Best Free VST Effects Plugins 2020

in this video i'm going to reveal to you what i think of the best vst effects plugins in 2020 [Music] hi folks i'm mike and i hope you're well we live in blessed times now i know it doesn't feel like it quite at the moment but we really do plug-in manufacturers in order to lure us into buying their paid products give away free products and they make them to quite a high quality so that we will be impressed now there's many to choose from out there in 2020 so i've narrowed it down to my top five that's free effects plugins now if yours isn't on the list or your favorite one isn't on the list let me know in the comments down below after you've watched the video because i'd be eager to hear which free plugins you've been impressed with recently now before we do get started if you like this kind of content all about home recording daws gear reviews plugin reviews that kind of thing then please do subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you're notified about my future videos now we're going to be looking at them in reverse finishing off with my very favorite plugin so let's get started with number five five so my number five pick for best free effects plugins for 2020 is not a free effects plugin in fact it's a collection of 37 free effects plugins in the melda production m3fx bundle now as i say there's 37 of them i'm not going to go through all of them today but do check out the full list because there may well be one in there which you've been looking for i'm just going to focus on three of them these are the three most useful ones in my opinion the first one being the compressor which comes with it now this is a very transparent compressor and of course it's got all of the features you'd expect to see on a compressor with a nice display at the bottom so you can see what's going on so for example if i adjust the threshold here it's going to show you where that is in relation to where the music is peaking right now okay now the other thing that you can see changing here of course is the ratio as i move that around and you've got your controls for attack and release as you would expect there now you've got some nice variations on the knee it's on a very hard or sharp knee here which you can see so the compression takes effect as soon as it goes over that threshold there you can have a linear one here where it happens at a couple of different stages and then you can have a nice soft compression here which is really nice to use if you want to make sure that it's not very obvious that you're using compression there's also a side chain in here i haven't used that so i invite you to experiment with that and let me know how you get along down in the comments now the next one i'm going to talk about is the m equalize i'll just move on to that here this is one of the best free equalizers going around and in fact one of the best equalizers going around i think it's very useful indeed very easy to use you've got six bands here easy to drag around and adjust like so as you'd expect and then this line here which you can move to adjust the queue now there's lots more options for each node or band here if you right click you'll see a whole bunch of options for the node type etcetera so very very handy in terms of ease of use and then it's got some nice analyzer features as well you can see the analyzer switched on here now you can have it off if that irritates you and you've got some things like say a sonogram here now one of the things i find really really useful is the areas feature so if you're new to using eqs you may not be very sure of you know what the various frequency ranges are you can switch on frequencies here which shows you where bass bass low mid mid high mid and treble frequencies sit so when you're watching people like me on youtube and you have no idea what they mean by low mid this will give you a rough idea well according to melda production at least another handy one in there would be say the drums overlay this shows you where the different drums sit within the frequency range on a regular drum kit another one would be the keyboard overlay and this shows you where the frequencies relate to different keys you know within the musical scales so some nice handy features there in terms of visualizing when you're using your eq now the last one i want to talk about in this collection of 37 is the loudness analyze which they give you in the bundle this is very very handy indeed and i think something that all of you may end up using if you're interested at all in doing mastering this is where i think this really comes to life a lot of daws don't give you that good meters along you know with the with the free plugins they normally give you and when you're mastering your tracks ready for release these days there's some some specific things that you uh want to reach in terms of loudness often i mean that's always been the case but it's getting more specific these days in my opinion so you can um meter things like luff's here which i think is very very useful in today's environment when you're releasing to streaming platforms and handily you can set your target now normally it's going to be around about -14 for a lot of streaming services and you can see i'll just set that there you can see how well the music which is playing is relating to that target you can see that they're not actually reaching up here at the moment to what i would hope to see which is a green area up here now if the target was different they would be reaching it fine okay so you can see when you're reaching your target quite easily there or when you go over your target you'll be going in the red so if you match this together with a good limiter maximizer then that's going to be very very helpful for getting results for mastering now when you use these plugins the free versions of these plugins from melda production i do believe that the only thing you have to put up with there's a little nag screen which will appear kind of at the bottom of the plugins i don't have that because i've actually owned their full plugin collection so that switches that off um but yeah it's i think it's in red somewhere at the bottom a little banner which will appear okay guys so that's a small price to pay when you get some awesome plugins for free four so in number four we have the frontier limiter from the d16 group now this is a really nice easy to use and a nice looking plug-in in my opinion now if you use this in conjunction with the metering plugin which we were just looking at from melda production then you'll have a lot of your loudness issues solved between the two of these and i'll show you that in just a moment a couple of major controls here which you can see