03/14/2026
Less is more, or so the old saying goes. But when it comes to plugins, are electronic artists better served by having a broad range of sound-shaping tools at their disposal, or keeping their options deliberately limited in order to better focus on the task at hand: actually making music?
Fred Again has positioned himself firmly in the latter camp in a new interview for the Tape Notes podcast, imploring listeners to spend less time seeking out the perfect EQ and and stick to a narrow set of reliable 'go-to' plugins, thus freeing up time and space to concentrate on more consequential creative decisions.
"This would be the thing I would most advise people to do," Fred told host John Kennedy. "I've spent so many thousands of hours wasted on plugins, getting into the weeds with these things. I've made it so that my Logic, I've just got this one menu that only has the eight plugins I use, or whatever that is, 12 plugins. It just doesn't matter."
"You want to do the things that liberate your mind to be hearing well, not whether or not [you're using] this compressor or this distortion or this distortion… the thing that's most dangerous about getting into that is that you'll forget about whether or not the chorus is wrong, or whether or not the chord progression is actually not serving the feeling right."
While Fred maintains that mixing plugins, by and large, produce indistinguishable results, he admits that experimenting with software instruments and synth plugins can inspire creativity. "There's the category of plugin that's really playful and random, like a crazy new synth that really surprises you," he says.
"I think playing with things like that is a great thing to do. But in terms of your reverb, compressor, EQ, all these things, I would just say, delete everything apart from… choose one, two, three, four, five, it doesn't matter what you choose. They're all great. Choose which one you like the sound of most and just work within that, and then focus on writing songs."
