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10 FREE Plugins You Need for Sound Design

Jun 07, 2021
Good morning friends and welcome back to another episode of Morning Coffee with Cameron, the show where you don't know if I'm wearing pants or not. In today's video I wanted to share with you 10 of my favorite

free

plugins

for

sound

design

and I guess music production too, if you're new to

sound

production or

design

, whether as a hobby or career, I feel your pain because It's very expensive and honestly it can be a little discouraging to see the high prices of everything and that kind of barrier to entry, but a lot of these

plugins

that I'm going to show you here today are really useful, really good and even rival in quality with some of the expensive commercial add-ons.
10 free plugins you need for sound design
Now obviously there are more than 10

free

plugins. These are simply my personal top 10 that I have made the most of and still use today. If you have free plugins that you think people

need

to know about, leave them in the comments below and if you like what you hear in this video, you can find links to all of these plugins in the description. I have divided this video into three different parts today. The utility plugins which are just useful things to have the creative ones which are a bit more quirky and left field and a lot of fun and finally some synths which I think you really

need

to know for more semi-interesting facts, sometimes jokes fun and sound design stuff, be sure to subscribe to the channel below and if you have a suggestion for a future episode of Morning Coffee with Cameron, let me know in the comments here we are with number one.
10 free plugins you need for sound design

More Interesting Facts About,

10 free plugins you need for sound design...

