VST freebies & cheapies, what do you like?

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