Found some useful free plugins this year. Also thought I’d just make a list of the ones I’ve found that have proven themselves useful over time. Some are free all the time, some are free at certain times of the year. I got all these for free, but yeah, some might not be free at this time. Keep an eye out around Black Friday and Christmas though.
Maybe not the best descriptions, but test them out and see what they can do for you.
Instruments
- Spitfire Labs - all sorts of great sample instruments. Lap Steel, mandolin, lots of great pads and textures.
- OB-Xd - lovely free Oberheim emulation.
- Dexed - DX-7 emulation. Can load DX-7 patches.
- Uh-e Tyrell - underrated free synth from Uh-e.
- Lira-8 - software emulation of the crazy Lyra-8 synthesizer.
- iZotope Iris 2 - granular beast of a synth.
- Xenakios PaulXStretch - vst version of the old paul stretch granular time-stretching app.
FX
- Acqua Celestial - interesting emulation of the SSL Fusion.
- Arturia Jun-6 Chorus - emulation of the great Roland synth chorus sounds.
- Arturia Filter Mini - Moog-like filter with sequencer.
- Arturia Rev Plate 140 - cool old plate reverb emulation.
- Audiomodern Filterstep - another cool filter with step sequencer.
- AudioThing Filter Jam - looks like a filter from a science lab. Can get some great textures with this thing.
- AudioThing Texture - interesting granular reverb.
- Fuse Audio Labs RS-W2395C - old-school looking characterful EQ
- Izotope Ozone Imager - stereo width plugin.
- Izotope Vinyl - nice little vinyl plug. All the crackles you need. Updated slick interface.
- Native Instruments Raum - nice reverb. Some interesting features and modes.
- Slate Digital Fresh Air - plug gives some nice high end “air” to the mix.
- Sonimus SonEQ - pretty nice Pultec EQ emulation.
- TAL chorus - another nice Juno chorus emulation.
- TAL Reverb 2, 3 and 4 - 3 is especially cool for ambient washes, imho.
- TAL DAC - imparts some old-school crunchy lo-fi sampler vibes.
- Tokyo Dawn Labs Kotelnikov mastering compressor Fairly simple and clean workhorse.
- Valhalla Supermassive - excellent reverb/delay. Just try it.
- Valhalla FreqEcho - frequency shifter
- Valhalla Space Modulator - all sorts of modulation fx
- Voxengo Span - frequency spectrum analyzer, check volume levels, etc.
- YouLean Loudness Meter 2 - handy plugin to check levels on master channel while mixing.