On this site you will find a growing list of amazing, free VST Instruments and Effects that will add extra variety to your music productions!
Gone are the days where you need huge amounts of expensive equipment and studio time. These days hobbyist and professionals alike can use their desktop machines or laptops to create music with nothing but additional pieces of software.
What a beautiful time to be alive!
“SL Drums 3 is a free easy to use virtual drum ROMpler. It has a number of parameters and includes the ability to route each sound/pad to a selected channel of your DAW's mixer. It is PC and Mac compatible and is also available for 32 and 64bit systems.
“Protoverb is an experimental reverb based on the idea of a "room simulator". Most algorithmic reverbs try to avoid resonances or model the reflections of sound from a rooms walls. Protoverb does the opposite. It builds up as many room resonances as possible, modeling the body of air in the room. It therefore does not need to modulate or colour the signal. The result is a very natural sounding reverbration with some interesting features: Long standing frequencies resonate louder, as if the air takes some time to get excited. Multiple instruments don't mash into a diffuse mud, they stay distinct. If you play a short melody, the room seems to repeat a ghost echo of that melody. Those properties are indeed found in churches and large halls, but they're rarely found in conventional algorithmic reverbs.
However...
To achieve this kind of stuff, Protoverb works with loads and loads of parallel, serial and networked delays. By all means, there is no mathematical formula that makes such a structure sound "just right". As with all delay based reverbs, it's down to trial and error, and maybe a lot of luck with random values. Therefore we designed Protoverb to present you with delay lines of random lengths and a random assembly of networking and feedback strategies. Which, if you're lucky and you come across a great setting, you can submit to our website, along with a few details
Push buttons to randomize!
To be precise, the small text box at the bottom contains two random entries. The first part depicts the network structure, strategies for a spatial layout and distribution of delay taps, strategies for finding useful delay lengths and so on. The second part is a seed for a pseudo-random number generator which is used to find various parameters, such as average delay length, which prime number to chose (if any) and so on. This text can either be edited by double click, or both parts can be independently randomized with the two random buttons below.
Get Protoverb - it's free!
In other words: Protoverb is a data mining concept. Instead of spending a few months ourselves, we hope that our community will come up with great settings. As a reward, this plug-in is free, people are encouraged to share their settings and thoughts on the internet.”
“Crisalys is a software synthesizer characterized by a powerful audio engine which can work up to 192Khz. The three oscillators are driven by custom waveforms designed specifically to grant top quality sound in any situation. Each oscillator has built-in FM, Ring Modulator and Cross Modulation options controlled by three separate internal LFOs. The Ring Modulator can achieve sound characteristics that can go beyond the common sonorities of this effect, thanks to an internal custom circuit which has been developed for this purpose.
The audio path continues through two multifilters which can operate as state variable filters, analog emulations or in EQ mode. The modulation section offers, in addition to the classic controls (modulation wheel, aftertouch, velocity, etc.), four LFOs, two aux envelopes and two step LFOs which can be used as modulation sources to create atmospheric pads, control the filters, create rhythmic sequences and so on. Each LFO has a special "Quantize" control which can be used to introduce a small (or huge, if turned fully clockwise) variation to the LFO wave and sync speed. Used on pads this can produce interesting effects, adding some granulosity to the sound.”
From the developers website:
“SL Drums 2 is a free VST drum machine, which with a single panel in the purest style drum-pad lets you create beats a fast and uncomplicated configuration. 8 pads to launch your rhythms, each with its own volume control, pan and release, SL Drums 2 is perfect for capturing ideas immediately.
New interface.
59 standard stereo kits and 59 multi-outs.
44 new kits produced by Coldman Beats.
450+ drum samples.
Each pad has its own volume controls, pan and release. Volume, pitch and reverb style analog overall effect (not including reverb in multi-out).
Ultra low CPU usage.
Easy to use.
100% royalty free
Compatible with the most popular DAWs on the market: Ableton Live, Cockos Reaper, Steinberg Cubase, FL Studio, Traktion, Mixcraft, Sony Acid, Presonus Studio One, Cakewalk Sonar & Apple Logic Pro.
4Front Bass is a small single sound instrument without any settings that reproduces a timbre of a bass guitar. It is available as VSTi for Windows, and as an AudioUnit, VSTi and RTAS for Mac (see enclosed readme file).
This instrument is small on memory and CPU usage and was found useful by many users and software developers as a plug&play bass guitar module which does not require any configuration or adjustment.
Though this goes without saying for professional users, I still had a frequent question on how to use this plugin from people, who are not familiar with this technolog. One should note, that to make use of this software a plugin hosting software is necessary, such as Topten Cantabile software. A MIDI keyboard is also preferred, as it is something almost essential to create a computer music these days.
From the developers website:
Run Anywhere
Helm runs in GNU/Linux, Mac OSX and Windows.
Run Helm as a standalone synthesizer or as an LV2, VST, AU, or AAX plugin.
Comes in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions
Helm is Free Software
This means you are free to run Helm anywhere without the pains of DRM, you can study and change the source code and redistribute exact or modified copies of Helm.
Read more about software freedom.
