Stock plugins, and DAWs in general, have come a long way in the past decade, both in quality and accessibility. It has come to the point where the only thing that they really use to compete with each other is their stock plugins and sounds.
Creating Great Sounds
While it has always been true that if you know what you are doing, you can make great sounds using anything, in today’s market, no matter what DAW you have chosen, you have a very complete arsenal of sounds and tools at your fingertips. Apple has a fantastic library of sounds in Logic, and FL has some great stock soft synths. Not to mention the best stock plugin ever conceived: Fruity Dance.
Gone are the days of scouring internet forums for someone’s curated drum samples, or finding some freeware plugin from the UK because Autotune is way out of your price range. Now you can purchase the sounds you want from the very producers you listen to. It’s also a great idea to go on deep internet dives and find/use sounds that maybe not everyone knows about. Keep an open mind when it comes to the UI … a lot of the people making obscure plugins are software engineers, not graphic designers, and you don’t want to miss out on something that sounds great because it doesn’t look pretty.
Some Recommendations
Below is a small list of free plugins that we use at DRM Studios and/or would recommend as still being useful with today’s modern DAW software.
GSnap
This is that freeware autotune from the UK mentioned earlier.
While pitch correction is almost ubiquitous nowadays, this is still a great VST if you need some quick, more stylized, pitch correction. The website also contains lots of other free effects for you to try out if you desire.
You can check them out here
Golden Master Soft Clipper
Massey is a legend on the internet forums, and he returned from his slumber recently with a free soft clipper. A good soft clipper is important if you are trying to win the loudness war and cook up some quality sausages. You can get fully functional demos of all his plugins, or purchase them for a reasonable price to unlock even more fun features. I also love that you can tell the programs were coded by a snarky engineer and the dialogue menus are entertaining. Unfortunately, the plugins are only available in AAX format, so not everyone will be able to use them.
YOULEAN LOUDNESS METER 2
Over the last decade, the way we view and measure loudness fundamentally changed. We used to be concerned with only the physical loudness of sound (which is measured in decibels), and now we have to consider the perceived loudness of sound as well (which is measured in LUFs).
You can read the full story and development history of this plugin on the developer’s website. He is a brilliant basement engineer, and this is a great loudness metering plugin.
DBlue Glitch 1.3
There are a lot of cool sounds that you can get in a track through a variety of time-consuming editing and automating tricks. This is a free plugin that allows for quick and easy application of a variety of fun things like tapestops, retriggers, reverses etc. It’s also great for throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks if you need a little flavour on a boring lead.
Check here for more information.
Surge by Claes Johanson
Surge is a free open-source wavetable synth. There are a lot of free synthesizers out there, but not ones with wavetable synthesis. All the coolest experimental sounds are being made through wavetable synthesis, and industry leading ones may be out of some price ranges.
This is the only plugin on the list we can’t say we have personally used, but it comes highly recommended by every other free plugins list on the internet and we thought it should be included.
Honourable Mentions
Anything by Dada Life.
While these plugins aren’t free, they are super reasonably priced and very useful. Sausage Fattener was originally free, and I have been happily using it for over 10 years.