9 Free Plugins Better Than Your DAW

looking to upgrade your mixing game today we're gonna be talking about some of the best free plugins that you can get off the internet let's get started [Music] hello everybody Dylan pines here from musician on a mission here with another mixing tutorial for you this is gonna be a bit of a weird or video I'm not actually going to be doing any in-depth tutorials on any particular plugins but I wanted to sit down and just kind of really quickly run through some of my favorite free plugins stuff that you can download off of the internet for free these are all plugins that I love using for my mixes stuff that either is extra from your dog you know stuff that just does not come in your DAW or it's stuff that I might think is better than what you have in your DAW you know maybe the average stock plug-in just isn't really cutting it for what you need hopefully one or two of these plugins can really up your game maybe solve a few problems that you have too so let's get straight into it so first off let's talk about some eat cues that I love using we're gonna start off with sleights revival this is a free plug-in you can get from slate comm I got this maybe five six years ago and I loved it it's one of the best ways I've found to get some really nice shimmery top end all it really is is it's just well there's a lot of cool stuff going on underneath the hood but pretty much it just enhances your top end with shimmer and it enhances your low-end with thickness that's really all it does now Steven slay has been very big on saying you know this isn't just an EQ there's some secret sauce going on under the hood that even I don't really know what it is but it does really help with you know your vocals if you're wanting that airiness with your bass if you want more thickness I even put it on a lot of my mixes on my mix buss and I'll add just a little bit of top end a little bit of bottom end just to get it give it more of that smile curve so let's check out a quick before and after through dawn dusk we'll break ourselves on chair I threw down a dusk will break from ourselves on care [Music] okay next up we've got isotopes vinyl now this is a free plugin that I've had for many many years I love using this for that kind of telephonic effect that vinyl effect from ever doing any kind of like 90s hip-hop or maybe I'm doing some vocals where I really want to push some emphasis into the bridge or something like that or maybe I'm doing a section of drums I'm wanting to feel really small so that they can explode in the chorus this is my go-to plugin I absolutely love this there's lots of different things that you can do to add a vinyl sort of noise some things actually degrade the sound like wear or warp depth other things will actually add in new sound like mechanical noise electrical noise dust and scratches that's all stuff that's going to make it sound like an actual vinyl record plus over here you've got the year that you can set which basically just tells you like hey how how dirty do you want this sound how aggressive do you want these EQ cuts so I love kind of the 1960s 1950s 15 30s all that stuff you get some really great affected dirty sounds [Music] so the final EQ that I've got on this list is kind of an EQ kind of a multiband compressor and that is the TDR Nova dynamic equalizer if you've ever wanted to get into dynamic EQ but you know maybe all of the plugins seem so expensive this is a fantastic place to start it works just like a regular EQ and a compressor put together all you have to do is move a band around maybe boost the gain just so that you could hear it find the place that you know maybe sometimes is really hurting your ears and other times really isn't make sure that it's where you want it to be and then turn your threshold on you could turn your gain all the way back down and then just decrease the threshold so that whenever that particular frequency pops up in the song it turns it down just like a regular EQ would it sounds honestly pretty great for a free plug-in and its really really helpful if maybe you have something where like you don't want to just cut an entire frequency range but maybe once every three or four seconds there's just one note is really bothering you this is something that can absolutely help so let me show you what before and after now especially listen for the really high-pitched blinky sound that happens every few notes and then listen to how it becomes a lot more tamed a lot more manageable once I turn the plug-in on [Music] you [Music] okay now let's take a look at saturation so a lot of does don't have very good saturation plugins if they even have one at all now it's important to know that saturation and Distortion not exactly the same thing usually distortion tends to take away frequencies whereas saturation tends to add new frequencies you know distortion is usually digital where saturation is usually based on analog equipment kind of like the extra stuff that happens whenever you push audio too hard through maybe an analog console or an analog tape machine or an analog compressor or something like that so this is the clang helm IV GI it's based off of a really really great desk saturation that they have and honestly for a free saturation plug-in this