VST freebies & cheapies, what do you like?

So far (using "D'Cota") I installed the thing, then in the "devices" pull-down menu, selected it as an active instrument. I went to the midi track "inspector" thing, and where you select your midi channel or instrument, I selected "D'Cota" from the list, played it via the midi keyboard I've got plugged into the interface, and fiddled with the sound parameters via the editor window.

"quite simple really". Er.... well, it was less of a faff than that sounds, anyway.

I'm not sure how it works with "Reason", though.

Here's some free vst instrument faves:

MDA E Piano as used by Roots Manuva.
Ephonic Drumatic drum machine is good, as is his Invader fx synth for noises and his analogue style delay
Cheeze Machine and Crazy Diamonds are both old school seventies style string synths.
MutantKoto and the effects that the same guy offers are pretty fucked (in a good way.)
da Hornet is an emulation of a Wasp. It used to be commercial but now it's free. It's not actually amazing but I thought Pash'd like a go on it.
The Japanese Synth 1 has become maybe the classic free synth as long as you ignore the uninspiring presets. There's plenty better ones to be d/led from KVR of you wanna.
Karma FX Synth offers plenty of modular opportunities and has a developer who does quyite a lot of updates.
Andreas Ersonn's Ibli and PolyIblit are my favourite free synths. They can sound rough as fuck. He also does an electric piano that sounds very different to the MDA one.

MDA do a good basic range of, well, everything. This is a really good starting point.
TbT Tapestop emulates a tape slowing down or up. It's cool. He also does a good compressor and limiter.
Tiny God has some fucked stuff including the Throbber plug in insp. by Throbbing Gristle.
Frohmage is a filter that can make a big difference to your material.
Voxengo OldSchoolVerb reverb.
Sir is an excellent convolution based reverb which means that you'll also want to be heading here if only to find out what that means.
And you'll want to be looking at everything by the developers on the Smart Electronix site to find a ton of weird and/or useful stuff.

I can't say enough good stuff about the Fish Fillets pack from this guy:

http://www.digitalfishphones.com/main.php?item=2&subItem=5

These are comparable in quality to Waves plug-ins - not kidding!

This stuff is pretty wicked.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/kriminal68/Karnage.html

I recommend it highly!

http://www.nomadfactory.com/products/free_bundle/
http://www.kjaerhusaudio.com/classic-series.php

Couple of effects I forgot above:
PSP PianoVerb "reproduces special kind of reverberation originally provided by piano strings" and sounds real nice.
Voxengo Boogex is an amp simulation.

I've downloaded everything that looks interesting, and will stick the lot in my vstplugs folder tonight! More later, perhaps.

I used to sometimes before 4.6. Now that they've got multiple AU outputs not as much. The AudioEase VST wrapper is pretty good.

Soooo....any good sites for free MAS or AU plug-ins?

I know there's a program that creates an AU shell for each VST, try http://www.osxaudio.com if you haven't already, lots of links to free AUs and samples.

http://bram.smartelectronix.com/

The "Supaphaser" is great, you'll never touch the MAS phaser again.

http://www.soundhack.com/

I've been driving myself crazy trying to find a free VST I used to use called Crusher_CJF.dll. It's not that it's a great VST, but I've been trying to recover some old Fruity Loops tracks, and I apparently used it on 80% of them. Have googled it and all that turns up are dodgy and/or dead links.

If anyone happens to have it, I'd love you forever if you could email it to me.

Goldwave is an oldie but goodie and I also like Reaper OK.

i haven't tried it (yet) but there's a free line 6 pod plugin available this month for peeps with an ilok

http://www.line6.com/news/offers/864

Audio Damage have a freebies page. The compressor is pretty good and can go from subtle right up to "nuclear blast". The tremolo helps spice up organs and pads. The fuzz isn't that great on guitar, more useful as a "totally mess up your sound" effect.
http://www.audiodamage.com/downloads/

ah yes i've been meaning to try those. i have a couple of AD plugs, they're really really good.

are there any cheap AUs out there that emulate 90s romplers such as the roland SC-88? i know of the edirol hyper canvas but it's pretty expensive

anyone know of a sampling synthesizer plugin? i'd like to be able take a sample and spread it across the keyboard. i'm pretty you can do it in Ableton, but programming MIDI in Ableton drives me crazy and i'd love to find a vst that can do it in Cubase.

I was looking for a free VST harmonizer that sounds good and there it is: Pitchproof. It can even do chords.

is there any such thing as a vst that would allow me to vary the tempo of audio as it plays?

with or without pitch shifting? maybe put it into a free dj program like Mixxx, record, and import back into your DAW?

preferably without pitch shifting i think, though yeah that technique sounds useful too, thanks.

Btw free dj program would work for this as well:

anyone know of a sampling synthesizer plugin? i'd like to be able take a sample and spread it across the keyboard. i'm pretty you can do it in Ableton, but programming MIDI in Ableton drives me crazy and i'd love to find a vst that can do it in Cubase.

― precious bonsai children of new york (Jordan), Tuesday, May 21, 2013 1:04 PM (10 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh, you mean just using it to pitch the sample and bouncing it out as audio? or something else? because that's what i normally do in my DAW, but it would be nice to trigger the samples via midi as well as sequencing audio files.

You can take a sample and map out cue points to a midi device, tho we may be talking about two diff things

I'm an idiot abt this stuff

ohh ok, hmm. i actually haven't messed with dj programs much because i'm an idiot about dj'ing.

also i downloaded a bunch of these free vsts yesterday, haven't checked them out yet: http://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/downloads/

The VoS VSTs are awesome - you can make some fucked-up self-oscillations and time-pitch-shifts with their NastyDLA effect

It's also a pretty good delay effect.

