The best FREE music tools available right now!

hey it's andrew huang i don't know if you saw my last video but it really took an unexpected turn thankfully i was able to repair the ship it's been smooth sailing for the last few days and our time crystal mission can't continue but today's video has nothing to do with space i wanted to share the best free music tools available right now the last time i did this type of video i talked a lot about digital audio workstations and mobile apps and modular synth software and not a lot has changed in the past couple years in those categories i've been trying new stuff out but i haven't really found that there's stuff that i would add to those lists so this video is going to be all about free plugins first category i'm gonna start with is since and i've got two to recommend for you there uh first step vital vital is an amazing achievement made by just one person matt title it's super powerful super flexible it sounds great it looks great this is the kind of synth that if you get to know well enough you could probably design almost any sound that you can imagine next up pendulate by newfangled audio this is also a synth plug-in and i would say it's slightly more limited than vital but what i do like about it is that it has a few pre-routed modulations that make it really easy and fun and fast to create super chaotic sounds it even says chaos on a couple of these parameters and so it's a lot of fun to kind of always have the option with any patch you're working on to just inject something completely wild into it our second category today is instrument emulation and the reigning champ here is still spitfire spitfire produced so many different kinds of instruments and with their lab series there's a ton of really great quality free ones it's really a huge long list of stuff that all sounds great i'll just highlight one that i've been using recently called bbc discovery so this is orchestral samples recorded with the bbc symphony orchestra i used it on some of my scoring for the journey to the microcosmos series [Music] another cool thing spitfire does is called piano book which is this community driven project that's basically people sharing sample libraries that they've made for free there are lots of incredible sounds in here it's not just pianos and also it's not just samples but it's um playable instruments so you do need something like contact or decent sampler both of which are free or there are free versions of them so um yeah you'll use those as plugins to kind of host these libraries and be able to play them like a piano the best free drum kit plug-in i've tried is steven slate drums free this might be a bit more rock oriented although you can get like jazz stuff out of it you can probably do country stuff with it they sound like a pretty real kit and lastly in the instrument category i want to give a shout out to ample who make a great guitar and bass plugin [Music] you can play really expressively with them and there's also a lot of tone control as well as parameters for things like string buzz moving on to effects i think one of the most exciting effects free or paid is super massive by valhalla i use this thing all the time it sounds so pristine it's a delay plug-in but if you use this warp control on it it kind of smears the delay until it becomes a reverb [Music] whether you use it as a delay or a reverb it sounds phenomenal and there's different algorithms that you can select on it so just by changing one of these algorithms out you can use the same parameters to have a completely different sonic character next up polyverse wider this is a super basic plug-in but one that i reach for quite often it's just got one control to make things wider in the stereo field you don't want to overdo this because it's probably using a lot of phase trickery to create stereo out of things where there wasn't stereo to begin with but it sounds really good on the right sources also pro tip i just discovered this completely by accident but instead of going to 200 wide when you want something really wide i found it sounds better if you do two widers in a row and have both of them at one hundred percent i don't know maybe it's just my ears i hope that helps you one of my all-time favorite ways to play with audio is using granular processing and i think my favorite free granular plug-in is ribs this is a really complicated plugin it doesn't have to be complicated like you can ignore half the interface if you want i still haven't fully wrapped my mind around how all of it works but it gives you up to 32 buffers where you can record audio you can either pre-record something or have it kind of constantly live listening to what's going into it and then you've got all the granular controls you would want over your sound with like brain size and density and there's a really fluid speeding up and slowing down as well as slowing down all the way until you're stopped and then you start going in reverse there's also a couple bonus things with this that you don't see on every granular effect like you've got a filter and amplitude envelope that you can apply to the sounds so yeah it's pretty cool the next two things that i want to shout out are not individual plugins but two entire companies who have made tons and tons of free stuff uh first is melda i feel like they've been around forever i would say about half of their plugins are free and regardless all of their plugins are super high quality they give you a lot of fine control over parameters i think they sound great the second company i want to highlight is air windows this is also a one-person operation it's just chris johnson programming all of these plug-ins i think every single one of them is free and he's just fully patreon supported one thing about air windows plugins is that there's no user interface you're basically just looking at gray boxes with sliders and numbers inside them and chris does this so that he can focus entirely on how they sound and on making tons and tons of plugins now for the final plugin of the day i gotta put it in here ott it feels like otg is used by almost everybody on almost everything at this point but if you don't know the story it started as a preset for ableton's multi-band compressor plug-in ott stands for over-the-top and it just completely squishes all the bands so that no matter what you put through it it's kind of got this really hyped up squeezed compressed super excited sound for people who don't have ableton expert who makes serum made a free ott plugin so you can have that same kind of effect but in whatever daw you use wu's fun if you know of any other good free music tools please leave them in a comment if you're looking for other good free music tools check out what people are saying in the comments also if you check out any of these plugins and end up using them a lot please consider supporting the creators these are all labors of love by people who are just you know obsessed with audio and making things that sound amazing and they all have either paid versions of their plugins or ways that you can donate to them to support them so that they can keep on making this amazing stuff that we all just get to use as much as we want for free if we can't afford it so cool hope you enjoyed this video and i'll see you soon with some more space adventures okay let's do this

Channel: ANDREW HUANG

Views: 403,948

Rating: 4.9851146 out of 5

Keywords: andrew huang, andrew, huang, music, musician, producer, song, canadian, canada, toronto, ontario, AndrewHuang, producing music, how to make music, music producer, making music, ableton, making a song, learn music, logic, fl, studio, plugins, plugin, boutique, free, freeware, vst, audio unit, au, best, free music plugins, tools, best free, vital, synth, effect, fx, instrument, spitfire, audio, piano, guitar, bass, drums, steven slate, labs, xfer, ott, melda

Id: ZFUU59BAILc

Length: 8min 28sec (508 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/EnMagiNe]

Good advice here