Toontrack EZ Mix 3 - and expansion packs

I was sceptical about buying this, I have had a load of plugins for Protools for decades, and thought it would not be useful.

Years ago I had a TC Electronics multi-band compressor, called Master X3 TDM, which ran on the Digidesign DSP boards. Like many other TDM plugins, I lost these when AVID moved to native processing.

Anyway Master X3 was brilliant for me - adding it to a final mix generally made a massive difference, and made any track sound much more like a professional end product.

Moving forward, I've used Waves C6 for years now, and assumed I had that base covered.

Anyway, with the Black Friday deals, I downloaded the trial installation for EZ Mix 3.

I had thought it was just FX for different instruments, but when I put it on the full mix, the presets are amazing to my ears.

I've tried it on  lot of my old stuff, and it really makes all the details stand out.

So: Presets or tweaking?

For guitar gear I've found I work out how to tweak my gear, then rarely change parameters later unless wanting a temporary alternative. Same with my AxeFX, Helix, Kemper etc. Tweak and save then use it.

For all my keyboard sounds, I'm less skilled in tweaking, and early on realised that buying in patches for my first one (Korg Poly 800 Mk2) was going to be the only effective path.

Nowadays I buy in suites of synths, pianos etc, and tweak the reverb, dynamics a bit, but little else.

My philosophy is to concentrate on the playing as much as possible, rather than the tweaking, although my ADHD often fights against this.

For this EZ Mix 3, you basically have little control - you select the preset, and there are few other parameters  you are allowed to tweak - more like getting a stomp pedal with 2-5 knobs.  I assume this will be fine for some, and an anathema for others.

The best reviews I found basically say - if you have fully-developed mixing and mastering skills, this is pointless, but otherwise it's very good - the results are fast and avoid analysis paralysis.

Onto expansion packs.

Reviews and comments indicate that the mastering presets that come with the basic plugin are good enough for mastering.  Therefore I looked for stuff that was more for guitar, because I found that this is where Toontrack have delivered their amp sims.

I ordered these:

Ambient EZmix Pack

EUR14.00

EZmix 3 Bundle

EUR199.00

for the 6 packs I ordered:

So: for playing guitar, first attempt with my default guitar (PRS NF NF HB) was disappointing on the more ambient/cinematic patches. Then I remembered that I've had that experience before with good kit, and I tried my EMG + active EQ guitar. The results were then instantly very creatively inspiring for the atmospheric patches, I had to dial up the treble, or scoop the mids on many of them. For the plainer amp sims, they are good, more like you bought an AxeFx and paid for a patch library, rather than the rubbish factory patches most vendors think fit to supply for some reason.

Maybe being a metal-origins vendor, they lean towards EMGs and active EQ? Anyway, these expansion patches are like buying a load of pedals, some you like, some not, some are very very inspiring, some not at all. Tweaking is very limited, is that good? Well really it puts me into more like when I buy a piano sample set - I tweak a few knobs, but that's all. I think that this makes it more into a creative playing outcome rather than another commissioning engineer shift.

I would highly recommend, but only if you have an EQ pedal or active EQ before the input.

Really good to hear your thoughts though. I too find less options/less knobs to tweak results in getting more done.