Author: Jooyoung Kim

Mixing Engineer, Music Producer

Black Friday Sale Summary: 2025 Virtual Instruments & Mixing Plugins

Hi! This is Jooyoung Kim, a mixing engineer and music producer. Black Friday is right around the corner, so, as I did last year, I’ll summarize all the plugin sales that I want to recommend for composing, mixing, and mastering music.

This post is not sponsored by any of the plugin companies listed. However, I have an affiliate partnership with Plugin Boutique, so, I’ll provide their purchase links alongside my explanations for any plugins they offer. Furthermore, purchasing through the provided link earns me a small commission that helps support this content..^^ (It’s really hard to make a living these days…haha..)

Then… Let’s start!

1) WAVES

I always recommend plugins made by waves to people around me. While their update plan policy is incredibly frustrating, it certainly doesn’t detract from the quality of their plugins. Additionally, they usually offer significant discounts during the Black Friday season.

Click image to purchase WAVES’ Horizon bundle

I highly recommend the Horizon Bundle. This bundle features 93 plugins, all of which are highly versatile. The price is only $219(Tax Included), leaving no reason not to recommend it.

Specifically, the CLA series, the Renaissance Compressor, and the H-Delay are my favorites.

2) UAD (Universal Audio Digital)

Universal Audio has lots of useful plugins too. The LA-2A series, the 1176 series and the chamber reverbs are definitely my go-to plugins from UAD.

Click image to purchase 10 UAD plugins

I own quite a few UAD plugins, and they were really expensive before Universal Audio launched the native versions. Additionally, the 10-plugin bundle was also very pricey, if I recall correctly. However, for this Black Friday sale, you can get 10 plugins for only $108.90 (Tax Included). I must admit, I find that a little unfair….^^. It’s a really great deal, so I highly recommend grabbing this opportunity.

If you haven’t had any experience with UAD plugins, I will select my top 10 recommended plugins for you.

  1. Teletronix LA-2A Leveler Collection
  2. 1176 Classic Limiter Collection
  3. API 2500 Bus Compressor
  4. Teletronix LA-3A Classic Audio Leveler
  5. EMT 250 Classic Electronic Reverb
  6. Fairchild Tube Limiter Collection
  7. Pultec Passive EQ Collection
  8. UAD Sound City Studios
  9. Hitsville Reverb Chambers
  10. Lexicon 224 Digital Reverb

3) IK Multimedia

Unfortunately, IK Multimedia already concluded its “Group Buy” event last month, so it is unlikely there will be any additional sales during Black Friday. However, I have written about IK Multimedia’s virtual instruments and mixing plugins previously, so, if you have an interest in this company, please read this article.

Introducing IK Multimedia Total Studio 4 Max (75% Off Until 12/2)

4) Arturia

Arturia offers a wide range of virtual instruments and mixing plugins. They boast significantly high quality, tthe only drawback is their high CPU usage. However, as CPU processing speeds have grown rapidly, I believe this is no longer a critical issue.

Click image to purchase Arturia’s V collection 11
Click image to purchase Arturia’s FX Collection 5

The price of the V collection 11 is $383.90 (Tax Included), and the FX Collection 5 is $273.90 (Tax Included).

I have written reviews before, if you have an interest, please read these articles.

Arturia FX Collection 5 Overview & Sale (50% Off, Until December 10th)
Arturia V Collection X: Introduction and Black Friday Sale (50% Off Until 12/10)

5) Brainworx

Click image to purchase Brainworx’s plugins

Brainworx was founded by Dirk Ulrich, the same individual who established Plugin Alliance. They offer superb mixing plugins with remarkably good quality. They are also remarkably affordable, so you should definitely consider purchasing their plugins if you have a limited budget.

Click image to purchase Brainworx’s bx_digital V3

Specifically, I recommend the digital EQ, the bx_digital V3, from Brainworx. At just $11 (including tax), it is incredibly useful for identifying the frequencies where resonances occur.

6) Celemony -Melodyne

Click image to purchase Melodyne

I currently use three main pitch correction plugins: Auto-Tune, Melodyne, and Revoice Pro. However, I find Melodyne to be the most intuitive plugin. I use it on almost every project.

The Studio version is now $301.40 (Tax Included).

7) Native Instruments

Native Instruments sells a lot of virtual instruments. Their Komplete bundle is their most famous, and it features a 50% upgrade discount during Black Friday.

Click image to purchase Komplete 15 upgrade

8) Cableguys

I think you need Cableguys’ plugins if you want to create a modern-sounding track. Recently, many producers and composers are making the source audio groovy, and these grooves are created through artificial manipulation.

Cableguys’ plugins are made for these purposes.

I recommend Shaper Box 3 (at $97.90 including tax). Also if your budget is larger, the Cableguys bundle (at $163.90 including tax) is a great choice.