Anything good going in the various Black Friday sales - soft synths, Ableton packs, etc?

soundtoys 5.1 for half price!!

bump for any Black Friday sales that are worth looking at?

Not sure if I've already stanned for it in this thread but Trackspacer (a sidechained EQ) is incredibly useful for getting some space in mixdowns and a steal at £25.

https://www.wavesfactory.com/trackspacer/amp/

Ooh that looks really interesting, ty

Debating about copping their Spectre plugin too, which also looks cool (and is on sale)

This thing is free, and I use it ALL THE TIME:
http://www.alexhilton.net/A1AUDIO/index.php/a1triggergate

Thanks! I can recommend the free vst synths from u-he (some standalone, some stripped-down versions of paid products), they sound great.

Any more?

Gotta get into those. The other amazing free plugin that I use all the time is this:

https://vladgsound.wordpress.com/plugins/limiter6/

I think it sounds better than a lot of paid master bus plugins.

https://tytel.org/helm/
https://tal-software.com/products/tal-noisemaker

Channel robot are giving away The modernist glockenspiel and the odernist kalimba. I do love me some mallet sounds. These seem nice. Bit of a cpu hit though?
https://audioplugin.deals/free-download-the-modernist-collection-kalimba-glockenspiel-by-channel-robot/

Glitch1- an oldie but a classic. 32bit only :(
http://illformed.org/

xp - ooh, I've been getting into sound libraries for screwing with in samplers, downloading those now

UVI's (free) Workstation comes with a handful of pretty good instruments, though I haven't really found any free compatible sample libraries (vs all the free Kontakt libraries out there).

also in that realm Spitfire's free Labs
https://www.spitfireaudio.com/labs/

O yeah those spitfire things look interesting! thanks
also: https://www.cinematique-instruments.com/pages_instr/page_klang.php

needs full kontakt though

I copped those glockenspiel and kalimba instruments, even though I have made many of my own sample packs using many of my own kalimbas & glockenspiels

https://projectsam.com/library-category/the-free-orchestra/

Dexed - DX7 emulation that loads DX7 patch files.
https://asb2m10.github.io/dexed/

I was looking for a good flanger, wishing Valhalla had one, and then found out they have one that's free if you fill out a survey! I've never been happier to respond to a company survey.

I've never really used a flanger. What's it good for?

Highly recommended skins for U-he's free synths making them more readable -
Triple Cheese - https://github.com/dozius/triple-cheese-themes
Tyrell N6 - https://plugmon.jp/product/interstellar-for-tyrell-n6/

It's a filter effect, the wiki defines it as "produced by mixing two identical signals together, one signal delayed by a small and gradually changing period, usually smaller than 20 milliseconds."

But I stayed away from it for years, maybe because I associate it with the snare breakdown in Lenny Kravitz "Are You Gonna Go My Way"? Then I heard this record, where a lot of programmed drums are run through some sort of shifting filter that I thought might be a flanger, and wanted to give it another go:
https://towheadrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/pure-energy

Thanks for the u-he skins!

has anyone played around with magenta/nsynth yet? i'm downloading now. it's free Max/MSP instrument from google, which uses machine learning to blend timbres from tonal samples, so you can combine the qualities of any two instruments, etc etc.

https://magenta.tensorflow.org/nsynth-instrument

see also: https://nsynthsuper.withgoogle.com/

https://www.discodsp.com/obxd/

Emulation of an OB-Xa - there's a buy link but it's really just a donation

It's pretty sweet, but has the same issue with discrete pitch jumping when you turn the Osc pitch knob, which makes playing with osc sync sound weaker than the real instrument. I'm using it for a pad sound in one of my tracks right now, though!

the same issue that a lot of soft synths have, I mean.

I can confirm that the Valhalla Space Modulator is sick, highly recommended.

"ValhallaSpaceModulator is FREE for anyone who has purchased a plugin directly from Valhalla DSP! "

Had you already bought something from Valhalla Jordan, or was the survey enough?

Ah, I've bought a couple things from them, yeah. $50 a pop and some of the best reverbs and delays I've ever used though.

^^ I use their shimmer and delay plugins on everything.

It's essential to the category of youtube videos that I would categorize as "ambient music made with cheap synthesizer and Valhalla Shimmer".

(related to but distinct from "ambient music made with cheap synthesizer and BigSky pedal")

don't forget "ambient music made with mutable instruments clouds either in module or vcvrack form."

that's an instagram-based genre, right?

https://www.audiority.com/shop/l12x-solid-state-amplifier/

forgot to post this a few weeks ago - it's a model of a little Marshall Lead 12 practice amp, but it also makes for a great overdrive/distortion effect, sounds A+ on a Rhodes or Mellotron type of thing.

That DOES sound good. Thanks!

https://www.kvraudio.com/product/tricent-mk-iii-by-full-bucket-music

Free '70s string-machine style synth

BUT, I found out that XILS Labs offers demos of their not-free VSTs (including a new Roland string machine emulation) where the only limitation is not saving presets or using DAW automation, which is very generous and at least w/ the string machine I can't see where I'd really be aching without automation anyway.

Re:XILS. For me to use the demos I guess I'd have to manually tweak any parameters in real time while bouncing to audio in the one session, giving up the chance of ever reloading the patch or adjusting it after that session... those seem like big limitations? How do you use it milo?

I just got it a couple of days ago and don't know what I'd use a string machine for at all really, so I'm just trying out playing it. I'd imagine just setting it up and playing it - you could use different instances on different tracks for major changes (switching different voices or something) but it doesn't seem like the kind of thing where you're going to be doing filter sweeps normally?

For their Polykobol or Synthi emulations, probably a much bigger deal but I haven't looked at those.

Installed XILS4 demo- happy to report it comes with a lot of presets. I almost never build patches from scratch anyway so I'm glad I got this. Closed and reopened a project and the synth and preset I'd chosen were still on the track but any tweaks I'd made to it were gone though. No registration required.

