Tokyo Dawn Labs

It’s Friday! It’s in fact Friday the whole day, so let’s do a #freefriday. Music equipment costs money. Sometimes a lot of money and on spare occasions an insane amount of money. So, can you get high quality plugins for a fraction of the cost, or even for free? Sure! There are tons of free stuff (and I do really mean free — not pirated) scattered across the Internet. A really good source for finding both free (and none-free) plugins and every else needed when it comes to software and music production is KVR Audio. But before you browse the site and get totally lost in the huge pile of free stuff I’d like to give a hint on where you should start; Tokyo Dawn Labs.

Tokyo Dawn Labs came to my attention via my old and trust studio buddy in arms as well as best friend. He recommended I’d try their compressor which was free of charge. Hand on the heart. It’s actually better than a lot of other compressors that costs money. It’s been discontinued now and replaced with an even better one. For free!

Before I shortly just go through their four plugins they have, I’d like to mention that they have a Gentlemen’s Edition for each of the plugins. That’s the version which has a few more feature compared to the free one, and you will pay a very small fee for it; to be a Gentleman. If you really like their work.

The plugins

Kotelnikov

Kotelnikov is the replacement for the discontinued Feedback Compressor 1 and 2. It’s designed to not be a virtual analog dynamic processor and they describe it with their own words like this:

The concept is “proudly digital” in the sense that it doesn’t try to emulate any previously existing device. This is the original!

SlickEQ

SlickEQ is an EQ that comes in four colours where each colour has a slightly different sound. You can also choose whether or not it should be linear.

Proximity

Proximity is pan-pot on steroids but still easy to use. It uses psycho-acoustic models to place the sound in a 3D space in stead of on a 2D line which the normal pan in your DAW does.

Nova

The latest plugin to join the family is called Nova. It’s a four band dynamic EQ similar to Waves C4. Each of the four bands also has a dynamic processor so you can use them individually. There’s also the standard Low-Pass and High-Pass filters additionally to the four bands.

The Gentlemen’s Edition has six dynamic bands.

If you’re tight on a budget and want to have high quality plugins in your mix, you should over look these plugins. They cover the basics that you need to come quite far. I forgot to write that the all run on both Windows and OS X so it’s only the Linux nerds who’ve been neglected.

Don’t forget to have fun while recording and being creative!

Did I say the’re all free of charge? I did — didn’t I?

#blogg100 — post 11/100