nice big controls here one for threshold and that's actually going to be the control which is going to make things sound louder as you start to push that down from zero and then also the overall output volume control which is going to be important in terms of setting your sort of peak level there is a control over here for soft clip now the documentation wasn't entirely clear on this but i tested it a lot when you really push things to their limit and you start to peak what i did notice with soft clip on there was just like less distortion when it did clip and when you had it switched off there was that sort of very yucky sound you get when you clip now over on the left hand side we have uh the control input so this is just the source which you're going to use to affect the limiting which is happening and then you have a release control fast medium and slow release i'm going to use on fast release at the moment and show you what happens when i've applied this to the master bus on this song and this is how you're going to use this and it's going to take you literally seconds probably to set it up and use it and it's going to go something like this [Music] [Music] so you can see that i was able to apply quite a lot of limiting there before we started to nudge the needle around so i just was adjusting it until the music was getting to that threshold and that's a really really quick way especially for a quick master you know when it's not perhaps for a final release but just to get in there do that just to get it up to a level where if you're going to send it off to someone to listen to it's at a decent level and very handy tool indeed so i definitely recommend downloading the frontier limiter from the d16 group three so in number three we have valhalla super massive and if you're in the market for a new delay plug-in then it's definitely worth considering this one it's got a really simple look to it as you can see and this is very typical of valhalla's plugins they all tend to have this kind of look to them you don't generally kind of have to read a manual to figure them out the the controls is fairly self-explanatory and this one's really really good fun to play with now before i do show it to you i'm just going to play the music which i'm going to apply it to first without it switched [Applause] on so as you can hear just kind of a guitar arpeggio there now i've set the delay according to a sort of a musical value 132nd dotted notes but you can set it in milliseconds as you can see here and as i say there's some musical values which you can set it to now let's have a switch on now and i'll play the same thing again and i want you to notice first off that i have the width turned all the way down let's have a listen and then i'll turn it up as we listen [Music] so if you're listening in stereo then you should hear a nice spread there as i put the width up to 100 percent i kind of like it there now there's this warp control here and as i change it if it's playing you'll hear that kind of weird sound like this but that's not what it does don't confuse it with the modulation controls that we're going to look at in a moment here it only makes that sound where you're adjusting it the warp controls the relative length of the delay so if you have it on zero then they're all the same length and as you increase it it changes so that's an interesting control to play with for a different subtle difference much shorter delays there okay [Music] then we have some controls over density and feedback feedback generally be the number of times we get delays [Music] and then the density here [Music] [Applause] and then sometimes it's nice to add a little bit of modulation to the delays as they happen i'm just going to add it subtly here okay [Music] and then we have a filter there as well so filters are really really handy i like them using them on delays and reverbs as well if i put the mix all the way up so that we're only listening to the delay and i'll say make sure that i only i'm applying the delay to the sort of higher frequency so i'll put this up like that i'll cut out a bunch of the low let's have a listen so that's the sound of the delays and if we mix it back in with the original you're sort of getting those delays but it doesn't interfere too much with the original sound if we go to the other extreme and then just allow all the low end through but then cut off the top end you get kind of a nice warm muddy sound which can be useful on sort of spit on sparse tracks have a listen to that and then going on from there you have a number of different modes available to you as well they're kind of going off screen a little bit there and they all have different characters and if you go through them and you try this out and as you click on each one it'll give you a little hint as to what the character of that particular mode is so all in all a really really nice uh delay plug-in to use i definitely recommend having it in your arsenal it's not going to be the answer to all of your delay problems but it's certainly going to deal with a lot of them two so in number two we have the ozone imager from isotope now this is a stereo widening plug-in and one of the reasons i've picked this is because you don't often get these as your one of your stock plug-ins with your daw so if you want to do some stereo widening you'll be looking for a stereo widening plug-in most likely there's not that many available but i do think this is the best of them now you can get some weird sort of phasing effects from stereo wideners at times they do need to be used with care i don't experience that too much with this one but i should warn ahead that you should always check your tracks in mono as well when you're using these types of plugins now it's very very simple to use and it's not really just a widening you can actually use it to make things more narrow which we'll talk about in a moment but first of all let's go through these controls up in the top left we've got some different metering which we can use and i'll play with those in a moment when the track's playing i like this first one here polar level particularly and then we have our widening control it starts off in the middle with nothing being done we can make it more narrow by dragging it down and we can push up and make it more wide and then we have this control over here which i'll switch on that's called stereo eyes now i'm not going to use this um in this particular track because i'm applying this to a whole song but you would apply this to say a mono track or a mod mono channel and you can use it to get a stereo effect now they've added a new mode to this in the newer version this is version two and i think version two came out within the last