by
Ian Pain
OK so this is my first attempt at a review and I hope I am able to convey the usefulness of this fairly simple and relatively cheap piece of software. The download and authorization was very simple and straightforward and I was up and running in no time. There is a basic PDF manual that comes with it but to be honest it is so obvious that anyone with some experience of plug-ins and music software would have no problem.
The basic idea behind it is that experienced producers set up their effects chains for guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, percussion, strings, vocals and some mastering chains both to give you a polished sound and save people like me who don’t enjoy spending hours mixing and mastering a bit of a shortcut.
I downloaded the basic version which has a bit of a mix and match of everything although maybe due to it’s Scandinavian heritage it does seem to have a bit of a bias towards ‘heavy rock’. This was fine with me as it was bought to mix my band. One good thing is that you can download refill packs that are based around specific styles or producers as well as mastering and vocals. The other good thing is that you can use multiple instances of it in your DAW although not in standalone mode. It is also designed to be very economical on processor power and in my experience of using it this did prove to be the case.
So looking at the interface there are four sections. It is divided down the center with the right half giving a pictorial representation of the various effects and processors in use (the ones used light up) and the left half divided horizontally into 3 parts with from the top, The Menu List, The Actual Combination Choices and at the bottom are 2 large dials to adjust some parameters of the chosen chain. The menu at the top is divided vertically into from the left, Instrument Group, Effect, Type, Genre and Preset Pack. So for example if I go to the left hand menu first and choose say a vocal chain it will show all the vocal chains in a list underneath. In the next column I can refine which effects and processors I want and so those not chosen will disappear from the list below. Next I can choose the type of effect ie. Amplifier, Aux, Group Bus, Insert or Master and then finally I can choose a music genre to refine it further. Within these menus I can choose any and all and in whatever order I wish.
So having narrowed down my choice of chain I can then choose from the list below which one I want to try, audition it and then with the controls at the bottom adjust certain parameters of my choice. The lit up effects on the right are just so you can see what you are using and doesn’t allow any tweaking of individual effects.
So how was it in use I hear you ask? Well I decided to try using it on a rock track without using any other plugins. The result was passable but I found the limited number of presets in the initial pack maybe didn’t have enough variety for what I was trying to achieve and so maybe one or two of the downloadable add on packs would have been useful.
The guitar chains were pretty good though any decent amp sim should probably give you an overall better result. The vocal presets were where I found it particularly useful and also the mastering presets. All the others had some useable chains but in general I did find to get the result I wanted I did need to use some other plugins. But because of the low processor overheads that wasn’t a problem.
To summarize I would say that it is really useful for getting the basic sound you want and then with a few additions and a bit of tweaking I could get the sound I wanted so in terms of time saving and quality and also taking into account the low price I feel for those of us working on trying to put out our tracks with reasonable haste then EZMix2 is a really useful piece of software.