You can also download the Streichfett wavetable and drop it into the Live wavetable synth and get a decent string machine out of it (need to add some chorus/reverb to get it to sound good, as with the real device).

Reopened project with the XILS4 demo and it had forgotten the presets I'd chosen. O well.

More kontakt
https://sonuscore.com/shop/origins-bundle-vol-1-5/

free fxx
https://sonicstate.com/news/2020/04/03/use-soundtoys-effect-rack-for-free/

thumbs up emoji for this guy's software. gleetchlab in particular. standalone max application rather than VST but you can route the audio to your daw pretty easily. spent a little time tonight mapping my faderbank to a bunch of controls and am just letting the madness rip.

http://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/softwares/

Stretching the boundaries of cheap but the G-Force M-Tron mellotron emulation is on sale for 60% off and it rules

New, free Valhalla reverb:

https://www.synthtopia.com/content/2020/05/19/valhalla-dsp-has-a-free-reverb-for-you-its-supermassive/

yesssssssss

!!!

re: http://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/softwares/

anyone used the Fantastic Voyage 'Portastudio' app? I've figured out most of the routing, arming tracks gets signal to them, etc. but I cannot figure out how to make recording/playing the tape do... anything.

Having a great time with this today: https://www.sonic-lab.com/fundamental/

Hoping that comes to iOS, I think hainbach hinted at that in a video a couple of months ago

https://valhalladsp.com/shop/modulation/valhalla-space-modulator/

Valhalla made Space Modulator free for everyone (instead of free w/ purchase)

they dropped a free reverb plugin as well, a month or two back, and it sounds OZMM

https://valhalladsp.com/shop/reverb/valhalla-supermassive/

Not free but I love combining ValhallaDelay with Supermassive - the tape and BBD modes soften the digitalness of Supermassive and it just creates this giant beautiful reverb.

QasarBeach = donationware Fairlight CMI IIx. Never spent time on a real Fairlight, but I understand the frustration at trying to get somewhere with it. I expect everyone to go vaporware on the next ILX comp.

Samplr for iPad (incredible) has been turned into a free Macbook Pro touch bar app

http://samplr.net/touchbar/

Damn, I didn't even know touch bar was a thing. I would still kill for a PC vst version of Samplr.

It's the first semi-useful thing I've ever seen for the stupid touch bar.

Izotope's Iris 2 is down to under £10 at Plug-In Boutique at the moment, which is a steal, it's a lot of fun.

Thanks for the heads up on that sale!

I'm giving this a shot for $29 (intro sale)
https://babyaud.io/parallel-aggressor-plugin

I wanted to get the Baby Audio VHS plug-in, but I don't know if it does quite what I want.

What are you going for, out of curiosity?

For modulation/wobble/Boards of Canada-y stuff, I like the Echomelt and Vectomelt from Psychic Modulation

I was looking more for a BoC tape degradation kind of thing, the Super VHS plug seems maybe a bit too washy and vaporwave for my interests, thanks for the Echomelt tip!

Audio Thing Reels is excellent at that. It's an 'emulation' of a cheap old reel to reel with multiple tape speeds and styles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXvNi7xu8Tc

Eventide released a new free synth today, Pendulate

I was coming here to post that, it looks sick

Valhalla Supermassive has a new 1.1 beta with more modes.

Baby Audio put out a free delay that's solid - the analog setting is a pretty good imitation of a BBD delay pedal, the others don't seem to be trying to be anything in particular

https://bedroomproducersblog.com/2020/10/09/baby-comeback-free/

Bump for Black Friday alerts.

Wavesfactory has half-off, they make those black magic mixing plugins like Trackspacer and Spectre.

I'm kinda hoping for a deal on Synplant, I've always wanted to try that one.

Valhalla Supermassive got updated today with another two new modes (also Valhalla Delay with a lofi mode based on one of the Univox tape echo units that uses what amounts to an 8-track cassette)

VirtualCZ is £9.95 on Plugin Boutique and you can bag a free Drumazon licence - Great emulation of the old Casio CZ series with a few new features.

vital.audio - new wavetable synth from the guy who made Helm, free for the base version or up to $80 for special features

Black Friday is killing me already :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kdaz1iAY5E

rare sale on u-he plugins happening rn, all half off via NI's website. Diva and Hive were already my go-to synths so i'm very happy to see this. actually i was ready to buy the Hive 2 for full price, and just happened to google for a sale and get lucky! just now i bought the Repro and Colour Copy as well... sale's on for another few days, here's the link:

https://www.native-instruments.com/en/specials/komplete/u-he-offer-2020/

intrigued by this Max 4 Live kit, Nestup
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeXziambsDY

https://gumroad.com/l/nestup

New Valhalla Delay update added a phaser mode that makes for some incredible reverbs.

Those are cool - need to spend more time on the Valhalla presets! I've just been using their plugins like a pedal and dialing in the same boring shit every time.

There are acres of free homebrewed Kontakt instruments here - https://www.pianobook.co.uk/

I think you probably need to make a Spitfire Audio account, but that's worth it just to get access to their free 'Labs' series also.

speaking of free Kontakt instruments that spark joy, i've been keeping myself very entertained by Lockdown Kitchen. tons of fun percussion sounds, (almost) all of which were sampled from banging on things in the engineer's kitchen:

https://www.rattlyandraw.com/new-products-1/lockdown-kitchen

Beta versions of some new Noise Engineering plugins for free:

https://www.noiseengineering.us/blog/public-beta

Audiority's Polaris reverb/echo is on sale for $22, loving it - it's based on early digital echo/reverb like the Ursa Major Space Station, so it's kind of thin and diffusion just slightly softens the delay lines instead of turning into a big Lexicon-y reverb.

https://overloud.com/free-gem-mod/download?id=0

Free licenses for Overloud's new Roland Dimension-D plugin. I haven't downloaded it yet but their quality on effects generally seems to be good?

