The Best Free Compressor Plugins for Music Production and Mixing

hello and welcome back to the channel today i want to share with you my favorite compressors for mixing and music production both of which happen to be free one of them i've been using for many years but the others only just been released but i have been beta testing it for quite a while so i'm very confident in its quality and capabilities so let's waste no time and just get right into the video so here are my two favorite compressor plugins the tdr molotok which is very new only just been released and the tdr catelnikov both of these plugins are made by tdr and in the description i have a link to where you can download them tokyo dawn records make world-class plugins they do have some paid plugins but what i like the most is that they offer free plugins that are not time limited they're not demos there's no pop-ups and adverts and when i say free i really mean that you click which installer you need for the kotelnikov or the molotok click the installer it just says look don't sell our plugins on and stuff like that you accept and just like that you download the installer you run it there's no product codes there's no mailing list sign up there's no giving away your name phone number any of that stuff they do update their plugins regularly so if you like you can sign up to their mailing list which i personally sign up to it keeps me up to date but the most important thing is no matter where you are which computer you're using which daw you're using you can download these no special product keys no eye lock activation or anything like that and you know you've got a compressor that you can rely on i always go back to this catelnikov because i know exactly how to use it i've learned that compressor really well which takes me on to why do i only have two compressors here why am i not recommending 10 15 20 it would be really easy for me to go online get a list of 20 free compressors but i truly truly think these are the best to to learn they have all the controls you need and more and they're not trying to hide some magic or some gimmicky feature in their plugins i'm going to now try to quickly explain what differentiates these two so the ketelnikov is very precise and accurate and it is completely transparent in my opinion unless you drive it extremely hard it usually doesn't sound like there's a lot of compression it just controls the dynamics and it's perfect for everything from single tracks to program material mastering it really is a plug-in that i can rely on to give me transparent and clean compression the molotok on the other hand molotok is russian for hammer or small hammer so you probably get the idea of what it sounds like if you drive it hard when you push this hard you're getting a lot of saturation distortion and there's lots of different tones textures and flavors that you can get out of this plugin so i'm going to very quickly show using an analyzer plugin called span the difference between these two plugins so if i first bypass the molotok i'm going to start by just running a sine wave through it so you can see on the interface i'm going to take this threshold up so that we don't have any compression and you can see on here it just here if i lower the threshold and increase the ratio you can hear that the gains being reduced but there's no harmonics or saturation being added and as you can see the interface makes it really easy to see the gain reduction set the threshold etc which we'll get into more in a minute if i now bypass the katel nikov and turn on the molotok this is a whole different story so if i press play right now we're fine if i lower the threshold so that i'm inside the signal here all of these harmonics are being added and depending on the attack release which mode i'm in and the ratio the distribution of these harmonics changes quite dramatically so although a sine wave is a very boring and plain example you could imagine on a whole mix or on complex sounds the way these extra harmonics and saturations add up and compete and interfere with each other that is that extra sort of magic that extra warmth or brightness or whatever you want to call it that's what these analog style compressors do but that doesn't mean the molotok is not as precise it's coded extremely precisely it works exactly as you'd want it to it's just that it's got all of this extra wonderful harmonic saturation built into it and it's not modeled after a particular piece of analog gear which means that it's not constrained to only having a certain feature set as you can see on the interface of both of these plugins they have all the features you'd expect from a premium paid for compressor plugin you've got your typical controls for attack release threshold and they all read out exactly what they are so there can be no confusion you've got side chain high pass so that the compressor doesn't over react to the low end which is so important when you're using it on a whole mix bus and what i like about the controls this is sort of the next reason why i just love these plugins is if you press this question mark then hover over any control and it explains exactly what it is so in this case you can change the attack and release style of the compressor using different modes it explains what the knee of the compression is it explains what this side chain is and i really like plugins that do this because it means you don't have to be scared of any of the controls you don't need to worry you know what one of them does or doesn't do it just tells you what it does and it just keeps it really simple so that you can just focus on your music i want to quickly go on to another example to show you how transparent this category is so i have a cello sample which i'll just play a little bit of here which does sort of start peaking quite loud over here and for those of you that don't know