10 Underrated FREE Plugins You Should Know About 🤤

hey google turn on the acoustic panels neat hey google set the acoustic panels to red sweet [Music] howdy doody buckaroonies and welcome back to another episode of morning coffee with cameron the internet is a wild and wonderful place and there's a lot of really good free stuff out there if you know where to look like just this morning for example i went on my local craigslist and i found this gently used office chair you could take home with you today this fully functional refrigerator which seems to be missing a door this pile of garbage that you can come pick up this pile of garbage that you can come pick up and of course what would the internet be if it wasn't for a bunch of cats that just won't stop today we're going to be checking out 10 really amazing free plugins you should know about for music production and sound design and unlike the aforementioned craigslist items they are not in fact giant piles of useless garbage all of the plugins are linked down in the description below and of course there are time stamps down along the bottom here as well if you want to skip around and check out a couple of plugins in particular and hey with all that money you just saved on plugins why not check out the sponsor of today's video psi acoustics who sent me these really kick-ass custom acoustic panels psi acoustics hand make professional grade acoustic treatment for your studio with some incredibly high quality art prints on them from some top name visual artists or even your own custom artwork like i did on mine the panels also feature optional fully customizable rgb led lights on the front and back of the panels that you can control with a free app on your phone that you can control with your phone's microphone that you can control with music or even control with alexa or your google assistant which is just way more fun than it reasonably should be so if you want to add some serious vibe to your studio check out psy acoustics with the link down in the description below and use code venus theory to save 10 off your order so a big thank you to psy acoustics for sponsoring this video and of course sending me these really awesome panels that are just kind of fun to sit here and look at first up on the list today we have gsat plus from tb pro audio this was originally brought to my attention by christian hartless who is a subscriber of the channel so big shout out to christian for turning me on to this one it's a really fast and easy saturation plugin but it's got some relatively deep and advanced features which is really nice to see gsat plus here is based on the saturation end of the cs5501 channel strip plug-in it features oversampling which is great because that's really important with saturation and distortion we have several different saturation characters we can select from each adding a kind of different flavor and mojo to things there's a stage control which allows you to add more stages or tubes to the saturation which in turn makes things feel more well saturated it also has this fluctuation control which is really useful because it adds instabilities and inconsistencies to things making it feel a bit more authentically analog rather than so perfectly straightforward and digital and finally we have the odd and even harmonic controls these allow you to control the amount of distortion on the odd and even harmonics and this is really useful for things like guitars or vocals or bass lines or synth lines or things like that where having everything being a bit distorted might not really work but adding different harmonics might make things poke out in a bit more of a musical and pleasing way [Music] [Music] next up we have barrier by kit plugins this is another saturation tool but i wanted to include it because it's a little bit different it's described very aptly on the website as a badass saturation and filter plug-in and this really rings true it goes from a pretty gentle heat much like you would expect from something like maybe the soft tube saturation knob to full-on audio meltdown destruction like you might hear on something like the doom soundtrack and it's really awesome one great thing about barrier that i find very useful is its ability to control transients and this is pointed out on the website as well in case you didn't know saturation and compression are two pretty similar processes just with a few little differences and that makes saturation pretty well suited to rounding off the transience of something that's very sharp and pokey but doing it in a very musical way this is really useful on things like drums very percussive vocal lines or slap bass or synth plucks or anything like that that's just very spiky that you just want to make it a bit more chilled out and a bit more musical barrier here isn't really modeled after any specific piece of gear or tool it's just a general saturation tool it also gives you a couple of pretty solid filters to reshape and mold the sound after the fact and it can be mixed in parallel which is really useful for things like vocals drums or bass guitars [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] next up is a bit of an oddball but it is a really fun one this is lattice verb and the l4 verb by uh you and uh you develop some very unique plugins that aren't really like anything else out there lattice verb here and the big sibling l4 are some really fun reverb plugins that more or less allow you to design a custom reverb algorithm on the fly and even play around with it in real time which can get really insane and weird but it's a ton of fun to experiment with