Good looking out

The Arturia demos that work forever but time out are great for goofing around for free (slash deciding if it's worth buying at Black Friday) - the newer digital recreations sound great, the Ensoniq SQ80 and E-Mu Emulator especially. There's a kick preset on the SQ80 that I want to sample for future use.

Cool I'll have to check out those demos. I've been considering pulling the trigger on a couple things, and I just know I'm going to buy them before they go on a ridiculous sale next month.

Black Friday sales coming through, Pigments here I come!

Hell yea. I've been waiting for Black Friday, too. If anybody ITT finds any particularly juicy VST/plugin sales, please share! I'm also watching for sale announcements on Sound On Sound's New Products & Industry News forum.

Audiority has a new free phaser pedal VST. I haven't downloaded it yet (slow reinstalling everything after a reformat because Universal Audio drivers suck) but all the Audiority stuff I have is good.

any suggestions for good dissonant and droney north african pipe/reed/flute sounds on the cheap? instrument or sound library or whatever

Dunno if this is what you mean, Nick B, but I programmed the ones you hear on this track on the FM8. At the time I couldn't find a decent soft synth that could emulate those sounds.

https://templo.bandcamp.com/track/the-valleys-of-paradise

ha, neat track! ideally looking for something a bit more 'real' though, and something where you get good buzzy timbral shifts as you blow harder through it, but can also be quite soft. also, a pony

Thank! hahaha ! Let me know if you find it ( that elusive vst, not the pony).

very tempted by 50% off Pigments

Pigments seems very deep so far, only scratching the surface but I still have hopes this could be my 'forever synth', or at least a main axe.

Baby Audio has a freebie one-button random fx vst.

Nick, sounds like you're looking for a Kontakt instrument? Haven't used them but I've seen some like you describe.

Can pigments be controlled with a Push 2?

xp yeah, i might jump for that if i have any spare cash at the end of the month - it's half price at the moment too. will keep searching to see if there's something that works with kontakt player or similar first though.

pig 3 is amazing, i got v2 last year and then a free upgrade when it launched. amazing they made something that deep whilst remaining a thing that i, a doofus, can still understand (mostly)

Another "free" one - https://soundpaint.com/

Kontakt-like sample player, you get one free grand piano sample set (I can't play piano for shit but it sounds good - it's a big sample library if you're space-constrained, 7GB or so) then buy more but the intro ones are pretty reasonably priced AFAICT.

Hi Moodles. Yes, Pigments can def be used with Push, but there may be some assembly req'd. (IDK if any the default presets are configured with mappings to Push's continuous controllers, but I didn't see any.)

What I do to get Pigments (or any non-native plugin in Ableton) to work with push is:
1) Drop an instance of the plugin into an empty Device Rack
2) Click the little arrow button that exposes the plugin's parameter automation config. (IDK what this is called, it's there for each plugin in the device chain.)
3) Click "Configure," which is now exposed, and click on whatever parameters I will want to available by default for automation/hardware control.
4) Click "Configure" again to stop selecting parameters.
5) Right-click the name of the plugin and select "Save as Default Configuration." Now, every time you instantiate this plugin, it will have all of these parameters configured as shown.
6) Each parameter now has a slider in the config section we've exposed. Right-click each of them and map to one of the Device Rack's macros.
7) Save the Device Rack as a User Preset and name it e.g. "Pigments Rack."

The "Pigments Rack" is what you'll open if you want the macros available on something like Push, without having to do all these steps every time you open a new instance of the plugin. I mapped Pigments' 4 macros, filter cutoff and resonance, and a couple other things I am forgetting rn.

Nice, thanks!

I'm strongly thinking about getting this because it's a nice discount and I'd like to make some cool space sounds. It looks more intuitive and flexible than Ableton's synths.

I've only used the sampler module so far, which is fun and has lots of possibilities for mangling audio. The other synths weren't as instantly usable for me, gonna have to dig into those next time.

It's a lot of synth for the price

Ohhh so that's how you do modulation routing in Pigments, now we're talking

yeah it's not immediately that bit! also don't ignore the fx tab :)

jordan, this was one of the best pigments tutorials i found, lots of little tips in there, super useful. v2 but it all still applies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tui94lfKlhM

Thank you!

I went ahead and bought it and have been playing around. Very fun and pretty straightforward once you figure a few basic things out, but there are definitely various controls that are a mystery to me. I don't know much about round design from a technical perspective so it's all trial and error at tge moment.

This really helped me understand what you can do with the sequencer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwW-reZhn9o

that was excellent, thanks moodles

Lol, Rolling Pigments 2022.

Still so much to learn, but my next trick is to find a good bit with one of the synth engines (or Razor), bounce it, and then bring it into the sampler. Rinse & repeat. (and then use that as the basis for a wavetable? Have not tried that yet.)

Or I should say my current trick, I've gotten my first usable results that way.

Native Instruments stuff on sale too, I got Form for half off. And now I swear I will not get any more new things, and will make all my tracks in 2022 using these. :)))

I just got Chromaphone 3 which is an acoustic resonmator modelling thing that i wanted for percussion stuff but it does a whole lot more too:
https://www.applied-acoustics.com/chromaphone-3/

pigments is only $49 if you own other arturia stuff, just hopped on this train

xp I was considering a Korg Minilogue xd desktop but as that is £££ and Reaktor 6 is 50% off I might give it a shot, particularly since my current PC won't melt under the strain. Last version I used was v4 just after it came out which was (checks notes) 18 years ago. Have to say I always enjoyed wiring up my own obnoxious sounding synths.