9) Eventide

Eventide’s reverb plugins are truly irreplaceable. The Blackhole reverb and the ShimmerVerb reverb are strongly recommended.

10) BFD Drums

Click image to purchase BFD 3.5

I love the BFD drum plugin. My main drum VST is BFD, and their sounds are exceptional. While it has a steep learning curve, once you understand its complexities, it will provide truly realistic drum sounds.

The drum sounds on this song were created using BFD drums.

The basic components are quite good, but I highly recommend buying the London Sessions expansion pack.

BFD 3.5 is currently only $42.90 (tax included), and the expansion pack is only $20.90 (tax included). I strongly recommend these two products.

11) iZotope

Click image to purchase iZotope

iZotope offers famous plugins like the RX and Ozone series. They also have excellent reverb plugins. Currently, they are offering a 40% discount on their bundle upgrades.

12) Plugin Alliance

Click image to purchase Plugin Alliance’s plugins

Since a certain point, Plugin Alliance began including tax when they sell their products to international customers on their website. Therefore, there is no compelling reason to buy their plugins directly from their website. You can earn points and free plugins when you purchase plugins through Plugin Boutique. Thus, I highly recommend purchasing them there instead.

My favorites include the Maag EQ4, the SPL series, and the Bettermaker C502V plugins.

I believe that covers all the main recommendations. There are still a few plugins I would like to recommend, but they are either not currently on sale or have fully transitioned to subscription models (like Musio 1).

Honestly, these days, I feel that plugins are not the most crucial factor in music production. The ideas and concepts are the most important aspects. Sound design and engineering are just the finishing touches to the music.

So, if you want to make meaningful music, I would advise against spending a lot of money on plugins you might use in the future. Just buy what you need now.

Then.. have a nice Black Friday season!

Cableguys’ Snapback Introduction Sale (~Dec 2, $29)

Hi! This is Jooyoung Kim, a mixing engineer and music producer.

Long time no post…!

I was too busy studying English and doing other work. Unfortunately, I failed to achieve the score that I wanted on the TOEFL test. My plan was to apply to a Ph.D. program this year, but I may have overestimated my English ability…T.T..

But I think it is reasonable for graduate schools to have a high TOEFL score threshold. If someone studies in Korea, I think they may have a good command of Korean and need to be proficient in the language. From the opposite perspective, English speakers will think the same way.

So.. I have to study English harder than before..

By the way, today, I’ll introduce Cableguys’ new plugin, Snapback. (The plugin was provided by Plugin Boutique, and if you purchase by the links, I’ll get small commission from them.)

Purchase Snapback in Plugin Boutique

It’s a simple audio layering plugin. However, this plugin has great detection ability and adds many flavors to the sources.

It analyzes the input signal in real time, detects each transient with high precision, and triggers two types of layers: a pre-transient “Snapback” layer and a main transient layer. This allows users to enrich kicks, snares, claps, and percussive sounds without manually adjusting timing in the DAW.

By automating phase-accurate alignment and offering detailed controls such as pitch, timing shift, stereo width, filtering, and dynamics, Snapback makes drum enhancement faster and more musical than traditional manual layering.

Let’s find out more about it’s parameters.

In the analyzer, a blue audio signal appears in front of the main source, with a purple audio signal behind the blue signal. The blue one is ‘snapback’, and the purple one is ‘transient’. They can be adjusted using the parameters at the bottom of the plugin.

I presume that many people are already familiar with the attack, decay, pitch, and all related parameters. Thus I’ll not elaborate about whole things. However, shift parameters refer to ‘shift timing,’ which can be adjusted from -4 ms to 4 ms. Width can be adjusted from 0% to 200%, and dynamics from 0% to 100%. HP and LP means High pass and Low pass filter.

Snapback and transient presets are organized into several stylistic groups, each designed to emphasize a specific aspect of drum layering. So, you can instantly hear how different combinations affect the groove.

Purchase Snapback in Plugin Boutique

Overall, Snapback is a simple tool, but it solves one of the most time-consuming tasks in modern production: clean and precise drum layering.

Its transient detection, timing accuracy, and flexible controls make it a fast and musical solution for enhancing percussion in any genre. I think $29 is really affordable!

That’s all for today. See you in next post!

Basics of Synthesizers (7) – Granular Synthesis

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Hi! This is Jooyoung Kim, a mixing engineer and music producer. Today, I’ll introduce granular synthesis, which is composed of “grain” units.

The principle of this type of sound synthesis is very similar to the concept of sampling. Granular synthesizers take small parts of a sample and store them as units. Those units are called “grains.” That is where the name “Granular Synthesis” comes from.

