Plugin experimentation strategies

Something I see a lot with people who are just starting out on their journey of self-producing is that they’re timid in their explorations. They only ever make small adjustments; they turn the knob a little bit at a time, without first identifying the range of colors available to them by exploring the knob’s extremes.

An insight that I’ve had about this is that it might partly be due to a fear of breaking something; of wrecking the sound that they’ve managed thus far to create. If you have something that’s sort of working, it can be intimidating to try to go further — because what if you make it not better but worse, and then you don’t know how to get back to where you were? And then you’re just kind of lost? That can feel scary!

So here are some strategies for experimenting within a plugin, to help always keep you safe as you explore.

1. Make a copy of the plugin. I do this ALL the time. If I have something that’s working, but I think maybe I could get it to work better, but I really want to make sure I can go back to the previous way if the experiments don’t work out, I literally just option-drag the plugin into an empty adjacent plugin slot, and bypass it.
   
   This way not only can I experiment to my heart’s content, I can also compare to the previous version at any time, simply by bypassing the experiment copy of the plugin and un-bypassing the safety copy!
   

2. Use the plugin’s A-B feature. Many plugins these days have an internal A-B feature, which allows you to store two different plugin states within the same instance of the plugin and switch back and forth between them. If I have a setting that I like, but I want to keep experimenting, I will just hit the A>B button, to store the current settings (A) into the secondary slot (B). And then I can experiment and try to find something I like.
   
   When I have arrived at something that I think is cool, I can use the A/B toggle button to switch between A (the new version) and B (the previous version) with my eyes closed and see whether I have actually made an improvement. This way is better than the way I described in step 1, because you can’t do blind A/B when you have to manually toggle the bypass state of two different copies of a plugin.
   
   PRO TIP: once you’ve experimented, and A/Bed, and landed on the version that you think sounds best, hit the A>B button (if the A version is the one you’ve landed on) or the B>A button (if the B version is the one you’ve landed on). This way both the A and B buffers will contain the plugin state that you prefer the sound of, and you can’t accidentally get confused down the road.
   

3. Undo/Redo. Many plugins these days have robust undo/redo functionality, which makes it trivially easy to experiment, secure in the knowledge that you can always undo your way back to where you started.
   
   That said, if I’m going to be doing experimenting any more extreme than a couple of knob turns or button presses, I’ll generally opt for one of the other options, only because trying to compare settings by undoing 5 times and redoing 5 times is clunky.
   

4. Save a preset. If the plugin doesn’t have A/B functionality, or if its function makes it impossible to make a duplicate*, then I’ll just save presets with the same name and _1 or _2 at the end and toggle back and forth between them. You can often select adjacent plugin presets with arrow keys, so this can make for a decent A/B system!
   
   * Examples of situations where a duplicate won’t work are 1) softsynths, which you can only have one of per track and 2) mono-to-stereo plugins, which for obvious reasons can only exist once in a unique place in a plugin chain.
   

If you feel more secure that you won’t lose your work or break something, you’ll feel more comfortable experimenting. So I would encourage you to get familiar with these strategies, so that you can feel more confident as you continue to explore!

Always playtime — jamie