SOS FOR ARTISTS: Beating Plug-in Overload

SOS For Artists tags both effect and instrument plug‑ins by category — this can help find suitable options when you want to prepare a restricted ‘tool palette’ for a new project, as described in the main text.

Is plug‑in overload stifling your creative output? SOS FOR ARTISTS offers a way to take back control!

Back in the days when analogue recording ruled the roost, an artist might release a new project like an album only once every year or two, to much fanfare and with a real sense of occasion. By today’s standards, they worked with limited sets of tools too, and it meant that artists and engineers could learn the nuances of the kit they had on the job. That way, they acquired a depth of understanding about their tools that translated into confidence in their decision making, as well as skill and speed of operation. They knew instinctively which instruments or tools to reach for if results were needed quickly, and which held interesting potential for those times when workarounds or creative experimentation were required.

Today, we face a different set of pros and cons. There are many more tools accessible to us, and the positives are obvious: we have access for relatively little cost to pretty much whatever capability we can dream of. But there are also drawbacks. We live in a world where social media and streaming culture mean we feel under constant pressure to create and release regular new content. And the sheer number of plug‑ins in our DAWs means we can easily become distracted from our creative goals by an overwhelming number of choices. We might start a new session feeling energised, with a crystal‑clear creative intention, but we soon become stuck in an endless cycle of auditioning sounds, comparing countless underused plug‑ins, and tweaking every available parameter just to see what it does. Our time melts away, and we soon realise we’ve failed to make real creative progress — having nothing to show for our efforts apart from yet another unfinished project...

We live in a world where social media and streaming culture mean we feel under constant pressure to create and release regular new content. And the sheer number of plug‑ins in our DAWs means we can easily become distracted from our creative goals by an overwhelming number of choices.

Limits Of Creativity!

One of the most effective tactics to counter this is to impose similar limitations to those we endured in days gone by. This might seem an odd point to be making in an SOS For Artists workshop — after all, half the point of our platform is to provide you with lots of useful tools, and access to one of the world’s biggest sample libraries (over 3 Million and growing weekly)! But you don’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Specifically, it can be a good plan to restrict the number of sounds and samples you use each time you embark on a new project.

The point of this dose of self‑discipline isn’t to stop you acquiring and exploring new toys and sounds altogether. Exploring them can be fun and rewarding. Rather, it’s to help you take control of the tools you have, so they don’t end up controlling you. In slashing the number of decisions you need to make, you can keep a razor‑sharp focus...