Some of these will be obvious to all of you, some will be new to a few of you, and maybe one or two of these will prove nothing short of Life Changing for one or two of you. In any case, all of these are things that simply must be among your arsenal of music-crafting tools, because 1) they're great and 2) they're absolutely free.
1. George Yohng W1 Limiter
Grab it here: http://www.yohng.com/w1limit.html
Well admittedly this isn't the limiter I use for mastering (I use the very pricey but totally amazing Sonnox Limiter), but for a freebie, this little guy can't be beat. It's an emulation of the classic, expensive waves L1. Does it sound as good? I have no idea; what I do know is it brickwall-limits with great success and meanwhile is capable of providing a very hefty, noticeable volume increase, if wanted (just increase the threshold setting).
2. Synth1 (pictured above)
Grab it here: http://www.geocities.jp/daichi1969/softsynth/
(Yes, the linked page is in Japanese; just click the "download" and "manual" links listed in english to the left of the image)
I almost didn't include this one, even though it's probably the greatest piece of freeware a synth-addict and computer-music creator could ask for. But here's the catch: it's PC only. So while I can enjoy this amazing emulation of the Clavia Nord Lead 2 synthesizer on my laptop, I sadly cannot put it to use on my iMac, where pretty much all of the DWIFH tracks are created, mixed and finished. Somebody out there, please, port this thing! Anyway, Synth1 is fantastic. Outdated interface, sure, but the sound is great, it's flexible, and there's hordes of user-patch libraries floating around the net. The developer of this beauty is Ichiro Toda, and after a many-years-long absence, he just updated Synth1 on 5-4-2010. If only he'd work on the mac port...
3. Stormgate1
Grab it here: http://www.araldfx.com/downloads.php#dla96dd0845f649eb792376e4a2bbfe001
There are a lot of gate-fx plugins out there, but Stormgate is my favorite. It's a surprisingly flexible and intuitive little freeware beast, and I can't believe I didn't find it sooner (it's a fairly recent addition to my plugin collection). For those of you unfamiliar with them, the idea of Gating FX is simply to cut the volume of the audio source at user-defined rhythmic intervals. Stormgate makes this easy and fun to do: you draw the envelopes yourself with a handy selection of drawing tools, then chain multiple sequences together using a super-simple pattern-follow scheme. The best way to get a feeling for it is to drop it as an insert-effect for a softsynth, load up some kind of bright pad that would normally play a sustained timbre (like a string patch) and then create 16th note steps along Stormgate's envelope window: now play a note, and you've turned a sustaining pad sound into a tempo-sync'd rhythmic instrument. But you can run drum loops through this thing to great effect, or whatever else you wish to rhythmically-mangle.
4.Togu Audio Line Plug-ins
Grab them here: http://kunz.corrupt.ch/?Products
There is so much high-quality freeware on the TAL website it boggles the mind. Really all I can say is go and check it out for yourself, and GRAB EVERYTHING. Especially of note is the Elek7ro VA synthesizer, the TAL-U-No-62 synth (a Roland Juno emulation, Juno-style graphics included) and the TAL-Bassline (looks nearly identical to a Roland SH101...). All three of these are especially great tools for learning subtractive synthesis, as they are very straight-forward, bread-n-butter type instruments with approachable interfaces that also sound really great.
5. dblue Glitch
Grab it here: http://illformed.org/plugins/glitch/
According to which music forums you read (or who is posting on a given afternoon) dblue's Glitch plugin is either the greatest freeware effect ever, or, rather, the death of electronic music itself. It's certainly one of the most aggressively debated pieces of freeware ever. Is it awesome? Is it cheating? I'll leave it up to you to decide...You feed it audio, you choose from a series of glitch effects, and well, they happen. The order can be controlled or random, along with some other parameters. Just go and play with it and see what you think. Oh, but only if you use a PC, because like Synth1, this one sorely needs a Mac port...
If you know of any other must-have freeware for computer music creation, please post links+descriptions in the comments below!
No comments:
Post a Comment