Best Free Instruments and Synth Plugins/VSTs - 2020

after the success of my last video where I shared with you my favorite free plugins for mixing mastering and production I was asked many times one of my favorite free synthesizers and instrument plugins so that's exactly what I'm going to show you in this video I'm gonna start by looking at a free synthesizer but then I'll move on to pianos other instruments and drums so there's going to be lots of different plugins and if you've seen any of these before which I appreciate you might have please use the chapter markers or the timestamps and simply just skip ahead to the next one I don't want you to waste any of your time but the first plug-in I want to show you is helm which is a synthesizer the reason I want to show you this is that many doors just don't have a basic simple easy-to-use synthesizer they all have incredible sounding synths but some of them aren't very easy to access and many people were asking about my sound design series saying what's a good alternative to serum and I'd say right now this one is a great free alternative to serum but another reason I want to show you this is that it's an open-source synth and it's developed by a guy called matt title or title i'm not sure and he's a really great guy he's built this synth up it's free for anyone to use it's on a variety of different platforms I think Mac PC everything really he's also developing another synth called vital which I think will be an incredible competitor to serum so I've really I've really got my eyes peeled for that one but what I want to show you is just from a basic sound perspective you could basically follow along with anything in my sound design series using this synth instead so just the raw sound compared to serum it sounds pretty much the same can access your different oscillators here so you could you know change oscillator a to a sine triangle square wave it's just really simple and you can blend in oscillator 2 with oscillator 1 your sub your noise oscillator so whatever I do here on serum I can just pretty much mimic and helm I can turn on the filter filter often top end do the same thing in here just turn the filter on sounds pretty much the same now helm doesn't have all the same features of serum of course this is a free synthesizer this is a premium one that's been worked on for years and years but just as a simple follow along synth I think helm is a really really good place to start just the interface itself it might look a little bit overwhelming but everything's built into these little modules you just turn them on and off you want some delay just turn it on turn it off and I think it's a really nice place to start I want to highlight that one of the criteria for making this list of free plug-ins is that it has to be something that most DAWs don't already offer and that takes us straight on to labs by spitfyre audio and I know a lot of people know about it but you maybe haven't experienced it and it's sort of full depth there's so many different lines so many different instruments in simple terms it's basically a sampler so they've recorded loads of different instruments guitars drums pianos synthesizers atmospheres processed it and just made the controls very simple very elegant so most of the instruments have the same layout of controls but they're usually mapped to slightly different parameters so be sure to watch the individual tutorials for each of them unfortunately my sustain pedal has just broken on my piano but I'm still going to try to play you some of the different instruments just to give you a flavor for it but I can't possibly do any of these justice you'll have to experience them for yourself [Music] and you can of course change any of these parameters so you can have a really dry sound with no reverb or you can drench it and then selecting in the dial lets you know which effect you're using or lets you change the effect on many of the instruments so I've installed some of the lines here it's all authorized and downloaded through their own app which is actually incredibly easy to use I'm really not a fan of downloading access software onto my computer but this one just tends to work for me so let's take a listen to some strings for instance you just select what you want to play and then you just load it up same interface but this time so let's add a little bit of reverb and see how this sounds let's try and find some other instruments here so electric piano for instance let's just load that maybe add a splash of reverb one of the reasons I like this plug-in and I don't use it in every single song but it does keep everything all in one space if you search for Strings you're gonna get lots of different string based instruments so if I do a search for guitar you can see I've got this moon guitar here and if I just load it up and see what we've got to play with here if I just add a little bit of reverb here this should be quite a sore a different sort of sound here so you could get all sorts of different sounds out of that and there's just tons in here along with a nice drum kit but I will show you a different drum plug-in in a minute so if I load the drum kit up here Tom's cymbals so it's pretty much what you'd expect and you can just play little rhythms on this those drum sounds are okay but they are far from my favorites free drum sounds that you can get so that sort of summarizes labs but there is so much to this even if you already have the plug-in you might be missing a couple of really great sample libraries in there so definitely go check it out see if it inspire some sort of creativity for you the next plugin I want to show you is another piano it's addictive keys which is an extremely realistic piano plugin now the free version is limited to four octaves which is usually enough for most people most producers most applications you'd only need four octaves I eventually went and bought the full version because I needed one more octave for a particular piece I was doing and also I didn't mind supporting the company what I particularly like about this beyond its stunning realism is that it is a trial that is it doesn't expire so it's not just like a 30 day trial they really believe in their product they give you a virtually an unlimited trial as far as I'm aware with four octaves you just don't get all the different microphone positions so it's slightly feature limited but you can get