Blogs and Playlists in 6 Steps

Contacting blog owners and playlist curators can be tough. They get tons of emails every day, so it’s essential that you make an effort to stand out. LANDR suggests that you send out customized emails to appropriate channels, provide brief context to your submission, follow up your email once, and cross-promote with the channel promoting your music.

‘AI’ Takes on Writing Death Metal, Country Music Hits, and More

Peter Kirn of CDM takes a look at how artificial intelligence (AI) is generating music, and even includes a link to a machine learning death metal live stream. He says “Okay, first it’s important to say, the whole point of this is, you need data sets to train on. That is, machines aren’t composing music, so much as creatively regurgitating existing samples based on fairly clever predictive mathematical models.” Although musical AI may not be as advanced as you had hoped for yet, Kirn makes the point that AI may “make for new instruments and production software.”

4 Ways to Use Silence to Enhance Your Productions

Silence is a creative tool that you don’t hear many people talk about… *ba-dum-ch* Cristofer Odqvist of The Pro Audio Files describes how the silence in a song is just as important as the sounds that are present. He discusses making use of “the mute button,” the silence between notes, “activating” signals that are phase canceling with one another, and disappearing FX.

How To Start Selling Your Music Effectively

This is a rapid-fire Q & A with Austin Hull of Make Pop Music that addresses plenty of different music production topics. He walks through what a typical workday looks like for him, which is pretty much packed from start to finish; it includes filming MPM videos, doing work for clients, and managing social media accounts. I’ve always been impressed with the quality and quantity of content that Make Pop Music releases, so seeing how it all comes together is rather intriguing.

How to Use Limiters in Your Mixes to Achieve Impact and Loudness

Sean Divine talks about using limiters during the process of mixing, in addition to mastering. Limiters are a go-to tool for making music loud, but they’re equally as useful when attempting to tame transient song elements. Divine demonstrates multiple different instances in which he may use a limiter, along with offering up some of his preferred limiting plugins like the Waves L3 Ultramaximizer and Ozone 8 Maximizer.

Charles Hoffman is a Mixing and Mastering Engineer at Black Ghost Audio. After graduating from the University of Manitoba with an English degree, Charles completed his education at Icon Collective in Los Angeles, CA.

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