This i the best EQ? Do you recommend to buy the 'Gentleman's' edition?

I wouldn't say it's the absolute best for all possible purposes but it can definitely be useful in almost any situation. I think GE is worth it for the LF phase lag alone

If you don't mind me asking, I am new to Production, what would you say are the top 5 most important FX VST's for you. (Delay, Reverb, EQ, Saturation, Compressor etc etc)

Also, the only synth I have so far is Xfer Serum, do you know it? If so what do you think of it?

Thanks!

The best totally depends on the purpose... lately i've been doing mostly mastering which is very logistical, so the plugins i use for that are quite different than what i would use for composition when i try to be really experimental and spontaneous. So it's all a matter of the features you desire in a given moment. I would recommend spending a bunch of time testing out lots of free plugins and demo trials of plugins to get a good feel for the range of what's out there and what you find the most useful, and also to more deeply understand by ear what the processes are actually doing to the source material. I only buy something when it fulfills some special role that i can't achieve easily with other tools.

To actually answer your question, i'd say the top 5 most important FX are: -Preamp / Tube Saturation -Spectrum Analysis (not an effect persay but very useful) -High-Quality Limiting (don't believe hype, do tests yourself) -Convolution Reverb and maybe -Harmonic Enhancer

Haven't used Serum (tho it looks really versatile and powerful)... What i would recommend is to learn its functions inside and out so that you know exactly what each parameter does and custom-craft a bunch of your own patches... then your productions will have your own unique sound. i have so many thousands of various synth presets saved over the years from free synths and from ableton packs that me buying any synth vsti is not at all likely to occur.

I see, that is very in depth! In terms of the top 5 most important FX you listed, could you give me any names of good vsts you use? I do not mind what you use it for, I just find fascination in researching the VSTs. For saturation I currently have the Klanghelm MJUC.

Also, learning Serum has been quite difficult as I've only been learning production for about 2 months. I can't seem to build any sounds that I like out of it yet. Can you tell me how long it took you to get a 'grasp' on sound design?

Thanks again! I really appreciate the answer.

i'm going to decline to name specific pieces here simply out of respect for slickEQ (don't want to spend the whole comment talking about other plugs).

MJUC is awesome... "va-mu" style compressor plugins are more rare to find than other types and that thing is a nice beast.

Honestly i don't have an extremely deep grasp on sound design.... i just try random things and see what sounds cool, and then try to figure out what it is that makes it so. I would at least say to definitely always try to pay attention to phase and harmonics. And worry more about balance than about loudness.