thing is fantastic does a great job at just increasing some of the some of the energy of a particular instrument and also giving it a little bit more thickness a little bit more Drive plus you've got a really handy little tone knob which you wouldn't have if you were just doing regular saturation so that you can target specific parts of the frequency spectrum and make sure that you're really getting the tone exactly where you want it to be it's gonna be a change here it's gonna be a change throw down at dusk will break from ourselves on caged so now let's talk about stereo imaging so this is isotopes ozone imager - now it actually comes from there ozone platform which is basically their like top shelf mastering plugin that they have now you might be starting to notice there's a lot of iZotope on this list they in my opinion make some of the best free plugins it's crazy what they're just offering for free but all this does is it just increases or decreases the width of a particular sound but it also can make a mono signal stereo with its stereo eyes function and I'll be honest I usually don't trust most stereo imagers when they're trying to you know sterilize something that's mono this I've really never had that much issue with as far as mono capability I don't know what kind of secret sauce that they have in this particular plugin but I've checked many of my instruments in mono and just increase the stereo eyes function and increase the width I really have not heard much tone suck at all so I couldn't recommend this plug-in enough I use it in a ton of mixes it's great on electric guitars that you're wanting to sound a little bit wider a little bit thicker it's great on drum overheads especially in in choruses where maybe you're wanting to automate in more width make them sound even more exciting sometimes I'll even use them on my reverb and occasionally even on my actual mixes I love adding some automation to give some sense of width and excitement in certain sections of the song this is great for mix development so let me show you what I'm talking about [Music] so up next we've got another stereo plugin this is the iZotope vocal doubler it's a super simple plugin it just allows you to create a fake double on top of your actual vocal just to thicken it up maybe make it a little stereo it honestly sounds great especially if you're using it on ascend I love mixing this in to get a little bit more thickness in my vocals even if I've already done some vocal doubling it could really sound great I want to know my name I want to see my face it's gonna be a change change throw down a duh squeal break from ourselves on caged so our next plugin isn't actually going to change any of the sound but it is going to help you to mix better and this is Vox and goes span now what span is is basically a multimeter it's got a frequency analyzer it's got a correlation meter down here for phase problems it's got a lot of dynamic metering so you can see how loud stuff is it truly is an all-in-one plugin it's something that you can keep on your mixbus it just open from time to time to reference you know maybe you're trying to find a particular part of the frequency spectrum that's just not sitting right to you this is gonna show you what it is another really cool feature that I love is whenever you are sweeping around here you can actually see what note you're on so if I was looking at like maybe a frequency that was just rogue right here well I can see that that is a D or maybe a D sharp and it's about a hundred and fifty-six Hertz that's really really helpful for you know maybe figuring out where some of the octaves in the frequency spectrum are where some of the the room resonances are it's just something that could be very very helpful for you so let me show you what I'm talking about I'm gonna bring up this acoustic guitar and you can see exactly what I'm talking about this is the frequency spectrum it's all of the different frequencies that are being played and it's showing us that we are perfectly in mono so we're not having any phase correlation problems and I can change by metering to any different kind of volume that I want for example if I wanted to look at a loudness like a lufs meter this is really helpful for that I can bring that up it also shows my crest factor which is great if you're doing any kind of mastering any kind of stuff where you're trying to get the loudness to be as high as you can now obviously a lot of does have multimeters like this but if yours doesn't or maybe if you just don't like the multimedia that you have in your DAW span is your next best choice especially if you're wanting something completely for free okay I want to show you one more that isn't really going to change the audio at all but something that is super helpful for your mix and that is em notepad by Melda production now it is literally just a notepad that's all it is I can just type in here hello my name is Dylan and that's it but the cool thing is it's actually a plugin it's something that I can put in my plug-in chain so it's extremely helpful for if I'm wanting to write down any kind of notes about a particular instrument you know maybe if I finish my first draft of a mix and I'm thinking like okay in the next draft I know I'm gonna want