The Telenator.
The TelenatorHere’s one I meant to post a long time ago but glad now I waited. A few of his plugins are rather old and, by today’s standard quaint in appearance yet outdated; HOWEVER, several of his plugins are not outdated by any means and are regarded as some of the best freebies for final mix and mastering. Oddly, few people know about them. The reason I am so glad I waited until now to post is that the download links used to take an hour to locate and then figure out which one(s) were active and contained the entire series or the plugin I was looking for. This seems to have settled down a bit lately, so time to post the links. For information about the plugins themselves, you can click around on these download pages I have linked below to locate those, as the blog pages are somewhat scattered as well — this chap seems to be quite the eccentric. When first offered, many of these were well ahead of their time (choice of recording settings in 192kHz, etc.). They perform well in the normal recording settings, but really shine if your CPU will allow you to set things to the very max. A few are design specifically for mastering. In any case, you won’t find any other plugins that look anything like these ultra-realistic GUIs, and very few perform quite like these do. They are dressed up to look like ’60s pro console units to celebrate the era of music he loves best.
Here is the general entry page to all of his download sites worldwide:
http://sirelliot.wordpress.com/download-section/ Scroll down to ‘Sir Elliot’s Links’ on the right-hand side. I normally use the one called ‘Download Link In Europe (North)’, as it seems to be fastest and is kept the most complete and up to date of them all. Here is the page you get, having clicked that link:
http://sirelliot.blogg.se/ Once you arrive here, you want to scroll down to middle of the page almost all the way to the bottom. There you will find the categories and lists of his plugins, free for the downloading. Currently each download is being carried by some nice DropBox-looking site. I have just tested, and they are safe.
There are too many free plugins to discuss all here, but a few are general-purpose sorts, while others are designed as the best of the ‘Poorman’s Mastering Tools’.
My ultimate favourites are as follows here: Sir Elliot Studio Q (also called ‘The Snob Q for Mastering’), Sir Elliot Narrow Q (a quite narrow-Q EQ for final mix or mastering fixes of trouble EQ bands or odd problems that can arise), Sir Elliot Peak Limiter Series II (the ‘hardest’ brick wall limiter you’ll find for free — safe to mix up to -.01 peak level), Sir Elliot Mastering Limiter Series IV (THIS thing can win you any Loudness War once you understand how to use it, an almost scary powerful device with good resulting sound), Sir Elliot Altered Dynamics Series II (the Mastering Compressor of the lot here), and Sir Elliot Little Black Box Series II (M) (this one special duty for your hard rockers and metalheads who also insist on winning the Loudness Wars — quite powerful).
The others all work and desrve honourable mention, but the group here are the clear winners of his 20 or so. Do enjoy!
Cheers!
–Tele
adimatisThanks Tele, you really deserve apreciation for all these very useful links you’ve posted, many of these VSTs I tried, many not yet, but thank you for provinding the information!
Adi
The TelenatorHey, you’re very welcome, adimatis. I’m up to something here, in case you didn’t know.
First, I pretty well finished off searching far and wide for the best of the best free and inexpensive plugins. I love quality stuff, but I’ve also learned as you have that great recordings can be made without having to buy each plugin for $200 and only the ones that attract all the snobbery on some forums. So, part of my effort is myth busting as much as it is a desire to share the booty. The other part to this is that I spent a ridiculous amount of time searching and learning. Any time I became busy, especially last year, earning that almighty quid to keep my own pursuits going, in between I would suss out plugins and items on the Net, since trying to work on my own projects became difficult when having to give my all to do quality work for others. So, I’m also the sort who likes to get the most ‘mileage’ out of my efforts, and the ideal thing to do, then, is to get that by sharing them here on this forum.
The other big factor is that the nature of Podium itself, being of quality yet inexpensive, attracts many of us who are discerning yet on tight budgets. At the same time, I don’t see the sort of person here who is only clowning around with digital recording and half serious. The ones here all seem a bit more serious and really trying to get work done. At the same time, like so many others, I’ve had one bad experience after another on several other forums from the usual assortment of trolls, jerks, and a few that I am certain have some type of mental disorder. In the last few years I’ve watched, and it seems the sociopaths have come out en masse on certain ones. Fortunately, we don’t see really any of that here, and since they don’t come here hunting for software or troubles, I can share discoveries and a few unique news items here, meanwhile avoiding giving aid to the miscreants. Last, I thought posting cool free and cheap software here would make for a nice add-on bonus for Podium users. Works a treat, aye? Cheers!