Just joined the Pigments 3 train

Ok now I might really start a Pigments IMM thread

I definitely feel like I need to learn some basic sound design concepts. I can come up with something kind of cool just by tinkering, turning knobs, and linking things together, but I wish I actually knew how to dial up a specific at will.

Cherry Audio has a new Arp Quadra softsynth. I can't vouch for the accuracy of any of their synths but they're all pretty cheap and very fun.

https://store.cherryaudio.com/

i also bought form. now im done. preset + lots of modulation + some corny M4L deterministic sequencing = instant youtube ambient

jordan start the pigments thread, wanna go deep on that one.

I did!

Rolling Pigments 3 Tips & Trix

Not a freebie but XLN Audio’s XO is available for £5 a month on Splice.

It’s an AI based way of navigating huge collections of drum hit samples, automatically creating a map of similar samples / removing duplicates / swapping samples by similarity.

Doesn’t sound very exciting on paper but it’s been a revelation finding uses for long forgotten drum samples and makes navigating a huge library weirdly fun and productive.

Jamie Lidell talked about making a M4L patch to work with that (or something like it) to bring in a random sample from somewhere in your folders, matched to the key & tempo of your current project. I don't use ableton but that would be amazing for serendipitous sampling.

Boz Digital's black friday sale is sweet. I picked up the Big Clipper and Sasquatch Kick Machine, as well as the Claps, Stomps & Snaps bundle. Hopefully my days of slogging thru kick and clap one-shots are behind me now.

I also went for Klanghelm's SDRR saturation plugin, because it's pretty, and Eddie Bazil raves about it. You can never have too many saturation/distortion plugins.

Plugin Alliance's sales are tempting, too... I can hear Soundtoys' Phase Mistress and Little Alter Boy call my name as I am pulled ever closer to the Eventide Blackhole :o

Klevgrand has some good sales, I went for their shaken percussion vst. Not something I would normally go for, but I'm so sick of chopping tambourine loops, lol.

Little Alter Boy is surely my most used Soundtoys plugin, along with the filter one. And the plate reverb they offered for free a few years ago.

Good stuff. Skaka (the shaker plug) has proven to be very useful... might've influenced my decision to get all the single-serving kick/clap/stomp/snap plugins from Boz. I also got Klevgrand's Pipa and Slammer. Swedish design is generally really fucking good.

Decided not to get Blackhole. I-lok sucks and I'd prefer to support Valhalla, so I'm likely to buy their Shimmer reverb instead.

Fuck Waves for throwing out this interesting freebie then making it part of their V13 bullshit licence, scamming c*unts.

Their website has been shitting the bed all weekend all 504 gateway timeouts lol

I think this is my fave plugin lately. Great for boosting things out of the mix: https://www.wavesfactory.com/audio-plugins/trackspacer/

(and on sale)

Been curious about that - do you just sidechain the signal of another track that you think is conflicting with it? Or the master bus?

I buss all the competing tracks to one and then use TrackSpacer on that buss.

So in the case of the vocal, everything but the drums/bass.

I love Trackspacer - I usually have one on a bass/subs group being ducked by the kick drum, and set up a group of virtually everything but bass and duck that by the snare

Hmm I have a demo version but I haven't been able to get it to do anything. So do you need to sidechain /use a send to get it to do anything? Or should it just try to separate things if you just use it as an insert on a buss?

Thanks for the headsup DJI, I was trying to remember the name of that plug...

Jordan, I'm pretty sure you have to use a sidechain...

Thanks for the recommendation, DJI. I watched a Youtube demo/review and copped it immediately.

Thanks, I ended up getting the demo version working and it's pretty cool. I might go for it too, even though I said I was done buying plugins this year. :)

Cosign on Trackspacer, I love it, my main job is in Post and I use it all the time to carve a little notch in my music or fx busses to make some room for voice, which it does very well.

You have to be careful though, there's a bug that sometimes pops up where you get distortion on the right channel, if that happens just reload the plug as multi-mono instead of stereo, that should fix it.

quick survey: what is everyone currently using for drums?

Samples :)

I usually start with a rack of a bunch of M4L drum devices. But I don't think my drums sound that great! :)

Funny, I was just about to ask the same question. I've been trying to reduce my time auditioning one-shot samples by making my own presets for Ableton's Drum Rack, and using Klevgrand's Skaka (for shaken percussion), and (soon) Boz Digital's kick/snap/clap/stomp plugins.

Can anyone recommend a VST drum machine that they find particularly joyful to use? I've been using synth plugins for percussion parts when Drum Rack's lack of a synth engine doesn't cut it, but it'd be nice to have a go-to (virtual) drum machine that handles multiple parts.

Been using Klevgrand's Slammer recently as a sort of side percussion thing, it's great!

I'm still in the dark ages with Battery to be honest, I find that there are a couple of drum sample kits in there that work really well.

I had to make a couple of fake Nirvana tunes for a podcast recently and used the old Battery multi-mic kit into the Arturia Fet-76 with the 'all buttons in' setting to pop the room, it sounded surprisingly good.

I think mostly I'm one of those people who don't like using midi for drums, it just feels wrong somehow

https://blog.native-instruments.com/5-free-e-pianos-kontakt/

Arturia Tape Mello-Fi - lo-fi tape-style modulation effect:

https://www.arturia.com/products/software-effects/tape-mello-fi/overview

PS it's FREE until December 31

Their servers are creaking. I got it a half hour ago and it's still not showing in my account.

lol same

i guess we can watch the video about it in the meantime >

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5r2HhDeFgE

and yes there are about a billion other plug-ins that do the exact same thing already but hey

i guess the tape stop thing is new tho

I’m using Uhe Satin for tape sim stuff at the moment, not quite sure how as I sold my licence but it just kept on working. Should probably just download this and go legit again lol

I like Audio Thing's Reels plugin and SketchCassette for this lo-fi stuff, they have a nice distortion.