we can draw on a curve to control the parameters of the different all-pass filters in this lattice network and out pops a reverb the smooth control here as well is really useful to make things sound a bit less glitchy which at times it can get very odd sounding so increasing that can kind of rain that in a little bit and the bigger sibling l4 here increases the amount of filters and controls in action however it's extremely cpu intensive so you need a pretty good computer to run it this one isn't really meant to do anything in real time this is more of a creative sound design effect that you can use to create some really weird reverb delay things and then bounce it out and then keep playing around with it so do keep that in mind with the l4 [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] next up one of my favorite sound design secret weapons is m freeform phase by melda productions this is another pretty weird plug-in but i find it really fun and really useful in case you didn't know the melda free bundle is just a massive collection of really good utility tools and some more odd creative tools and it's absolutely worth checking out so go pause this right now if you don't already have it and just download all of them because they're all pretty great m freeform phase is a very unique phase control tool so what we do is draw in the phase rotation and movement across the frequency spectrum and then we can dial in the amount of that happening up to very extreme values as well as adjust the quality settings and all of these things become pretty important and if you start experimenting with this plugin you'll find out why this makes for some very weird sounds i guess is the best way i can describe it you can really put anything through it draw on a random curve and play around with some settings to get something almost completely different at the other end making it great for sound design especially for things like percussion or weird synth sounds or anything like that it's also really fun to design wave tables with you could put through a pretty standard or conventional oscillator or wave table play with this thing automate a few things and get something really weird out the other end [Music] this [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] coming up next the surge fx bank from the wonderful people over at the surge synth team the surge synth team are the people responsible for developing and maintaining surge the amazingly cool free synth plugin that you should really check out and a bunch of other really cool open source projects the surge effects bank here gives you the effects of surge as a separate plug-in that you can run on anything and surge has quite a few effects so this gives you a pretty good variety of different effects and tools to explore and it's all very cpu efficient the controls are really fast and easy and pretty clearly laid out and there's a lot to explore by just flicking around and exploring different effects so let's check it out [Music] do [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] speaking of the surge effects bank another really great set of free plugins you should know about are the plugins from air windows and conveniently enough a whole bunch of them are included inside of surge as well as the surge effects bank they're all maintained by a magical wizard of a human named chris who is an absolute gem and a national treasure who should be protected at all costs because he releases all of these for free and they're open source as well meaning you can check them out play around with them and even learn how a plugin works if you want to learn to develop your own going into the air windows plugins in any detail would take quite a bit of time and lucky for you chris is an amazing human being and posts some very excellent breakdowns and detailed videos about what each plugin does why it works the way it does and some of the more interesting ideas behind them because they cover a pretty massive variety of different tools and effects and some of them are pretty specific and niche but quite a few of them are very useful tools as well for general production and sound design work i really can't say enough good things about chris from air windows and if you check out the air windows plugins and you got some cash to spare please go support him on patreon he more than deserves it he's an amazing human being for releasing some of these for free because a lot of them really rival a lot of the expensive paid stuff out there many different air windows effects are included in the surge effects bank so we're going to take a look at a few of my favorites that i recommend you check out first up we have air which adds a nice sheen and top end to the sound we have iron oxide which is a tape emulation plug-in that's meant to be pretty heavily colored and it sounds really really good pressure which is a very mu compressor plug-in that just squeezes things together and of course a bunch of really cool reverbs [Music] so [Music] [Music] yes [Music] [Applause] next up we have chana v or channy v or chanev i don't really know from analog obsession analog obsession is a developer of some really great sounding analog and hardware gear inspired plug-ins and there's a lot to choose from all of them being totally free as always i highly encourage you to throw money at them on patreon because these are some really top notch plugins that you should definitely check out this one is a channel strip plugin and a channel strip for those of you not familiar is a set of tools in a single interface that you use to mix a track much like you would