Bought myself the full version of Toontrack's EZMix 2 and a couple of add-ons. I chose to go with the Mastering one and the Metal Guitar Gods add-on to start with.
Pretty good stuff! For how much these things cost, they really do make things easier for someone like me who would rather concentrate on writing songs than dealing with the kerfuffle of making them sound "right" afterwards. I've always found that the polishing off takes a lot of the passion and drive out of it for me, so these plug-ins are a godsend.
Have played around with them a fair bit today, not read the user manual yet, but it seems at first glance that you can't really tweak any of the pre-sets, which I thought might be a bit limiting, but there's so many of them that there are at least two or three pre-sets for each instrument I use that I like, I really didn't need to tweak them anyway. Other people might find this limiting, but for me it's perfect. Once I've found one I like, writing and recording in the future will be much quicker as I'll know exactly what to select.
The Guitar Gods add-on is pretty decent, and actually the pre-sets I think really rival the patches on my Pod XT. For 39 euros, that's not bad at all. However, the un-tweakable aspect of the patches is something I can't see many guitar / tone nerds putting up with. So I've decided not to use it for my guitars, but it was worth buying for the Bass pre-sets, in my opinion. I have the Bass add-on for my Pod, but it doesn't really sound that great. I found using a mix of the Fredrik Thorendal "Koloss" bass pre-sets and the Devin Townsend "heavy bass" pre-set gives a really nice, well-rounded sound for the kind if stuff I write.
The Mastering add-on does what it says on the tin. Again, loads of decent pre-sets for giving those finishing touches to a track, like master limiters / compressors, just to give it a "bigger" production sound. Really digging this lot! All three downloads cost me about the £150 mark, as they're doing a whole bunch of discounts this month for "Songwriter's Month", so if any of these sound like they could help any of you, I think you need to get over to the TT site before the month is over to get some decent deals. :)