Subtle tape stuff is beyond my hearing ability, I want it absolutely trashed if I'm using a "tape" plugin.

Also Izotope's Trash 2 is free!

https://www.izotope.com/en/shop/trash-2.html

Nice free Spitfire labs Xmas-related thingy.

https://labs.spitfireaudio.com/christmas

After a kerfuffle with Arturia software center (turned out it was just on their end), I got my Pigments update (great) and the Tape Mello-fi freebie. The latter rules - I've had a bunch of tape emulations and saturators, and this is the best by far. Instantly usable and fun, highly recommend people grab it if possible.

Cool! Will you be posting anything on Instagram for #jamuary?

Ha, not likely. For electronic music my setup isn't very video-friendly, I almost always use headphones instead of monitors, and work mostly on the computer.

For drums, the more I've been practicing and getting my hands right, the less I've felt compelled to make any videos for some reason. Maybe if I finally get some drums set up in the house, although drum kit sounds terrible on phone audio.

I cracked and bought the hainbach audiothings gong amp. Think it goes back up to full price tomorrow-ish?

Surge synth is now free/open-source, and they added a bunch of stuff. Haven't tried it yet, though: https://surge-synthesizer.github.io/index.html

New Hainbach dropped: https://www.audiothing.net/instruments/noises/

Recently went through a bunch of free transient shaper plugins for a specific use case, and Crack from Surreal Machines is very nice:
https://www.surrealmachines.com/transient-machines-vstau/

Also scooped a few others, I have high hopes for Rave Generator if I can get it working.

I'm kinda disappointed in Noises, it's interesting but I don't feel that you can screw with the original samples quite enough for my liking, plus bit reducers are corny.

Bought the latest cheapy background noise cleaner-upper from Waves that's just been released, I have RX Elements but it's great to have something that I can use in real-time across a track.

Got an email from Native Instruments with a bunch of free downloads from NI, Izotope, and Plugin Alliance since apparently they're all teaming up. Looks like some real useful stuff in there (mostly on the saturation, mixing, and masering side of things), I won't say no.

Free Mellotron VST:
https://www.audiolatry.com/mel-lofi/

nice!

Hora Detour module in VCV Rack is great fun - self contained vector synth, combine it with the Instruo Harmonaig module for a sort of polyphony (or maybe there's a way to get polyphonic note input into VCV Rack, I haven't really looked)

This DAW Mixbus is awesome. Pretty much this stock daw, a good editable delay and a good editable reverb = all you need for a killer mixer software.

https://harrisonconsoles.com/product/mixbus/

Really you could get by with just the DAW and a good audio editor that had some decent effects built in.

For mixing, this stuff is awesome - the EQ and compression and gain control is so deep - you don't need anything else. I've been cutting stuff with limited tracks and this app has been awesome for mixing. Don't about inputting synths or anything.

I've gone back to Acid as my cut 'em and track with a virtual drum machine or loops. I find it much easier to cut up files than Ableton, which has some cool effects built in. Acid not so much, but it was the first software like this I used, so I know how to use the edit tools - hence - it works for me.

Not really a VST thing, but not sure where else this should go. Does anyone know of any good, preferably free, collections of vocal samples? Can be singing, talking, stuff from movies or TV, whatever, as long as it is not weird generic stuff.

freesound.org might have some usable things that realm but it's a slog to go through

https://dsp56300.wordpress.com/downloads/

Finally got around to installing the Access Virus chip emulator and a Virus C BIN file, sounds and works great, takes up pretty much zero CPU

If you have Minimoog D for iOS, it's now a free VST/AU on macOS.
https://www.moogmusic.com/news/model-d-app-now-available-macos

Angela‘s reaction to

Not really a VST thing, but not sure where else this should go. Does anyone know of any good, preferably free, collections of vocal samples? Can be singing, talking, stuff from movies or TV, whatever, as long as it is not weird generic stuff.

Ooh good one

possibly the wrong thread, but i guess spitfire audio guy chose a good week on twitter to pledge support for transphobes:

https://ra.co/news/77787

It's not exactly a cheapie since the intro price is $59, but Cherry Audio's new emulation of the GX-1/CS-80 is pretty great.
https://cherryaudio.com/products/gx-80

Does anyone use Analog Obsession's donation/ware plugs? Looking at YT reviews they seem almost too good to be true.

Whoa, definitely going to get those, ty

The Best Free Plugins of 2022: Free Plugins of the Year
https://www.gearnews.com/best-free-plugins-2022/

Thank you! Some intriguing stuff in there.

Finally started messing around with Vital, seems like an extremely promising synth. I don't really know what I'm doing yet and I haven't installed any presets or wavetables (which seems to be an essential part of the experience), but I still got a cool part just from messing around with the single default wavetable in the free version. The modulation and routing is really intuitive, and the fx sound great.

I've been playing with that one, too. I've mostly been following along with the least obnoxious Youtube videos I can find, but have made a few interesting patches.

Digging the Cherry Audio Jupiter 6 emulation, might have to actually buy it. Roland's slider interface lends itself to VSTs better than knobs IMO.

Waves new free voice/vocal plug is decent, it's a handy little cocktail of dynamic eq/de-essing and a one-fader threshold/make up gain compressor. There is a gate in there too but it's not so great.

Seems like every single YT review uses these absolutely fucking dismal trap vocal tracks as their testing ground, so it's hard to get a read from some badly recorded asshole saying the same sentence three times, but worth checking out if you can take the deluge of emails from Waves that comes from signing up.

Not a lot of freebies, just tons of sales blowing up my inbox. The BPB (Bedroom Producers Blog) newsletter continues to be a treasure trove though, they released a free VHS simulator and pointed me to another free tape sim and a cool delay. I grab something from them every week (hence all the plugin mailing lists).

