Manifesto Implementation: Day Of The Long Knives!
Kind of a light day today in the studio meant that after catching up on a bunch of contracts invoicing and other monkey work, I could get down to implementing the Manifesto on my computer; that is, ruthlessly eliminating soft synths, sample players, and audio plugins from my system. I'm changing my workflow, and there's a lot of stuff that just doesn't cut it at this point (admittedly, some software never did cut it).
So I went through every plugin, and decided then and there whether it was useful or whether it would be axed, gone, deleted, made to disappear, exiled and "resettled."
The criteria were:
1. Has to sound good enough to be used on its own or in conjunction with some hardware and mix at least decently.
2. Must have been used on a track in the last six months, or must have inspired creative ideas during that period if not used on a track.
Everything else had to
go!
Ruthlessly Liquidated:
Absynth, Massive, FM8, Alpha, Morpho, CRX4, Octopus, RMV, Predator, Electra2, Oxium, Syn'X, Strum, String Studio, Ultra Analog, Chromaphone, Tassman, Strum Electric, Ohmicide, Ohm Boyz, Fromage, Quad Fromage, Sample Tank, SampleTron, T-Racks, Symptohn, Miroslav, Predatohm, dozens of Waves plugins, GTR3, Studio Devil's amp modeler, Independence Pro, Mach Five, and Amplitube.
Goodbye! See yaz! Nice knowin' ya! Have a nice afterlife!
No point in having the Revolution slowed down. No sense in auditioning patches or otherwise fussing with a piece of software I haven't found useful in forever, or one that doesn't sound good enough to be used on a project. Money down the tubes? Well, I used some of this stuff a long time ago, and most of it appeared on tracks and paid for itself. A significant percentage never got used at all, once I started working with it and discovered the relationship wasn't going to work out.
Having shown my commitment to the principles of the Revolution by my action day, I can now await the arrival of The Prophet with the proper revolutionary attitude.
Note: I will concede that there is some good sounding software that remains on my computer. Lots of it. In the soft synth world, this is stuff that I can process through some analog gear, or even some plugins, and get pretty good results, because it's powerful stuff.The stuff that's remaining will most likely be run through at least one analog stage while mixing simply to give it a little more weight, but some of it I'll just keep around because it inspires creative ideas.