Useful plugins for mixing

 I spent a good while doing some messing around with various different plugins with a view to getting my mix to be comparable to typical releases but I was having an issue getting loudness similar to commercial recordings. After some research I found I needed to do two things. Firstly I needed to address some gain staging issues which was easy enough with built in MIDI and audio gain plugins but I also needed to add some compression to the master output as a bit of light mastering. In the past I have acheived this with Jamin and a mixdown channel but my research pointed me to a plugin called Loudmax which I have tried out and it is very good I am pleased to say. I also wanted a decent spectrogram because the built in one in Ardour is tiny. Wolf-Spectrum came to the rescue in this regard. The Calf plugin suite also provided some cool plugins such as Calf Fluidsynth, a multi-band compressor and a nice reverb unit. This was installed through the Ubuntu Studio app store called Discover.  Here is a video that shows how I got on with these plugins.