Find one use for each plugin

It can be tempting for me to feel, with each plugin I get, like it’s going to change my world. Like I’m supposed to master it, and learn every way that it can work, and test it on all instruments, and become An Expert In This Plugin. As though it’s school, and by the end of my onboarding process I should be able to write a paper on my new piece of gear.

And … that’s fine? I think for some people that approach can work really well.

But for me, I think, it’s always felt a bit overwhelming. Gear can be complicated. And sometimes the first time I open up a new thing that I haven’t used before it can feel like there are too many possibilities, or like I don’t quite understand what all the controls do, and it might feel hard to approach.

Something that’s felt helpful to me has been to realize that I don’t need to learn everything immediately about every piece of gear I have — and a great place to start is to just keep loosely experimenting with it here and there until I find something I love it for!

My example of this this week was with a reverb that I bought last year. I love Baby Audio, and I bought Crystalline on its intro sale. I installed it right after I bought it — this is nearly a year ago — and I opened up the session I was working on, and I put it on a vocal … and I didn’t like it! It wasn’t right for the song. Too dense. Hm. So I put it aside. I tried it a while later on a guitar … didn’t like it. Too slow an attack. Hmm. A while after that I tried it on a synth for one of our 80s kids songs … didn’t like it. Not enough harmonics. Hmmm.

But yesterday I needed a reverb for a specific situation. The song I was mixing had a sparse, driving postpunk disco feel, and I wanted to give the snare a Joy Division-ish space around it, to add a general sense of atmosphere and tension. In my mind, I was hearing a dense reverb with a slow attack and not a lot of harmonics … and I remembered my previous failed experiments with Crystalline! So I put it on there, and it was exactly what I was looking for. And now I have an excellent use for Crystalline.

Finding a way in — jamie