if you push compression quite hard on strings it almost always sounds unnatural and all i want to do here is control the dynamics but i don't want to lose any of the vibrato i don't want to lose any of that emotion in the sound so let's take a listen you can see it shows you where the threshold is so it's very easy to set [Music] [Applause] [Music] so that was tons of compression far more than i'd ever want to do it was actually 10 i was hoping to set just just a few db but at that loudest part we had 10 db of gain reduction and it still sounded very natural to me at least in these headphones if i push up the makeup gain a bit pull the threshold up and set that more sensibly [Music] [Applause] [Music] just sounds really really good whereas if i go to the molotok which i don't know if i'd really want to use this on a cello but if i go to the molotok i also want to show some nice things about this is you can of course just right click change the user interface which means that it scales really well depending on the screen you're on so i think i'll go to 125. let's take a listen with the molotok [Music] so although we were pushing that quite heavy that's adding a lot more to the sound that wasn't there before which might sound great in the context of a mix or it might just be something you'd want to use the ketelnikov for another great feature is that with just a left click it takes you from gain reduction to total gain this is a combination of the makeup gain and the gain reduction which shows you how loud you are relative to the original signal i like this feature because it prevents me getting tricked by just adding a lot of gain to the signal or makeup gain because it lets me know at all times whether i'm louder or more quiet than the original signal the real fun starts when you download these plugins and use them on your own music but i will give you another example on this drum bus these electronic drums i'm going to use the molotok to add a lot of grit and character to them and then hear how that sounds in the mix so the first thing i'm doing is i'm going to push the side chain high pass up which is a fantastic feature it means that the compressor is not going to overreact to the kicks it basically ignores a bit of the low end so that it's more compressing based on the sort of middle and upper range of the signal so let's press play and dial in a really crunchy messed up tone so that's original let's pull the threshold down push the makeup gain up [Music] you can really hear it messing up the signal [Music] there we go [Music] that's probably a bit too much you can hear that if i pull the sidechain high pass down it starts distorting the kicks even more [Music] so i'll push that back up so let's now add that in with everything else in the mix and see how it sounds i'll start with it bypassed and then i'll turn it on so although there was a bit of difference in gain everything was a lot more present in that particular case it might not be the direction you want to go in but i just wanted to show how much you can really alter the sound of something as simple as a drum boss the next feature i want to quickly show is that there is an internal and external side chain which is not common at all in free compressor plug-ins usually this is a premium feature and what it means on my mixer is that if i sidechain the kick to the base on my base channel i have another instance of molotok and now i'm using side chain compressions so this is reacting to the kick and then compressing the base accordingly i have another tutorial which explains this in depth and many other compression tutorials in case this is going a little bit too far but what this means is that although the compressor is on the base channel it's listening to the kick and every time the kick hits it takes volume away from the base which means that you don't have to rely on your daw's stock compressor to do this you can just use this one here so that's really it for this video but the main point i wanted you to take away is that it is much much better to learn one or two plug-ins in depth and in detail so that whichever daw you're using whichever computer you have to work on or which studio you can pull up the plugin you know and get great results with it because every compressor every plug-in is a bit different and in my experience it's much more valuable to have one or two plugins that you know inside out and you know you can get a good result with them instead of trying to rely on expensive plugins or lots of different plugins to achieve the same thing especially with these sort of holiday seasons coming up lots of sales for plugins are about to start and i really do want to say guys these two plugins are world class tokyo dawn labs and tokyo dawn records the company that makes the plugins they believe in their work so strongly that they know that if they offer these free plugins that people that really really love them and can support will then go on to buy some of their more expensive sort of more feature-rich plugins in the future and i like that they just believe in their products enough to offer them for free so thank you very much for watching i hope you enjoyed the video i do hope you go and download those plugins because it's a lot of fun to just be using them on your own productions instead of listening to my stuff but thank you very much for watching hope to see in the next one bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 146,130

Keywords: free plugins, free vsts, best, free, plugins, compressors, saturation, tdr, molotok, music production, mixing, analog plugin, best plugins 2020, top 5, top 10, digital vs analog, molotok plugin, free plugin, free plugins 2020, compression tricks, mixing with compression, in the mix, vst, best free vst, vsts, vst plugins free, free vst plugins

Id: c9ZfSto2Vxc

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2020