I did finally spring for the Vulf compressor on discount, and I'm thinking about the soundtoys Super plate too.

Super Plate is gorgeous. I got the full Soundtoys bundle a long time ago for $100 on a super sale but don't use most of it (the Lexicon Prime Time, the pitch shifting - don't care for Echoboy or the distortion devices really), the $29 upgrade to Super Plate justified the whole thing.

Nice, I got the bundle years ago (pre-dated SuperPlate). I've used them a ton, but these days it's mostly Little Plate and Filter Freak. And actually I've been reaching for EchoBoy Jr over EchoBoy...I'm sure you can do the same things in the full version, but Jr is nicely stripped down and highlights some 80s & 90s emulations that sound really cool.

And Decapitator, they all have their place though.

Yeah, Echoboy Jr is a go to (not always the final choice, but usually worth a shot)...
Recently discovered that Microshift can be pretty good to just thicken up a sound, if you use a light touch...

I have a nice Arturia Plate, but I am still tempted by anything by SoundToys, I love Echoboy Jr and use it all the time, my only real purchase this time was FabFilter's Pro-C 2 w/ 25% off.

Oh and an old Waves plug, Soundshifter cause I needed to automate a voice going up and down a bit in pitch for a job and my other pitch shift plugs are kinda stock. $20

I’m not sure I have a great ear for reverb. Most reverbs sound alright to me. Then again, I haven’t spent time comparing them back to back. If I did, maybe the differences would seem obvious. I was thinking of downloading Little Plate while it was free, but I read somewhere someone saying that they had a problem (can’t remember if it was instability or high CPU), so I’ve been wary of it. Plus I’ve been using a free Black Rooster plate called RO-GOLD. I downloaded it last year, and when I heard it, I thought, wow, I remember that sound (of plate reverb). I use it on every track I do. But maybe the Little Plate or some other one would be even better, I don’t know.

The other plug-in effect I use on everything is Valhalla Super Massive. I love that one.

I like Solaris (shimmer reverb) as well.

But I've got to the point where I am becoming much more hesitant about new plug-ins in general. It seems like a lot of stuff would be, on the face of it, more or less duplicating things I already have. And even if something's slightly different, is it worth the bother? A case in point is WA Production KickShaper. I read a lot of people raving about it on Gearspace, but one of the most recent posters complained that they didn't like it. There are already so many ways you can process kick drums, mix them together, transpose them etc., so is it really worth spending $16 (current sale price of KickShaper)?

I got Inner Pitch from Auburn Sounds for free from one of those BPB emails (it may not be free anymore), and it's a fantastic pitch shifter. Much better than Little AlterBoy (though I haven't used the Waves one).

I used to love reverbs and soft synths. Now I hardly ever use reverb, and can't seem to have enough compressors, vintage-style EQs, and saturation plugins. It's a sure sign of aging.

Would you recommend particular compressors as being vastly superior for specific tasks? I use Cakewalk and I tend to just slap the stock Pro Channel compressor on everything. It mostly sounds good enough to me but maybe I'm missing out. I do have various other compressors, such as TDR Kotelnikov GE, but I don't seem to get around to using them.

Same with EQ. I tend to just use the stock EQ. I'm probably missing a trick though. When mastering I do use TDR Nova, which I like.

I now have Melda MSaturator permanently on the mix bus and I really like what that does. I do like all the Melda plug-ins I've used.

I downloaded Inner Pitch free edition as well, but I can't remember if I've used it yet. I also have Graillon and Couture by them.

For EQ, I really like using the BLENDEDEQ and Harqules from Analog Obsession for tone shaping on channels and busses. I use stock eq or Fabfilter for surgical stuff, but with those it's nice to just use my ears and lightly boost or cut whereever makes it sound better, and the EQs themselves do have a pleasant quality.

For compressors, I'll take as much trial and error as I can get. Some of them do more than just compression (like the Vulf one, which emulates the original SP404 vinyl sim I think?), and others I think of as more harsh or smooth or transparent. Analog Obsession has one called dbComp that's easy to use and particularly good for drums. So it depends whet the instrument is and what sound I'm going for. I still don't fully know what I'm doing so I like having options in case I'm not getting the results I want with one tool.

I'll have to try the Melda saturator, I think I'm put off because of their ui, lol. I use the BPB saturator on basically every channel.

The other plug-in effect I use on everything is Valhalla Super Massive. I love that one.

New v3 of that was just released and is really really fun - also free!
https://valhalladsp.com/shop/reverb/valhalla-supermassive/

Thanks for those tips. I'll have to look into these.

I actually like the Melda UI. I find it pleasantly straightforward, at least on the small number of their plug-ins I've used.

I half know what I'm doing, because I did it for years (before giving up for many years), and half still don't know what I'm doing, because I never received any training in engineering and just picked it up as I went along. I'm too lazy to learn more, and basically still an ignoramus when it comes to the proper technical side of engineering. I just can't engage with it, the maths and scientific side, though I do semi-understand how to DO a lot of things, but without a full grasp of many of the technical principles underpinning them. I read forum posts on the technical aspects of engineering and mastering, and equipment specs and performance, but it's often way over my head. Same with Dan Worrall videos, which I enjoy watching, but don't understand half of what he says.

New v3 of that was just released

Yes, I saw that. I'm always (and possibly needlessly) scared of installing plug-in updates, in case the update changes something so the plug-in doesn't perform exactly the same as it did on a project using the older version. I imagine that wouldn't be the case with most plug-ins but I'm reluctant to take the risk.

Yeah same. I literally didn't use compression on my first few records because I didn't understand it and my mixing decisions were hilariously naive. Now I have a lot more experience and have consumed countless tutorials, so I do in fact know how a compressor works. But I still prefer to work sort of quickly and intuitively, and if a few minutes of knob-turning isn't working then I'll try something else, or often just change the part.

