Plugin Buying Guide

Each one is modelled on real hardware. Decapitator's 5 drives come from an Ampex tape preamp, an EMI console, a Neve and both sides of a Culture Vulture. Live's Saturator gives you generic curves.

EchoBoy puts the wow and flutter of a Space Echo or a Memory Man on your repeats. Live's Delay is clean. Nothing in Live does MicroShift's H3000 widening.

These model the hardware the records were made on. They go right down to the transformers and tubes. The LA-2A's optical cell sets its own release. The Pultec lets you boost and cut the same low frequency at once. Live's Compressor and EQ Eight are clean and model none of it.

They run on your own computer with no UA hardware. Softube covers a lot of the same ground. It comes down to which ecosystem you've already bought into.

VintageVerb is one of the most respected reverbs around. At $50, it's hard to beat on value. Its 22 modes recreate the digital halls, plates and chambers on 1970s and 1980s records. The colour switch picks the decade. Go dark and noisy, go brighter, or keep it clean.

Room, Delay and Shimmer cost the same. Supermassive and every update cost nothing. Shimmer pitches the reverb's feedback up an octave so the tail climbs as it fades. Nothing in Live Standard does that.

Both guitars come from the Session Guitarist line. Electric Vintage plays rhythm on a late 1950s Telecaster. Electric Mint plays lead on a 1960 Stratocaster.

Each one holds more than 200 strummed and picked patterns that a session guitarist played. Switch to melody mode for slides, hammer-ons, pull-offs and vibrato. Live's Guitar and Bass pack has neither.

The keyboards in these genres are vintage. Junos and Prophets, a Mellotron, a Farfisa. Analog Lab models exactly those, so a Juno pad has the Juno's filter, drift and chorus. Pigments and Serum are built for sound design, and neither is a Juno. Live's Drift and Analog get close. Arturia's dial these sounds in that much quicker.

Tape MELLO-FI adds wow, flutter, worn tape and hiss at once.

Pro-L 2 oversamples up to 32x and meters your loudness for streaming. Live's Limiter does neither. With Saturn 2 you split a sound into as many as 6 frequency ranges and drive each one its own way. Live's Saturator drives the whole sound the same way.

Pro-Q 4 is FabFilter's most famous plugin, but you don't need it. The sets use Live's EQ Eight. That's plenty when a mix is built clean instead of rescued.

EZdrummer 3 and EZbass sound like a record the moment they load. EZdrummer's kits were recorded at Hansa in Berlin and arrive mixed, close, overhead and room mics and all, and Dream Pop EZX is a kit made for this music. EZbass's expansions are the basses of each era, a violin bass, a Wal, a flatwound P-Bass, and every one slides, hammers on, ghosts and mutes. Our bass parts use all of it.

Superior Drummer 3 is more realistic, and overkill for these genres. Skip Toontrack's MIDI packs too. Fala writes every part's MIDI itself, played with a musician's feel.