few months or so correct me if i'm wrong down in the comments now with the second mode i think it's much much better at actually taking a mono track and making it sound sound more stereo with a sort of a slight doubling effect um with the first mode which is the odd one you can get more of a sort of a phasing effect in there at times you may want that you need to use your ears to check we won't be listening to that but we will be listening to a whole song now and applying some width or making it more narrow so i'll start off by playing and dragging this down and making it more [Music] hole and narrow the poison made me small fell as far as i could go i hate love and made me tall [Music] now there's probably not too many occasions where you want to take the lovely stereo width that you've added in your mix and make it more narrow overall but you may want to so that feature is there it's way more likely that you're going to use this to make the song sound wider which is what we're going to do at the moment and when i get it up to the full width i'll start to show you the different metering as well let's have a listen [Music] though the poison made me small fell as far as i could go [Music] [Applause] [Music] i'm not a man [Music] so you can hear that it has a really nice widening effect when it's at the top there definitely recommended the ozone imager from isotope so it wouldn't be a top five if i didn't have some honorable mentions and i'm going to quickly run through them now those that almost made it but didn't quite for various reasons i've got a couple here from one company called clang helm they make really nice plugins especially they do some nice vu plugins they're known for that a little bit now these two plugins here are a compressor and a saturation plug-in they do colorize the sound definitely worth grabbing hold of and down loading right away i'm going to quickly run through to the other ones which i didn't put in the top five one of them is isotope vinyl here now if you want to make your songs sound like they're playing on vinyl with all the sort of scratchy sound the different frequency ranges from different ages in time like you can see here on this control um then this is a really really good plug-in the only reason i didn't put it in the top five is because i don't think it's something that you're going to very frequently use so i didn't want to sort of have that taking up one of the positions in the top five but definitely check it out if you want to make things sound a little bit old-fashioned and a little bit dirty now finally for my honorable mentions i also have this one here which is the voxengo span plug-in you will have seen it in a number of my videos if you've watched any of my videos and it's a very very good and comprehensive metering plug-in probably the best of all the free ones certainly and maybe one of the best at all very very useful if you are going to do mastering as we were talking about earlier lots of different ways to measure peak and average volumes with this plug-in and could be used on single channels as well as buses so definitely check out voxengo's span plug-in if you don't have it already one so in at number one we have nova from tokyo dawn records now i have mentioned this plug-in before but i've used a lot more in the last year or so and i have to say it's grown on me so much that it's really one of my favorite free plugins ever now on the face of it it just looks like an eq which it is but it's got a really nice trick up its sleeve which we'll talk about in a moment but first of all let's look at those eq features it's a four band eq you can see the different bands here which is more than enough for most occasions and it's also got a high pass and a low pass filter there as well which is always very very handy now to change the nodes at all of course you can just drag them around with your mouse i like to do this on my mouse and use the wheel on the mouse to adjust the cue as you can see me doing there and also you can use the right mouse button to change the type of node that you're using there okay so very very quick and easy to use in that kind of way and when you're using it you can also solo that particular band so let's have a listen to that [Music] i'll solo it so if you're really trying to find a very specific kind of frequency that can be very handy to be able to solo it there but the trick that it has up its sleeve is that this is actually a dynamic equalizer now if you haven't used them before you may find them a little bit confusing at first but they can be very useful indeed because each of these bands can have compressor type controls applied to them so say i've got this frequency here which i kind of like but then again once in a while or sometimes it gets a little bit out of control that part of the guitar just peaks a little bit too much and i'm already emphasizing it yeah so it's not really good to over emphasize those parts then i can control it with the controls down here the dynamic control so i'll just click on this threshold button here and that switches all that on i can set a threshold at which point i want it to start start suppressing that band there and then of course i've got my usual attack release and ratio controls as well that you would normally see on a compressor so that means as i start to play the music you'll see that at these frequencies if i adjust the threshold you'll start to see them suppressed at a certain point [Music] now this can be very handy indeed now some of you may have used a multi-band compressor it's quite a similar uh concept except i feel like you can be a lot more sort of surgical with these you could even use it as say a de-esser or something like that if you wanted to have a lot of control over your de-essing so a really nice plug-in and in fact i must say all of the free plug-ins from tokyo dawn records are awesome and i've also got all of their commercial plugins which expand upon the features of the free plugins so definitely worth checking out now before you rush away i've got a couple of small favors to ask which will only take a moment of your time first of all let me know in the comments down below which of these plugins is your favorite and maybe there's another one which i haven't mentioned please do let all of us know about that secondly if you did like this video make sure you hit the like button have you done it yet i'm gonna wait here until you do thank you now if you didn't like this video for any reason whatsoever hit the dislike button twice and if you do like this kind of content of course make sure you subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you're notified about my future videos and i will see you in the next video you

