The Absurdity: When the Tools Bite Back

March 14, 2025  

Here’s where it gets grim and funny, the part every music producer and mix engineer knows deep in their bones, where the marrow aches and the blood turns sour. VST plugins don’t just sit there, pretty and quiet like some doll on a shelf—no, they fight you, claw at you, sink teeth into your guts and twist. You load a pirated synth, some half-cracked software instrument you snatched from a shady torrent at 2 a.m., swearing it’ll birth a bassline to save your soul. Instead, it crashes your DAW—a blue-screen scream, a digital death rattle—eats your session whole, hours of mixing chewed up and spat out, leaving you cursing at 3 a.m. with a deadline bleeding on the floor like a gutted fish. The audio hardware dies quiet, a soft hiss fading to black, but audio software—that bastard dies loud, a banshee wail dragging your soul down with it, kicking and clawing all the way to the pit.

Take Rico, that lanky ghost from our last tale—he’s every music producer who’s stared into the void and seen it stare back, mocking. He watched a VST plugin, some freebie called MIDIWarden, turn his bassline—a thick, mean thing he’d nursed like a wounded dog—into elevator mush, a plinky jingle fit for a dentist’s lobby or a mall food court where the fries are cold and the air smells of regret. He’d poured his guts into that track, tweaking knobs until his fingers cramped, mixing it in a room that stank of stale beer and cigarette ash, only to have the software instrument laugh—a dry buzz through the speakers—and spit out a sound so soft it could’ve lulled a baby to sleep in a butcher shop. Or Lila, that wiry mix engineer with nicotine stains and a cat named Momo—she fed her $300 compressor emulation a drum loop, chasing that perfect snap, and it flattened her tabby into a two-dimensional smear on the rug, a cartoon corpse pinned by a plugin gone rogue. That’s the mix engineer staring at a screen, jaw tight, as a VST plugin clips harder than the real thing—a rack unit worth its weight in gold—ever dared, distorting her mix into a scream she can’t unhear.

The absurdity peaks in the plugin glut, a festering pile that chokes the 2010s like a landfill after a storm. Thousands of VST plugins clog the market, a digital swamp where music producers wade knee-deep, drowning in their own greed. Synths mimicking synths mimicking synths—a hall of mirrors where every sound’s a ghost of a ghost—effects so niche they’re useless, like a reverb that only works on a Tuesday under a full moon. You’ve got your Serum, a wavetable beast snarling through clubs, Sylenth1 purring presets for EDM kids with glowsticks, Kontakt libraries thick as phone books, stuffed with orchestral stabs and piano drones no one asked for. Then there’s the freebie delay some basement coder coughed up, a wet fart echoing in a tunnel, downloaded by a music producer too broke to care it’s trash. The market’s a junkyard, a sprawl of software instruments and effects, and the mix engineer stands there, ankle-deep in the muck, chaining 12 reverbs to “find the vibe”—hours of mixing, sliders nudged like a surgeon with a scalpel—only to mute them all, light a smoke, and mutter, “Screw it,” into the dark.

It’s the dream of music equipment without the weight, the promise Steinberg whispered back in ’96—no racks, no cables, no bank loans to lug home a Moog or a Fairchild. But the weight’s still there, a phantom limb aching in the CPU, the wallet, the skull. The music producer hoards VST plugins like a junkie with a stash—200, 300, a hard drive groaning under the load, half unopened, presets collecting dust like empties under the bed. Each one swears it’ll fix the mix, make the kick punch, the pads shimmer, the vocals soar—lies every mix engineer knows by heart, a litany of bullshit they’ve chanted since the first crash. You crack open a software instrument, tweak a knob that doesn’t exist, and for a second, you’re king—until the fans scream, the CPU spikes, and the DAW folds like a cheap suit, leaving you with a silent screen and a cigarette trembling in your fist.

The tools bite back, and they bite hard. You’re Rico, half-drunk at 4 a.m., watching your VST plugin turn a trap beat into a lounge jingle, marimbas tinkling where hi-hats should snap, your mixing desk a graveyard of faders pushed to no avail. You’re Lila, cursing a compressor that flattens more than sound, your cat glaring from the rug, a victim of audio software gone mad. Every music producer has a scar—some pirated software instrument that ate a deadline, a synth that crashed mid-take, a delay that turned a vocal into a glitchy mess no one could save. The mix engineer knows it too—hours spent mixing a snare, EQ’d to perfection, only for a VST plugin to clip it into distortion, a harsh buzz that mocks the silence. The audio hardware—those old racks, those analog gods—dies with dignity, a quiet fade to black. But audio software? It’s a beast, a rabid dog that turns on you, howling as it drags your work to hell.

The glut’s the killer, the absurd peak where choice becomes a noose. By the 2010s, the VST plugin flood’s unstoppable—thousands of them, a tidal wave of code crashing over music producers and mix engineers alike. Serum growls, a monster of wavetables, bending sound into shapes no music equipment ever dreamed—clubs thump with it, kids in hoodies nod. Sylenth1 purrs, a preset machine for trance heads and house junkies, slick and soulless. Kontakt looms, a library so vast it’s a maze—strings, horns, pianos, all sampled to death, thick as a brick and twice as heavy. Then the freebies—some delay plugin from a forum, coded by a kid with a cracked laptop, sounding like a fart in a sewer pipe, downloaded by a music producer with $3 in his pocket and a dream in his gut. Effects pile up—choruses, flangers, phasers, distortions so specific they’re pointless, like a reverb tuned for a whisper in a cave no one’s seen. The mix engineer chains them—12, 15, a mad stack of VST plugins, mixing a vocal ‘til it drowns in echo, chasing a vibe that slips away, then mutes the lot, lights a cigarette, and stares at the wall.

The weight’s the joke—the dream was freedom, music equipment in your pocket, no racks to haul, no power bills to dodge. But it’s there, crushing all the same. The CPU chokes, fans screaming like a jet engine in a closet, the laptop overheating on a desk littered with ash and coffee rings. The wallet bleeds—$300 for Serum, $200 for Kontakt, $50 for a delay you’ll use once, and the freebies crash anyway, eating time you don’t have. The skull’s the worst—every music producer paralyzed by choice, staring at a plugin list longer than a rap sheet, unable to pick, unable to start. The mix engineer knows it too—mixing becomes a war, a slog through VST plugins that promise gold and deliver mud, hours lost to a sound that won’t sit right. It’s the absurdity of the tools—give ‘em teeth, and they’ll bite; give ‘em too many, and they’ll bury you alive.