You’ve set yourself up with one of the latest and greatest Digital Audio Workstations, picked up a tonne of skills on your music production course and want to expand your plugin collection without breaking the bank. Does that sound about right?
Once you’ve got a basic suite of synths and samplers you’ll want to start adding some plugins to really bring your tracks to life. In truth, there’s hundreds of free plugins available and you could sit down for days searching every corner of the internet trying to find a hidden gem. To save you some time with sat down with our audio engineering students and put our favourites into a Top 5 free Audio Plugin list!
1. Guitar Gadgets
Music production courses are packed with great guitar players all looking to make their licks famous! So first on the list of free audio plugins is Guitar Gadgets by Musical Entropy. The plugin packages together a variety of analogue guitar pedals such as delay, reverb, crusher, various filter’s and effects.
Coming with 11 effects in total this is a great plugin to have for your guitar tracks.
2. Frohmage
Next up on our little list is Frohmage by Ohm Force. Pro Tools experts are always on the lookout for something tasty that’s going to be able to give that extra bit of character to their work. Frohmage is a plugin the students on our music production courses enjoy using.
When you’re dealing with bass frequencies the plugin comes into its own acting as a low-pass filter. However, it’s much more than a simple low pass filter with the inclusion of effects such as phase and distortion. You’ll be able to add warmth and grit wherever you need it.
Try it out on kick drums, bass, synths or across a whole drum track. At Pulse we always encourage our students to experiment and try different things. Very often this is where the best results are created.
3. Freq Echo
We’ve got the Freq Echo by Valhalla up next. This quirky delay plugin has some tricks up its sleeve to make your project sound psychedelic. The addition of high cut and low cut controls as well as the frequency shifter are what set this plugin apart and why it’s on our list.
The interface is very straight forward and easy to use and can spice up anything you send through it. Even after an intro music production course you’ll be able to get the most out of this excellent bit of kit.
4. iZotope Vinyl
Vinyl is all the rage these with shops recording record sales this Christmas. We know that quite a few of our audio engineering students got records from Santa this year! So, if you want to get that classic vinyl feel into your track the iZotope Vinyl plugin is the one for you!
This tool has been around for a long time and is as popular as ever. It allows you to create the sound of dust, dirt, scratches, and any other noise vinyl throws at you. A really fun plugin and well worth a download!
5. Hypercyclic
No list would be complete without Hypercyclic by Mucoder. This is one of the best free arpeggiators out there. Music producers are often trying to liven up a rhythm track and this plugin does just the job!
Great to get you thinking outside of the box. Give it a try – you never know where it might take your song.
Find Out More
If you can’t get enough of music technology and music production and want to learn more you’ve come to the right place. We provide several music production courses full and part time as well as shorter courses to get you started.
Why not drop down to one of our open days and chat to the team here at Pulse?
[openday]FOLLOW US
