Simina Grigoriu & Moe Danger
The DJ/producer/Kuukou label-boss and her favourite engineer – who also happens to be her brother – pick some plugin favourites
SONARWORKS REFERENCE 4
“For us, audio quality is the most important thing when we’re in the studio. We have calculated the perfect listening position, the right monitor position, and we’ve installed acoustic treatment to get the best balanced sound possible. However, that never takes you to 100%, which is why we religiously rely on Sonarworks Reference 4. It measures the frequency response of your monitors and then creates an EQ curve to correct any remaining dips or boosts that can be heard at the listening position. The results? An almost perfectly flat response, and no one’s getting fooled by room acoustics or variations in the speakers. A great bonus to this is that if we travel to another studio, we can quickly deploy a measurement before starting work, giving us the flat response we’re already used to. There is a slight downside: no monitor calibration software could possibly remove unwanted room resonances, modes or reflections. If you want the best, you need to install acoustic treatment in your room.”
ABLETON LIVE 10
“People can argue to infinity about which
DAW is the best, but if you ask us, it’s Ableton Live. The beauty of this DAW is that it’s so open to creativity, which means you can accomplish what you want in 50 different ways. There is no predetermined way of working, and with the Session/ Arrangement views, you can just as easily jam, perform live, compose, mix and master. This is certainly no one-trick pony!”
ARTURIA V COLLECTION
“When it comes to production, we don’t like to waste a lot of time digging through synth presets or auditioning sounds – that’s a creativity killer! Over the years, we’ve bought and forgotten about tons of synth plugins, but the day we grabbed the V Collection, things changed. All the plugins are rather well modelled on sought-after analogue classics. If we’re looking for an authentic Moog sound, we’ll drop the Mini V
into a session and we’re good to go. CS-80? No problem. Our favourites are the Jupiter-8V, the SEM V – modelled on the legendary Oberheim – and the Buchla Easel V.”
LENNARDIGITAL SYLENTH1
“Like everyone else, we sometimes end up in situations where we’ve gone through tons of plugins and still can’t find the sound that fits. This is where Sylenth1 saves the day. Yeah, it’s been around forever, but it’s always sounded great and it’s super flexible. A true workhorse. There is probably no other plugin that has been used so much in our projects. The straightforward design makes it easy to program a patch on the fly and get on with making music. One bonus is that you can push it wide and still retain a solid centre image. PS: Serum, we love you, but you have mono compatibility issues.”
SUGAR BYTES EFFECTRIX
“Simina’s productions involve a lot of audio recorded sources that we bash and mould into something unrecognisable. That’s where Effectrix comes into play. It’s a simple plugin that offers all sorts of audio bending capabilities, from simple delays and reverbs to bit crushing, stuttering and stretching. The cool part is that it all happens on a sequencer grid. You sequence the effects over the audio and that is quite unique. It surprises us by delivering results we never expected, and in a wonderful way.”
FABFILTER PRO BUNDLE
“After we’ve dropped in some awesome synths and warped some audio, it looks like we’ve got a track underway. Creativity subsides and things start to get technical.
It’s time to EQ, compress and finesse! FabFilter’s Pro Bundle is perfect for everything. The Pro-R reverb is versatile and it sounds great, which means we spend less time finding what we need compared to other reverb plugins. The Pro-Q 3 EQ is easily the best EQ plugin; surgical when you need it to be, smooth and colourful when it’s time to shine. The Pro-C compressor is also incredibly flexible, but it excels at sidechaining, thanks to the hold function and pumping mode that is missing in any other compressor we’ve tested. And when it comes to the final mastering stage, the ProMB multi-band compressor and Pro-L 2 limiter are simply unmatched.”
MASTERING THE MIX: REFERENCE
“Even though we’ve made it to the mixing and mastering stages, we still need to make sure we’re not fooling ourselves. It’s easy to push the bass too far or think your kick is really punchy, when in fact it’s softer than a baby’s butt. If you spend too much time on a song without another reference, your ears start to accept the balance as correct. This is where we need to start comparing to some other tracks. We use only the best mixed and mastered tracks from top labels to make sure that we always attain those prolevel results. Reference by Mastering The Mix is easily the best referencing plugin we’ve used. You can drop in multiple tracks and compare them all visually to your mix. It can automatically balance the volumes between tracks, and if you create custom frequency crossover points, you can easily listen to only the bass, subs, mids, or whatever you want. It also has a great way of showing you if parts of your spectrum are too loud or quiet, too wide or narrow, too compressed or dynamic. Genius!”
MASTERING THE MIX: EXPOSE
“What Mastering The Mix again? No, we’re not obsessed with this company, they just make some great tools. Once the track is done, mixing accomplished and master rendered, Expose is the last stop before we send the tracks to the label or distribution. This is an external piece of software, not a plugin. You simply drop in your tracks and Expose, well… exposes any issues you might have. Did you over-compress? Expose will let you know. Or maybe there are moments in your track where your stereo balance goes out of phase, or perhaps your mix is too loud, or your master is clipping? Expose will tell you. It does a full analysis of your track and gives you a report. Every single track we finish goes through Expose as the last step. If it doesn’t pass, it’s time to step back and tweak the mix and/or master.”