With these essential plugins for Pop music production, you can improve the quality of your vocals and ensure that they cut through even a dense mix.
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While the tools we use may have changed drastically in the last 30 years, the focus on engaging the listener with compelling vocal performances and melodic hooks remains the same. Vocals are certainly a priority, so we need to be able to correct the pitch and timing of vocal recordings and control the dynamics so they hit consistently in each section of the track.
Essential Plugins for Pop
There are no rules to creating hooks, so the inspiration could come from a sample, riff, or chord progression, but it helps to have effects to add movement to any musical phrase. Another key aspect of Pop production is creating a space for the vocal or primary melodic lead to ensure that we have a focal point throughout the arrangement.
The plugins on this list aren’t meant to replace your go-to processors from FabFilter and Oeksound, as well as your favourite stock DAW plugins. Instead, you can use them alongside them to enhance your workflow and add new capabilities that inspire your creative process.
Essential Plugins for Pop: Celemony Melodyne
Melodyne remains the industry-standard vocal correction tool in modern music production workflows. Rather than tackling only one aspect of the process, the detailed editor allows you to adjust the pitch, timing, formant, and gain of the vocal signal from a piano roll-style interface to deal with a range of issues and control the amount of processing according to the severity of the problem.
This includes timing and alignment issues that occur when the vocalist slips out of the pocket or when you’re dealing with stacked vocals and find that they aren’t lining up properly. Rather than applying tuning to the entire signal, you can correct only the parts that need attention, so the overall effect is far more transparent and natural-sounding.
Another key consideration is the gain, and because the processing is done before you add a compressor, you can control any sudden level spikes as well as reduce sibilance and plosives on a case-by-case basis. Once you get your head around the basics of the workflow, Melodyne quickly becomes essential in your vocal production process. Get it at Thomann.*
Essential Plugins for Pop: iZotope Nectar
Some DAWs don’t include a suite of effects processors designed specifically for vocal production. This makes iZotope Nectar an attractive prospect with its range of AI-assisted tools for achieving vocal clarity and consistency. The range of modules allows you to generate AI background vocals, add compression, de-essing, breath control, EQ, and more.
Like most iZotope products, the versions of Nectar are divided into three tiers, giving you a different feature set. Naturally, the premium Advanced version has the most flexibility with advanced features like Auto-Level and Vocal Unmask, as well as the ability to run all modules as individual plugins without opening the entire Nectar suite.
That being said, one of the most exciting things about Nectar is its workflow, and the Standard version lets you rearrange the order of the processing modules as you please. Of course, you have a comprehensive vocal production toolkit within a single plugin interface with intuitive controls, and it also includes the Essentials version of Melodyne. Get it at Thomann.*
Essential Plugins for Pop: Minimal Audio Evoke
Pop production often relies on the character of the vocal performance, and Minimal Audio Evoke gives you the platform to match the sound with the artist’s aesthetic, whether this involves processing the entire sound or adding subtle layers to define the verses or chorus sections of the song. This allows you to delve beyond clichés like hard tuning or retro vocoder effects.
Evoke uses a resynthesis engine with 15 different character algorithms, ranging from more natural doubling and widening effects to transformative textural processes that alter the sound completely. Besides pitch correction, you can use four harmony voices to shape specific vocal phrases within a performance and add expression.
Within the resynthesis engine, the spectral filter allows you to manipulate specific aspects of the vocal signal, adding sustain to vowels or creating glitch effects and ambient drones. Also, there is a powerful modulation matrix and an extensive effects rack that allow you to create complex rhythmic effects. Get it at Plugin Boutique.*
Essential Plugins for Pop: Wavesfactory Trackspacer
Trackspacer is a plugin that takes sidechaining, a widely used modern production technique, and refines this process while making it incredibly easy to use. Rather than simply ducking the entire signal, Trackspacer analyzes the input signal and uses an internal 32-band EQ to mirror the spectrum of the sidechain signal and apply it to the processed signal.
While this may sound complicated, the results speak for themselves as the plugin creates a space for the sidechain signal. Within the context of a Pop mix, the lead vocal is the main priority, so trackspacer allows you to carve out a pocket for your vocals to sit in, and you can control the amount of processing, as well as the attack and release to get the most natural sound possible.
The easiest way to use Trackspacer is by routing your DAW channels onto four or five aux buses first, which is standard mixing practice. Then, you can apply Trackspacer to the channel groups that are occupying a similar frequency range to the vocals when they are playing simultaneously. This way, you won’t need to use a plugin instance for every channel in your DAW. Get it at Plugin Boutique.*
Essential Plugins for Pop: Cableguys ShaperBox
One of the key parts of Pop music production involves turning melodic or chordal elements into hooks. This could mean reshaping a sustained vocal or guitar part and transforming it into a catchy hook, or changing a boring synth pad progression into a pulsating rhythmic loop that defines the intro or pre-chorus section of your track.
ShaperBox combines 11 different effects algorithms, including multiband sidechaining, stutter and glitching, pitch shifting, multiband saturation and distortion, noise texture, filtering, reverb, phasing and flanging, bitcrushing, and stereo effects. Each effect module can be chained in any order and linked to a range of internal and external controls.
This includes custom LFO shapes, patterns, and envelopes that can be looped to varying degrees to control the rhythmic onset of the linked effect. What’s more, the effects can be split across three bands to target specific areas of the frequency range. You can also trigger effects from external audio or MIDI signals to match the rhythm pattern of an element in your track. Get it at Plugin Boutique.*
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