VST freebies & cheapies, what do you like?

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!