The Best Free Plugins and VSTs 2020 - Mixing and Production

hello and welcome back to the channel today I want to share with you my favorite plugins for mixing production and mastering these are plugins that I use every day and not only are they free but in many ways they are better than a lot of the paid plugins and they're better than the stock plugins in your dollar so let's dive right in the first thing I want to say is that if you've seen any of the plugins I'm showing in this video simply skip to the next one using the timestamps in the description or the chapter markers along the bottom of this video I can appreciate you may have seen one or two of them before but starting off with three fantastic equalizers from acoustical audio these really are stunning equalizers acoustical audio doesn't simply algorithmically recreate an EQ what they do is they basically sample an entire hardware unit so every possible combination of input and output and then they package that all up into a plugin and what I hope you'll hear from these three plugins as a beginner is that they really highlight that EQ is not simply about the frequency and how many DB you boost or cut it's all about how you get there exactly what harmonic content and what richness is added or taken away from a signal to give it a certain tone and a certain character the first one is coral which I use for mastering and then the other two are for light heavy sound design and also maybe mixing applications so let's just start with this coral plug-in up at the top the interface is relatively straightforward lokah on the left Hika on the right and then two shelving filters for low and high frequencies so let's take a listen [Music] we the characteristic I like most about this EQ is that it simply manages to pull up all the high-frequency detail or pull up everything in the low-end without making things sound Phase II without any sort of weird aliasing going on it just sounds really really sweet and it's one of the only eq's which I would actually describe as having a silky top and even though that phrase is thrown around all over the place these days let's move on to the next one the next free plugin again from acoustical audio is titanium 3 this one's great for thickening up your whole track or just a sub or a kick I definitely wouldn't describe it as stealthy and subtle it's really you know bringing a lot of that thick low-end in so let's take a listen as I boost the low-end you should hear a dramatic difference like I said this one is not subtle it's not stealthy it's for those times especially in sound design where you want to just get a really really thick bass tone this is going to help you do it the next free plugin again from acoustical audio is coffee this one has a little bit more control than the last one but again it's a low boost and a high boost and also a cut and there's a few other features preamp emulation in there but let's take a listen on this drum buss and you'll get a feel again for how much harmonic content this is imparting that you simply could not get from a standard stock digital EQ so let's start with a bit of a low boost so I'm going to select about 120 Hertz let's boost the top-end those high hats all of that crunch you're hearing there as long as it comes across on youtube ok now it's not digital Distortion that's actually real saturation and harmonic content being added and it can sound a little bit broken on its own but if you add it in in the context of the mix the drums are just going to punch right through the mix and sound amazing I'm going to move on to the next plug-in in just a moment but I want to say I'm not in any way affiliated with acoustic or audio I just think those 3 e cues really help you here how eq is so much more than simply a frequency and an amount of gain it really is all about the tone and the texture of a particular EQ but anyway the next plugin is the you lean loudness meter - the free version I'm currently using the pro version but the free version truly has everything you need it's a loudness meter so it's going to make sure that your average your momentary your short-term loudness is all in check for whichever streaming service or site you're gonna upload your music or your podcast - if I give you a little bit of a demonstration it shows you what's going on with your integrated loudness short-term the true peaks and all of these figures are what you need to look at when you're setting your limiter just the final output stage and you're checking your mix in my opinion there's no other loudness meter that even comes close to being this neat organized and clean even the ones you pay money for I always come back to this one and I highly recommend it if you want to know more I have a whole video about it linked up in the top corner the next few plugins are all from TDR labs firstly they're kotelnyk off mastering compressor I've shown this one before but it's excellent in my opinion it's better than almost any doors stock compressor the sheer functionality and stealthiness of this signal it's not for emulating an analog plugin you're not going to get that sort of warmth and tone that you might get from an actual hardware compressor but it's for those really surgical really stealthy times when you just need compression maybe during sound design or in a whole mixed situation and another thing I particularly like is that that company that makes it TDR they keep updating refreshing fixing bugs they really support their products and they've got many products which they've been supporting for many years the next free plugin from TDR is Nova which is one I've shown a hundred times on this channel it's excellent it's pretty much an EQ and a compressor in one but it's so much more than that if you want to know more about this dynamic EQ check out this video I explained the whole thing and give loads of sound details in depth but this is a plugin which I legitimately use in almost every mix in some place or another final free TDR plug and I want to show you is slick EQ I'm using it a little bit less these days but it's a wonderful wonderful EQ it's got many different modes to it which change the curve slightly there's many different output stages and it's free from all sorts of warping quantization distortion aliasing issues phasing problems it's such a wonderfully coded EQ and it's the EQ that taught me how to EQ with my ears instead of just my eyes there's no visualizer here you've got high pass low mid and high you have to listen for the frequencies and actually mix them properly and this was really the EQ that taught me how to hear four different frequencies it's an EQ that I've kept coming back to year after year and although I have many other replacements both analog and digital there's something very special about this EQ to me and it's really got me some good results in the past so I hope you enjoy it too and I forgot to mention one of the best features about it it automatically adjusts the output gain so if you're boosting a frequency it doesn't trick you into thinking it's better just because it's boosted it will take the output down and try to match it for perceived loudness which of course is pretty important as it's very easy to be fooled by a change in volume I'm just gonna finish off the video with two more plugins which I specifically use for mastering first is span now you've almost certainly send this one before it's a frequency analyzer so if I press play it's going to show me a distribution of frequency energy and content in my song really really useful this plug-in is so incredible and I've got a whole tutorial for how I use it and how to use it up in the corner and in the description but one particular useful tie in with the next plug-in and that is mid side issues when you're mastering so the next plug-in I'm going to show you is brainworx bx solo it's one of their free plugins and there's only really one thing I use bx solo for also there's a stereo way it's left-right solo you can swap the left and the right etc I just use it for soloing the mid or the sides specifically so that's the mid channel and the side channels so let's take a listen just the mid then just the sides then I'll solo the sides and you can physically see and hear now if there's any problems with like excessive low-end in your side channels so this is just a nice little plugin to access that I know that many doors have a utility plugin that replaces this but I don't think FL Studio really has exactly that kind of plugin but that's it for today so thank you very much for watching I hope you enjoy using those free plugins and I hope to see you in the next video too bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 354,713

Rating: 4.9691553 out of 5

Keywords: free plugins, best, top, top 5, best free plugins, 2020, best vsts, free vsts, in the mix, top free vsts, mixing, mastering plugins, best free EQ, best free compressor, free analog plugins, vst, plugin, music production, mix, master, best free plugins and vst, best free vsts, effects

Id: EkVc1t_04j0

Length: 8min 51sec (531 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Thearctickitten]

Yeah this guy slaps! He’s helped clean up my mixes and also has great mastering tutorials