stunning results out of it and they believe in their product so much they think that if they give you the free version it's gonna work perfectly for you and some people are going to invest and support and get the full version as I give a sound demo right here what I want you to really listen to is how detailed the low end sounds because a lot of piano plugins sound ok in the mid-range and the low end just Falls to pieces but just here you've just got such a rich low-end on this piano and I really really like it as well of course as the top-end being great I can't really articulate this with my skills and a MIDI keyboard but [Music] it just sounds so crisp and detailed to me if you want just like a classic studio grand sound I don't see why I would really reach for any other plug-in I just think it sounds amazing especially for solo piano pieces if you're like a singer-songwriter and you want a stunning piano to hold up your whole track then this is probably a great choice the next plug-in on the list is addictive drums - the demo version so it's not time limited you've got most of the drum kit that you need you're just missing a few features and the reason I like this a lot more than Labs is it's got a lot of grooves built into it but I'm just gonna play some stuff on the keyboard here and I think that the recordings and the articulations are much better so for instance if I play this kick in this snare I just think those sound better but also you can play the snare really soft or with a long with a high velocity and it sounds very different at all the different velocity layers which means that if you start really creating a beat with it you can get a lot of dynamics in there so I know my timings a bit all over the place but it can be a fun plugin if you're going for that sort of style and now while this is good and you can just play on a keyboard like I just did and there's a couple of different free kits to choose from what I actually use this for is I go over to the beats tab I set a tempo in my door and I just used the beats that are pre-built into here there's tons of them to pick from like rock Latin hip-hop and whatnot and I use this to practice my instruments as a much better way than playing to a metronome so I literally grab my guitar or the piano more often the guitar than anything else and I just press play here [Music] and I find that playing along to stuff like that although some of it was quite you know forward sounding I find that that is much nicer for my practice than just playing to a metronome and often if I'm just recording sort of demo or scratch projects to get some ideas out this can really help me visualize some beat making in a different way instead of simply always just driving my samples onto the channel rack and just programming them that way in FL Studio this really opens up a few different opportunities for me the next plugin was actually recommended to me by some viewers after my last video and it's instead of the bx solo plugin which i showed there which I just used because I had it many people said I should use the Vox angle MSE D plug-in which I didn't even know Vox angle had this plug-in MSE D for my needs it was just far superior so thank you guys for pointing that one out to me I would recommend everyone go grab that one as well to round off this video I wanted to make two quick but I think very important points and that is that firstly there are lists of fifty a hundred two hundred free plugins that you can go and download that's great you can explore them to your heart's content they might inspire you or or what nots but honestly after testing hundreds of plugins over the years I can honestly say that the stock plugins built into your DAW are usually world-class and are everything you need whether you use FL Studio Ableton logic Studio One and many other dolls these plugins are stunning and this takes me on to my second point which i think is actually more important and that's we've got to ask ourselves why are we always looking towards the next free plugin or even the next paid plugin an awful lot of this is marketing and you've really got to be aware when you're being marketed to so my message to anyone listening whether you're a producer beat maker mixing engineer they're these companies they're playing to your insecurities playing on this fear that you you have this insecurity that your stuff isn't good enough and to have your stuff be better you need this new plugin or this new free plugin and I think a lot of it is just a distraction and it takes us away from really investing in our you know something I know I can do in the next half hour or hour to really improve my music is go and study something in music theory that's always sort of bugged me or that I've been a bit insecure about go work on my practice you know play my guitar and practice so you know getting really really tight in the groove of the metronome you know challenge myself to finish something that I'm working on today even if it's just simple we can all invest in ourselves today right now and really better our skills without having to chase some you know mysterious plugin that will be fun but isn't really going to take us to the next level the way that just developing our own skills really would also if you are looking for more sort of community support to work on these problems and issues you have with your music please do join my discord server it's a wonderful place where we all chat about music sound design music theory production you name it it's all in there but anyway thank you very much for watching this video I do hope you enjoyed it and I hope to see you in the next one - bye for now or inspires you to create a different way I love all the whole variety you can just dive through these plugins to your heart's content [Music] [Applause] thank you

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 265,553

Rating: 4.9803967 out of 5

Keywords: Free Plugins, Synths, Instruments, Drums, free plugins, best, top, top 5, best free plugins, 2020, best vsts, free vsts, in the mix, top free vsts, mixing, vst, plugin, music production, mix, master, best free plugins and vst, best free vsts, effects, best free synth, best piano, best free piano, piano vst, drum vst, Spitfire labs, addictive keys, instruments, synths, instruments and synths

Id: EMNv1KTTk7E

Length: 12min 52sec (772 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020