[Daniel Barlow]

Hi again Chris,

Before continuing let me put forth the following disclaimer:

In terms of mastering, or audio engineering of any kind, I am probably the wrong person to ask. I am not knowledgeable in those areas as a sort of bedroom musician myself. My experience there is essentially trial and error with the help of some books on the subject.

Having said that, the FX chain on your individual tracks is specific to that track right, and the FX chain on your master track applies to ALL tracks (which, I believe, happens AFTER each individual track FX chain has been applied to the raw audio recording. This could differ from DAW to DAW, or be flat out wrong… again, not an expert).
The EZMix packs are basically just preset FX chains, whether that be for bass, guitar, vocals, or master tracks. There really are some great presets to be found in all of the EZMix packs, mastering or otherwise.

I hesitate to recommend any particular pack because what sounds good to me might be rubbish to you. They sell packs in genres mostly, and even the Producer packs (presets made by top music producers) give some description of bands they have produced in the past which should be a good indication of the general genre type sound you can expect from those presets. The best advice I can think of is to look through them all and try to see which ones match up with the general sound you are going for.

On a side note, I like a lot of extreme metal (grindcore, black metal, death metal) so my first major purchases were fairly obvious. However, since then I have picked up other packs outside the metal packs and found sounds I really enjoy. So really it comes down to how much experimentation you are willing to do and how much money you are willing to drop on a hobby!

As with everything music, let your ears guide you!

[Daniel Barlow]

Hey Chris,

Not an expert or anything but I’ve been using the three products you are asking about (EZMix2, EZKeys, EZDrummer2) for a while now and I think I can help point you in the right direction. I’ll talk about EZMix a bit first to give you an idea of what it is and what it does (I welcome correction on any of this by someone that is more technically oriented than I).

Basically, as I see it, there are two realms to EZMix, tone presets and mastering presets.

In terms of the tone presets, it’s not so much for mixing, but more so for getting good sounding tone right off the bat, which should mix well provided you are really taking each tone in to consideration when choosing them. There may be some additional tweaking required to the EQ etc…
EZMix has a couple of effects you can tweak for each preset but generally speaking, what you hear is more or less what you get with each preset (until you tweak with another plug in). Having said that, they are premium tones designed by industry professionals so you are getting good sounds.

The mastering pack for EZMix lets you put a single plug in on your master track that compresses, widens, brightens, etc… Basically applies the mastering process to your tracks as a whole (this is probably what you are noticing in the demos in your question 6).

Now as for using EZMix on EZKeys and EZDrummer, you are correct to say it is not required, but I still do it. I even use other presets on my EZDrummer/Keys as well (more reverb, chorus, EQ, etc…). What they give you in EZDrummer is, again, professional tone. You get professionally engineered recordings of drum kit pieces. It’s personal preference though. Neil Dorfsman may have said “this right here is the perfect snare sound” and you may disagree, or it might not fit perfectly in your song as is. So again, it comes done to tweaks.

Your questions 3, 4, and 5 are probably outside the capabilities of EZMix. Those actions you are describing are more human intuition based and are essentially a reflection of your abilities as an engineer. I don’t know Reaper so I can’t comment on it’s abilities, but in Pro Tools (which I am familiar with) you could achieve this sort of behaviour through automation.

Long story short, EZMix is not so much mixing software but a collection of professional grade tones. If you are okay with the Amp Modelling on your dedicated unit then you probably don’t care too much about the producer sounds. However, if you are not familiar or comfortable with the mastering process then you may want to consider picking up EZMix2 with the mastering packs. One plug in and voila, huge sound. I know nothing of the mastering process so it’s great for me, pretty much the reason I picked EZMix2 up.

Hope this helps.

[Author]

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