to do XYZ but I don't want to forget that this plug-in can help you do that just put it at the beginning of your chain or the end of your chain or wherever you want and you could just go in here and start typing in notes maybe I'm saying like upper mids are too heavy cut around 4 kilohertz maybe I might want to do something like that or maybe this is a session that I just tracked and I might say guitar recorded with shure sm57 4 inches from the grill that might be something that would be really helpful for me in the future if I was trying to do some sort of mixing trick and I needed to make sure that I was using the right mic or that I knew exactly where the microphone was and you can do anything with this maybe you're creating a demo and you have a few really cool ideas but you just don't really want to waste time on creating them right now just bring up meld a notepad write it in on the track you're thinking about and move on and obviously you can do anything you want with like the size of the text it's got a little handy notepad for you here that I have never used but if you're using an iPad that can be really really helpful and if you want to have several lines going you can do that nice and easy it's very very simple you've even got a handy little symbol section over here in case you need it so my final plugin of the list it's another one that's not really going to affect your audio but it is going to save you a ton of time and it is the hornet vu meter this one also is technically not free but it's really cheap it's like four dollars it's almost nothing here is why I love this plugin so much and I use it on literally 100% of the mixes that I do so one of the most important parts of mixes is the mix prep and one of the biggest parts of the mix prep is gain staging you know you want to get all of your tracks to kind of sit around the digital sweet spot which is usually 0 DB vu now doing gain staging is a bit of a pain it takes a long time you've gotta get up a vu meter or a loudness meter or whatever and you have to go track by track and set the gain at a particular level it can take a long time it's worth it but it's not fun so I found this plug-in a while back I actually had one of the moa team members tell me about it I've never gone back here's why it's so great this Auto feature that it has you can set a particular vu level you know I like to set it at plus 1 or plus 2 and it basically turns up and down the volume until it's peaking at plus 1 or plus 2 vu which makes gain staging so much faster because you can open up ten of these and then hit play and it gets rid of all of them all in one go let me show you what I'm talking about so I've just gone in here I've turned on my auto function I'll hit play [Music] great and so it has gone in here it's turned up my volume by 1.9 DBS I now know I'm gonna be sitting pretty much around 0 DB vu on average I'm gained stage and it took two seconds it was not hard at all and had I had a whole bunch of tracks that could have done all of them at the same time now obviously the important part with this plug-in it always needs to be the first plug-in in your chain because it's the plug-in that is setting your gain every other plugin is going to be using the volume that you've put in here as the volume for its processing so that's really really important or you can even do what I do which is that I had a lot of stuff to my tracks during my mix prep and then I bounced in place so I baked it into the sound so I end up just baking in an actual gain stage sound into the track so I don't have to actually do any gain staging during my mix and I don't have to have this plug-in on for the entirety of the mix either it's a nice little trick that I do on a hundred percent of the mixes that I do so that's it those are the free plugins that I use in tons of my mixes I really love them I think that you will too and if you want other free stuff we've actually got a little present for you Rob mazes the founder of musician on a mission he's put together a free workshop where he goes through the seven steps of making radio ready music at home he's created a new approach to home recording and mixing that's gonna help you to do all of the steps so much faster and seriously we've had thousands upon thousands of people take this workshop and they've seen results of their music in just a few days so if you're wanting to learn the seven steps and you're wanting to learn them quick and free maybe you're just trying to up your mixing game I would go and watch this free workshop now just click the link on screen or down in the description below to get your own personal access it's totally free and you're gonna love it and of course I can't forget if you're new here don't forget to subscribe we make tips and tutorials and lists just like this one every single week on our Channel we'd love to help you grow in any way we can so that's to be it from me this has been Dillon Pines with musician on a mission and remember create regardless [Music]

Channel: Musician on a Mission

Views: 408,140

Rating: 4.9318571 out of 5

Keywords: musician on a mission, rob mayzes, home studio, home recording, vst plugins, best free plugins

Id: qjH9zJpvu-U

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Sun May 24 2020