find on a mixing console so here we have a mic preamp section a de-esser section an eq a compressor a limiter a tape drive output section and the output trim knob this plug-in is really great for adding just a general sense of mojo and vibe to the mix giving you that kind of console mixing experience it adds some really nice sounding musical punch with some heavy parallel compression or limiting it had some good heat with the saturation stages like the preamp or the tape stage and it's good to shape and gel the sound together with a very musical sounding eq the eq isn't as flexible as something like the fabfilter plugins because it's meant to be more like a console eq that only has a couple of bands and they respond more or less with the same behavior you would expect from an analog eq so it just sounds really good to tweak and play with [Music] [Music] [Music] another really amazing plug-in from analog obsession you should know about is pre-box here this is a really really useful plug-in it has 11 different preamp models emulating different devices preamps consoles and bits of analog gear we have a high pass and low pass filter section to reshape the sound a bit and we have an input and output gain section making for a pretty straightforward and simple interface prebox is really great to add just a bit of subtle or rather extreme character to things in a mix and just make them feel a bit more alive like making loops just jump out a bit or just adding that sense of polish and finessing to a mix that just makes things feel a bit more like a record it's really good for adding flavor to a mix on different things like maybe a drum bus or a vocal or adding it to each and every channel of a mix making it kind of feel like it was mixed through a console and even adding different consoles or devices to each of the individual channels to give you something that just feels a bit more alive it's a really cool plugin that you should go get right now [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] next up is probably one of my favorite free plugins on this list magic dice by baby audio this uses the engine of spaced out which is their full reverb and delay plug-in and it is one of my favorite reverb plugins it just sounds so so good this is amazing for really lush and rich sounds and it also acts as a delay it's got a really simple interface we just click the dice to get a new setting it really never sounds the same twice and then we have a mix slider to blend it into taste the only big downside of this plugin though is there isn't a way to save the settings but maybe they'll add that in a future update which might be kind of useful [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] capping things off in this video we have amplitube custom shop by ik multimedia now i know a lot of you don't play guitar and stuff out there but trust me this is still a plug-in worth having no matter what you play this is a huge collection of guitar amps and effects all for free it is sort of a freemium thing because you can buy more to add on but most of the stuff isn't that expensive either so if you're into it it's pretty easy to expand and get a few extras this is great for guitars and bass obviously but it's also really good for vocals drums keys or synth lines or just getting a bit weird and experimental with in total we get nine different stomp boxes four amplifiers five different cabinets three microphones two rack effects and a tuner which is also great to have for guitar players who just can't seem to ever stay in tune it also runs as a standalone so if you do want to just run it and run stuff through it or play and practice your guitar or whatever you can do that as well which is great to see [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] uh [Music] all good things must come to an end and we have reached the end of this video so as always a huge thank you to the developers of these plugins and making them free and accessible to everyone to start making and creating with of course i always encourage you to support these developers where possible by buying their paid software wherever that's applicable and of course an extra big super duper mega buck or any thank you to the developers who make their projects free and open source for everyone that's always super amazing to see if you know some other really good free plugins for music production and sound design that weren't mentioned in this video be sure to share them down in the comments below and of course if there's interest i'd be happy to make another one of these free plugin roundup videos in the future with that a big thank you again to psy acoustics for sponsoring today's video and providing me these really kick-ass custom acoustic panels be sure to check them out with the link down in the description below and as always thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed it i hope you learned something and i hope this inspires you to get out there and make something awesome you

Channel: Venus Theory

Views: 144,543

Keywords: Venus Theory, sound design, bitwig, bitwig studio, fl studio, logic pro x, ableton, cubase, free plugins, free vst plugins, best free plugins, best free vst plugins, vst plugins fl studio 20, free vsts, free vsts 2021, best free vst, best free vst plugins 2021, free plugins 2021, best free plugins 2021, free vocal plugins, free guitar vst, free guitar plugins, guitar amp plugins, guitar amp plugins free, airwindows, analog obsession, meldaproduction, baby audio magic dice

Id: lw03654HndM

Length: 30min 44sec (1844 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 06 2021