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 115,977

Keywords: Best Free VST Effects Plugins 2020, best free vst effects plugins, free vst effects plugins, best free vst 2020, top free vst plugins 2020, best free vsts 2020, free effects plugins, free fx plugins, best free effects, best free effects plugins 2020, audio fx effects, free, vst, effects, plugins, fl studio, best free vsts, free plugins, free vst, best free vst, free vst plugins, creative sauce, cakewalk, studio one, 2020, free vsts, best free plugins, best vsts, free vsts 2020

Id: 114Pf_y8X3A

Length: 22min 31sec (1351 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

I love Valhalla supermassive

[u/kevinkace]

I didn't know about Nova, and it's dynamic EQ. Anyone have opinions of it versus FabFilter? Can you side chain the dynamic EQ?

[u/CreativeSauce2B]

Hi folks! What are the best effects plugins you can get in 2020? I've put together my top 5 - see if you agree!

[u/trrichard]

From the video description:

1) TDR Nova: https://www.tokyodawn.net/tdr-nova/

2) Izotope Imager V2: https://www.izotope.com/en/products/ozone-imager.html

3) Valhalla Super Massive: https://valhalladsp.com/shop/reverb/valhalla-supermassive/

4) D16 Group Frontier Limiter: https://d16.pl/frontier

5) Melda Production MFreeFXBundle: https://www.meldaproduction.com/MFreeFXBundle

[u/musocraig]

Wow that bundle is amazing!

[u/prismcollection]

TDR makes amazing plugins. Nova, feedback compressor, slick eq, are all so good.

[u/mmjarec]

Do you know if any of these work inside the maschine software vst player? A lot of fx like compressors or EQs don’t show up when installing into 32bit or 64 bit vst folders. Rescanning doesn’t help.

[u/soundofseastudio]

Wow Creativesauce, this look great, thank you for sharing. I like Fabfilter and i am looking forward to try the VST plugins from your list. Will happily share afterwards how this will turn out. Keep up the great work.

[u/OmniC4t]

!remindme 12 hours