The grains have lengths ranging from approximately 1 to 100 ms, and these samples can be played at different times, phases, speeds, and frequencies in a granular synthesizer. Thus, cloudy sounds that resemble long reverberations and continuous tails are produced by these manipulations.

In 1947, Dennis Gabor introduced this concept, which was first implemented in a computer in 1974 by Curtis Roads, an electronic music composer specializing in granular and pulsar synthesis. The spans are quite long, aren’t they?

The emergence of granular synthesizer hardware was significantly delayed due to the large computational requirements and high CPU speed needed for the calculations. Thus, the real-time version of this synthesizer emerged 12 years after the use of granular synthesizers in Curtis Roads’ music.

DMX-1000 (https://120years.net/dmx-1000-signal-processing-computer-dean-wallraff-usa-1978/)

The real-time granular synthesis was invented by Barry Truax, a Canadian composer. This synthesis was processed by the DMX-1000 computer.

Naturally, you might wonder about the existence of physical hardware, as with other synthesizers. The upper photo shows the modern, dedicated granular synthesizer hardware, the GR-1, which was released in 2017.

This shows that this kind of synthesis processing requires a lot of computing resources. And this means that many virtual synthesizers using this method require significant computing power.

Granular effect “EFX Fragments” by Arturia (affiliate link—if you purchase this plugin through it, I will receive a small commission to support my work :)).

However, for implementation in DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations), no physical hardware is needed to use granular synthesis. Arturia’s EFX Fragments is a great example.

Granular effect “Portal” by Output (also affiliate link)

Output’s “Portal” plugin is another excellent granular effect.

This is the official video of the EFX Fragments. You might hear the “shimmering sound” from it.

This sound could be effective in ambient music that requires long tails on the sounds. I like these sounds, but I’ve never used them in my music… ^^;; However, someday I will…

OK, I’ll wrap this up today. See you in the next post!

Life Update: Live Sound Engineer, Mixing Instructor, and Thesis Work (Oct 26, 2025)

Hello everyone, this is mixing engineer and music producer Jooyoung Kim.

It’s been another busy week, so this one’s going to be a short life update post. ^^;

Last Saturday, we held the second “Frisketch x Yeonjun Yoon | Um” concert.

I worked as the sound director again. We used the same venue as the June concert, but this time we positioned the piano differently.

In the meantime, I picked up another Peluso P87 and added two RØDE NT55s for ambience. The sound came out much closer to what I had in mind this time.

Because of the speaker placement, I decided to run the mix in mono. Since the only instrument was the piano, the main mic (P87) captured it beautifully.

That said, when the artist mentioned, “I wish the piano tone were a bit less metallic,” I completely agreed. Haha.

Then on Tuesday and Wednesday, I assisted Sound Director Sung-won Yang in his class “Mixing with IR Reverb” at the Arko Arts Human Resources Institute in Ilsan.

On Wednesday afternoon, I took over and led the mixing lecture myself.

Sometimes I wonder if I made things too difficult, but the topics I consider most important in mixing tend to be the challenging ones.

So I told the students, “It’ll all make sense later—trust me,” and just went for it. Haha.

Honestly, I had so much I wanted to cover, but time was short. I trimmed and trimmed until the lecture fit the schedule perfectly—but it still felt a bit like a Spartan session.

Hopefully it wasn’t too much to absorb all at once.

By the way, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here before, but I’ve been teaching major practical courses at my graduate school since finishing my master’s degree.

I used to give private lessons only to a few close acquaintances, but now that I’m officially teaching as part of the program, I’ve been thinking a lot more seriously about pedagogy and teaching methods.

Also, my master’s thesis has finally appeared on D-Collection (The archive of theses in South Korea).

The topic is the same as my journal publication, though since it’s an earlier research version, the experimental conditions may feel a bit rougher.

I wanted to cite my published journal paper in the thesis abstract (which is normally standard practice), but unfortunately the publication and submission dates overlapped too closely.

I even contacted the university library afterward, but they said the submission was already finalized and online revisions weren’t possible.

Still, since the journal was published first, there’s no real issue academically.

(For context: a thesis isn’t considered an official publication—once your advisor approves it, the degree is granted.)

Interestingly, I couldn’t find another case online where the timing overlapped this perfectly. ^^;

As for my recent live recordings, I’ve finished most of the mixing, and now my Mac Studio is running endless deep learning sessions again.

Compared to my old Windows PC with a GTX 1080, the Mac runs quieter and stays much cooler.

I’m redoing the experiment I failed back in May, and this time I plan to take my time and turn it into a proper paper.

I already got IRB approval, so I’m hoping the training finishes soon.

(Each CNN run takes about 20 days, by the way… hahaha… ha… 😭)

I’m planning to try a WaveNet model as well, but I’m slightly worried it might overrun the IRB deadline. 😭

That’s how things have been lately.
See you in the next post!