Let’s cut right to the chase: the price of most VST plugins is in no relation to VST instruments. So are the instruments too cheap or the plugins too expensive?
When it comes to buying VST instruments, I often apply the same rule I use in shopping for example apples: I check the origin, the quality, and the price. However the weight of the bag must be in some relation to the price tag suggested. If a nine-gigabyte library of grand piano sounds from one vendor cost as much a fifteen gigabytes from another company, the instrument itself must have something special in it.
Anyone who has worked with VST plugins know that their price is often very expensive compared to their weight: an average plugin download is some 40-50 megabytes only, but the price tag is equal to ten gigabytes of instrument samples. Yes, they are two separate product categories, but the code and algorithms included in them have distinctive similarities. After all many of today’s VST instruments include in themselves lots of features from separate plug-ins: EQ, compression, reverb etc.
This is why I think the plugins cost so much: it is only a decade or so ago when they were by and large applied by professionals only, and even today the pros are still the most important clients for many of the vendors. Hence the habit of putting a ‘pro price’ tag on them (whether or not also the pros have paid too much for them I leave to general discussion).
Of course also plug-in manufacturers have realized the potential of home mixing: a whole new target group is making music in their respective home studios now. And to be fair, the plug-in prices have in general come down from their most outrageous peak.
But let’s do some research here. Waves Audio has come up with a new product concept by putting out ‘signature plugins’: software allegedly used by a famous music producer. This is of course merely a marketing strategy: I am willing to bet anything that for example J.J. Puig or Eddie Kramer didn’t once have the actual software tailor-made for them that is now sold by taking advantage of their reputation. Or do you really think Brett Favre wears his signature Wranglers only?
It is also ironic that famous music producers would publicly admit that all their skills can be encapsulated in or reduced to a bunch of ones and zeroes. But this is not the main issue here: we were supposed to talk about plug-in prices. A J.J. Puig signature plugin costs 100-150 dollars each, and according to Waves online store there are six different Puig plugins available. So if a home mixer would like to purchase all of them, he or she should put in a hefty 700 dollars: enough for purchasing some of the lushest VST symphony orchestra libraries around – most of them equipped with tailor-made mixing options of their own.
But when it comes to price, neither a seven-hundred-dollar VST library nor a plugin pack of similar cost are sensible choices for hobbyists. Using freeware plugins then again is: there are tons of different mixing freeware – some of them of excellent quality – around.
If you take a look around at any professional studio, you understand why a hundred-dollar plug-in does not sound peculiar: everything else there is even more expensive. But when it comes to bedroom studios, this is usually not the case. The most valuable thing for hobbyists is using common sense, and at least mine says no when someone tries to sell me fifty megabytes of code for 100 dollars.
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