I've never mixed someone else's record where changing the arrangement or instrumentation isn't an option, that would be an interesting challenge but way harder I'm sure.

But I still prefer to work sort of quickly and intuitively, and if a few minutes of knob-turning isn't working then I'll try something else, or often just change the part.

Yes, same here. And in the past I would beat myself up over my inadequacy, but now I don't care. I just move on. Same way that in the past I would pride myself on being some kind of 'power user' of a program or piece of equipment (this is back in the 1990s on an Atari ST and Akai samplers and so on). Now, I've got a DAW that has hundreds of commands and options, and all sorts of ways of doing things that I don't know about or understand, but I don't care. I just want to get the job done and come out with something I'm pleased with, even though I know it could always be better. That's not to say that I don't still want to improve, but I'd rather improve in the course of doing something, finishing something, not just spend hours learning techniques for the sake of it.

For drums I would recommend the Waves SSL G Bus Compressor, it has a nice way of gluing things together and also works well with other instruments.

I have an Arturia 1176 plugin which I like for more dramatic drum mixing, the 'all buttons in' setting blows things up nicely and pulls a lot of the room sound in, which can work nicely running in parallel with a cleaner drum mix.

I don't know what the best 1176 style plug might be, UA maybe, there is a Waves CLA one, I'm very happy with this Arturia version.

https://klanghelm.com/contents/products/TENSjr

Free version of their new spring reverb plugin based off the giant studio spring units, sounds really nice

I posted it in the other thread but I'm also enjoying this emulation of the Kawai K1

https://www.nilsschneider.de/wp/nils-k1v/

Cool K1 plugin, love that. CD-Rom game and Cinemax channel vibes...

UA is running a $49.99 "guitar" bundle: https://www.uaudio.com/uad-plugins/plug-in-bundles/uad-guitar-fx-bundle.html

This is a hell of a good deal considering it includes the Lexicon 224. Also comes with Space Echo, Dimension D, LA3A, CE-1, a leslie.... I've only played a little bit with it so far. But that reverb, holy shit. Supposedly the code is ported from the hardware. These are native plugs, you don't need UAD hardware.

!
Thanks for the tip... UA stuff always sounds great, but usually super pricey....

This is intriguing -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5d70Vk3_o70

I'm not sure about the "physical modeling" thing. Is it using your recorded sound to trigger a sampled instrument and blending the two? It's cheap enough where I think I'll just give it a shot.

If it uses 'physical modelling', then I would say it's not using samples at all. I'm pretty interested in this too but I'd like to hear what people have to say about it before shelling out $29. I downloaded a couple of Sampleson physically modelled electric piano VSTs a while ago, though I see from my notes that I haven't used them yet. I must say I am attracted to the idea of this kind of thing. I absolutely refuse to use sample packs or multisampled 'virtual instruments'. I don't want the bloat on my computer in terms of the file sizes. Aside from a number of varieties of 909 (e.g. Samples from Mars packs, which are very good), I more or less stick to synths and whatever I choose to sample myself, as I always have.

Saw this covered on the BPB site today and downloaded it immediately. Looking forward to using this.

https://wildergardenaudio.com/maim/

It degrades and alters the input sound using MP3 compression and other adjustments. The sound examples using drums don't seem that remarkable but there's a video on YouTube where it's processing a piano pattern and that sounds a lot more intriguing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALmvEnr0XPo

Some comments say the effects are reminiscent of Digitalis. I might have that already installed, not sure. It's true, I think, that a lot of these things kind of cross over with each other in terms of the results that can be achieved. I'm still using the 32-bit sampler Shortcircuit to load samples and even that has some nice sound processing options built into it.

And contrary to what I wrote yesterday, I also downloaded the free Boz Digital Labs Steinway 1926 piano Lite version, which has also just been written up on BPB. True, it's somewhat multisampled, but apparently only 50 MB in total, which is what I like to see. I like the sound of the demo audio files. I rarely use piano, but I can see that this will be useful.

I started messing around with Haptic Perc, it's an odd duck. There's no wet/dry control, so it's mostly adding tonal info to the attack of your source recording, which will always be audible. So it sounds kinda lame if you use a drumkit loop and try to make it sound like a hand drum, but works pretty well if you're tapping your fingers on the desk (also had some interesting results using brushes on a snare or sticks on a practice pad). The tuning slider also has zero labels, so you're purely going by ear (and it's a little hard to even get back to a previous setting).

Still pretty unique & cool though. I had a track with some hand drum samples that were too short/overly truncated and I was able to use it to generate a more natural sounding decay, it sounds nice blended with the original track.

Hmm. There seems to have been not much interest in it so far. On YouTube I'm still seeing only Sampleson's own promotional videos, which aren't that revealing of what it can do. I'd certainly try out a trial version, but they haven't provided one. I don't think I'm going to spend $29 on it without trying it.

But I'm now quite interested in Sampleson's Metapiano ($89). Sounds really nice, and as I mentioned before, I just refuse to use huge multisampled instruments. This is only 60 MB (and also claimed to be light on CPU). Only thing is, I don't really use piano much, if at all, but it's tempting all the same.

Gonna have to get this I think

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79EZpULr6J0

Heh I've always done this by individually pitch shifting or time stretching each hit (as audio, not midi). Looks fun though.

I bought it but haven't used it yet.

that looks cool. Logic added "Beat Breaker" to a recent update, which can chop things up really quickly, but isn't as retro as this one. I haven't messed with BB too much but it is quick! I remember learning about chopping breaks in a 1995 (?) issue of Future Music. It was written before most samplers had graphic displays! so it was all, take the total number of samples for a loop, divide by 8/16, those are your chops. ha. Not sure today's producers (definitely including me!) would have that kind of patience!