This is TDR Nova from Tokyo Don Records. This is a dynamic equalizer and I don't actually know of any other free dynamic equalizer. The useful thing about this is that it's a four-band EQ with a low-pass and high-pass filter as well and the filters can go up to 72 decibels per octave, allowing you to automate them to create cool filter sweep effects, but as It's a dynamic equalizer, I can also use this to reduce resonances in a sound, which is incredibly useful here. I have a high pass, low boost and high shelf as just regular EQs and these two bands are in dynamic mode which allows me to reduce some resonances which is also cool.
10 free plugins you need for sound design
It's that you can isolate each band to hear the effect that band is having and you can also go to the gain reduction delta which allows you to hear only the things that are being reduced with the gain reduction in dynamic mode, which is really cool just to maintain. Taking a look at how it's affecting the overall sound, you also see that it's a parallel dynamic EQ, so you can use the dry mix to recover a bit of the original signal if things are sounding maybe a little weird. Here are two examples, a drum mix that needed some resonances fixed as well as just some general EQ, as well as a vocal sample with a really resonant frequency that is super annoying, just to show you how transparent this thing is, let's listen.
10 free plugins you need for sound design
Hello, then here. I have our cloud seed lord and savior. I couldn't finish this video without including this plugin. I love this plugin. This is an algorithmic reverb that sounds different than any other algorithmic reverb I've heard, the only thing I can compare. Maybe it's something like Valhalla Shimmer or Evantide Black Hole and it's still completely different. It's not a Shimmer reverb, but it is designed to be a reverb that should be really ridiculous with tails up to 60 seconds long. It basically lets you turn anything into a pad or ambient drawing soundscape and has plenty of controls and features to go really deep with the reverb design to demonstrate this.
Here I have a serum patch initialized with a low pass filter and then we are. I'm bringing Cloud Seed to 100, what to listen to, what it can do, another great reverb bar delay unit that's also free. I wanted to quickly mention the new Valhalla Supermassive, which is similar in purpose to the Cloud Seed, and also acts as a delay unit, but is meant to give you those great ultra-smooth reverb sounds, so let's listen to this on that same patch and hear what it says. does. The following is a free audio clip see here. This is a snipping utility that offers a ton of different types of snipping and is extremely simple and useful to use.
It's perfect for getting that distorted, overdriven sound without the headache of guessing and just trying to clip random things and hoping you get something good. It's great for anything from subtle analog heat like the arc tangent mode here or heavy clipping, total distorted brick wall sausage madness. I think this is particularly useful for things like trap drum sound design or other modern genres that require that big distortion feel here. I have a basic drum loop and let's go. To get this going and listen to some of the different modes, next we have ivgi 2 from clanghelm, this is honestly one of the best saturators you can get right now.
What's unique about this is that it's not just a simple live. saturator, but it actually models some of the inconsistencies of a real analog system, so as a saturator it actually feels a little more alive and a little more colorful, which is really nice to add just a little bit of bite and growling at things or creaking. all the way up and getting that totally over the top sound, so as a bonus of clang helm, I also wanted to show off the mjuc jr real quick because this is a fantastic one knob compressor that sounds really great, it's based on a mu variable. or tube compressor and also features the same nice, catchy, lively modeling that they've somehow crammed into this, all you have to do is turn up the compression a bit, set the time constants and get some nice, thick, juicy sounds . and this is a little more extreme, this is the sga-1566 from Shattered Glass Audio, it is designed to emulate an all tube mic preamp system and it actually does a very good job and even at really extreme settings it never gets really harsh , which is something that I think is maybe a little bit harder to do and is something that's not very common in some of the free distortion plugins.
The only thing you should know about this plugin is that the CPU usage can become quite intensive if you use high CPU. mode, so you may need to render things to audio, and it also offers up to 4x oversampling, which is really great for removing artifacts. Here I have the init serum patch and we're just going to incorporate it and see what works. The next thing it does is Kinvology xt, which is a convolutional reverb, but what's special about it is that it allows you to load in your own samples and manipulate them and get really weird with it as a reverb on its own.
It's actually pretty decent, so I wanted to show you just the reverb on its own with just some of the impulse responses included and then something a little more creative and fun. The only thing with this plugin is that the plugin itself is free and comes with a free core library, but there are more paid boost responses that you can load, so it's kind of a freemium plugin. Here we have paul x stretch which is the vst version of og paul stretch with some extra twists, you get the tonal harmonic controls ratios. versus noise mixing things all kinds of things all kinds of control to get really creative with this it's a lot of fun to experiment with not only big lovely ambient drones but also creative sound design and taking something and just stretching it into oblivion and then bouncing it to save and manipulate later in my bag of tricks is one of my favorite secret weapon plugins and this is fracturing glitchy machines, this is a buffer stutter delay effect, if that makes sense you can use it as a normal delay but that's not really where it shines, this is meant to take sounds and split them into millions of pieces and create these weird idmy effects with glitches and stutters and it's amazing, you can feed it almost anything and get something really cool similar .
For Paul Stretch, the real fun of this plugin is with this little question mark right here, if I play this right now, I just have this on some drums that are dry, we have a kind of delay effect and if we play this. question mark, it will actually start randomizing these parameters, so you can click here a few times and get something totally new. Sometimes there is no sound at all and I'm not sure why, but with a few tries. you can get some really cool glitches, this plugin is really great for those weird, choppy glitch effects, it's great for generating textures, it's great for adding some grit and character to impact sound effects, it's great for creating vertical stripes, it's great for just general weirdness, to round this out. section we have that vocoder 2 now this is a pretty humble plugin and it's pretty simple it's an old style vocoder it's really solid maybe it's not that exciting but the reason I recommend you check out this plugin is that it has a kind of a cool feature is the ability to use the left signal as the carrier and the right is the modulator also known for having a vocoding sound in itself and it's a lot of fun to play with this and manipulate it so here I just have a set of really basic dry drum sounds and then we will run them with the sound stream being encoded if you experiment further with this plugin by changing the pitch of the sounds and feeding them through this to encode them themselves or adding the chorus. here with the little chorus button you can get a lot of really unique and interesting sounds and it's also great for just getting some extra weird character of sounds that you can't really get any other way, with the bands and other controls you can manipulate things and It kind of changes the overall timbre of the sound, but this is just a feature that I think is really worth having and is especially useful for designing drums when getting into synths.
Here we have helm, which is absolutely free and is a fantastic synth, especially if you are newer to synthesis, it is very powerful and very capable, but very easy to use because it is very well designed and puts everything in front of you. Helm is released for free as a donation, where it is also open source, you can check it out, alter the code and play with it if you wish and you can also donate to help contribute to the development of a new synthesizer called vital, which will be quite exciting. The helm has a really clean design.
The mod matrix is ​​really simple. You can simply click on it. one of these little headphones and you assign it to something and that's it, it's really simple and easy, it has a very clean and crisp sound all around, so it's very neutral and very simple, and it's a good starting point to close a introduction to synthesis. On this list we have what I consider to be probably the king of synths that money just can't buy because it's free and that's a step up. It was originally closed but is now open and has been continually improved and developed and has become a ridiculously powerful true synthesizer offers virtual analog subtractive synthesis also offers FM offers wavetable and can even act as a vocoder making it a really good versatile tool it's very flexible it's very powerful it's very easy to use it takes a little getting used to the user interface is maybe a little dated but it's incredibly powerful.
The other big advantage of the Surge is that it has some very high-quality effects, making it a great all-around synth for almost all applications. It's like a free version. serum minus some features but besides a few others the other big advantage of surge is that it also supports mpe so if you have an mpe compatible controller or device you can use mpe within surge so to close this video , I wanted to give Two Honorable Mentions to things that I think are also worth having that don't really do anything by themselves, but are very useful. First, there is the signaller.
This is a multi-metering tool that offers vector scope for stereo monitoring. image of things, an oscilloscope for looking at waveforms, which is incredibly accurate and handy and looks really cool, as well as a very accurate and fast spectrum analyzer that you can use to monitor how your sounds look and how everything is going . this is great for mastering this is great for mixing this is great for sound design this is just a great free plugin that you should have finally the last thing that i think you should have is the melda production suite which is absolutely free and comes with a A whole mess of accessories that are very fun to manipulate.
I really like the pitch change, especially since a format control changes theperformance of sounds and you get something a little more interesting and creative. There are a lot of really powerful tools here and they are all very useful and very high quality and that about sums it up for this video. If you have any plugins, you would like to leave a comment below. Other than that, I think we're done here, so thanks for watching, I hope you do. I enjoyed it, be sure to like and subscribe and I'll see you guys again soon.

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