In this article we are going to show you how you can save thousands of dollars every year on studio gear. Warning, it contains some home truths that may mean a change in your habits, if that’s not for you then stop reading now.
Do you know how much you spend on audio plugins and other studio gear every year? It’s highly unlikely that you keep a running total of your spending, if you do then you are rare. It’s quite possible your spending runs into the hundreds and more likely it could run into the thousands. For some, the total amount spent on audio plugins and other gear for your studio is perhaps your entire expendable income per annum, if you are buying things on credit it could be more than your expendable income.
Who can blame you? After all without that thing you’ll never be able to get the perfect sound… at least that’s what you are led to believe.
You might be thinking at this point this is some polemic against the marketing practises of the people that sell you the stuff, it’s not. The pressure to buy is often coming from our peers, social media and forums, in some cases the marketing efforts are the least persuasive of the entire push to get you to spend more money.
There is a business theory called the law of diminishing returns. Here’s one definition of that;
The law of diminishing marginal returns is a theory in economics that predicts that after some optimal level of capacity is reached, adding an additional factor of production will actually result in smaller increases in output.
To simplify that it means there comes a point where adding more to the process doesn’t improve the results by as much. Or to put it another way, there comes a point where you are spending money on your studio and the gains are not as great as the investment, in some cases it effectively becomes a bad investment.
If you consider plugins for example. There have been few development in the last decade that mean you can do now what you couldn’t do then. Even the smart plugins like iZotope RX and Sound Radix Auto-Align have been around for over a decade. Of course improvements have been made to their features and performance, but they still offer the same core functionality.
So how do you save money?
Learn How To Use What You Have
Yep, you’d be surprised how little we scratch the surface of a plugin or DAW. It’s obvious by the amount of comments you read in forums or social media bemoaning a missing feature. Then someone who has “read the f*cking manual” points out it can be done.
Just this week Russ discovered a feature in iZotope RX that allows you to change the inflection of dialogue by drawing a pitch plot on the timeline. It meant he could take a cut from an interview and send the inflection of the voice down instead of up. Had he not found that feature he might have purchased a plugin that could do it, scrapped the clip or had a less than perfect edit.
Ask yourself how many of the plugins and applications you have on your computer do you really know well? In many cases we are scratching the surface. They say that ignorance is bliss, when it comes to audio software ignorance is expensive. We have gigabytes of software that’s often redundant because it either unused or replicating something else we already own.
There’s a group of people who are serial DAW users. They start on one DAW, learn it just enough to get working and then when they hit a roadblock decide the DAW is rubbish and move onto another one. Then the process starts again, give it a few years and they are back where they started having done a tour of all the major DAWs on the market.
On the other hand there are hundreds of thousands of people still using the same DAW for decades. Is their DAW perfect? Probably not, but they’ve worked hard to learn how to get the very best from it.
The Difference Is Slim
Here’s an elephant in the room… how different do all the 1176 clones really sound? Yes there’s some cheap crap out there, but once we get into the territory of the good stuff the difference is negligible. We’ve proved this time and again with blind audio listening tests, in many cases it comes down to taste or the platform you’ve chosen to hitch your wagon to.
FOMO, the fear of missing out, fuels some of our buying habits. The sooner we realise that keeping up with people on social media is futile and costly. In the final analysis your client rarely knows or cares what brand of plugins you are using, in some cases they don’t even know what a plugin is.
Start Using Stock
A few weeks ago we asked Grammy winning mixer Mike Exeter to mix the same song with both premium and stock plugins. We told him to first mix it with his favourite premium brand plugins and then mix the track again using just the plugins you get with Pro Tools. It’s hardly fair is it putting things like EQ7, DYN3, and Dverb against what are premium plugins but we thought, what the hell?
To be clear, this wasn’t a case of trying to match the settings on each plugin. It was mix the track twice and see what happens when you don’t have access to, in this case, over $2500 worth of premium plugins.
We gave the results after the test and this was the summary;
However, we think the takeaway from this exercise is that it’s not the gear, it’s the ear!
There’s some fantastic plug-ins we all have on our systems but if we don’t educate ourselves and invest the time in honing our skills then we may be wasting our money.
Summary
Perhaps when you read this title you expected us to give you some secret link or coupon code to save money. Life rule number one, you are NEVER SAVING MONEY WHEN YOU ARE SPENDING IT. The only time you are really saving money is when you intended to make that purchase anyway.
As we said at the start of this article, this is not some polemic against premium plugins or DAWs or software, quite the opposite.
Developers and manufacturers work hard to give us the best tools possible, they want us to discover just how powerful the tools we have in our toolbox are.
It’s in our best interests to learn to use our tools and the get the very best we can from them. Often it’s not the tools that are the issue, but our lack of commitment to learn them and our lack of imagination in using them. The next time you are tempted to buy something else, stop yourself and think, can I learn one I already own?
Photo by Brett Sayles from Pexels