Topic: Music: VST - Effects & Instruments

[Sidhe Priest]

A thread for musicians. Would be nice for it to be stickied...


Voxengo Overtone GEQ - a harmonic EQ plugin, this generates overtones - additional harmonics. This has two EQ panels - primary EQ and overtone EQ. This plugin is great for livening up the sound of any instrument or a master mix. Mastering engineers used to use master tape for the same effect - magnetic tape recorders generate additional harmonics.

Digital Fishphones - home of Spitfish, Blockfish, Endorphin compressors and some other fancy plugins. The author works for Magix, the maker of Samplitude. He specialises in non-linear analogue-style plugins, so this is your free Izotope Trash replacement :-)

DTBLKFX - an FFT processor that does stuff to audio. This plugin works by adjusting frequencies via a Fast Fourier Transform. Examples of effects are "cold & distant" sound, "repitch to a note", "add chord", etc.

TOGU Audio Line, another analogue-emu plugin home, there're some neat bass synths and a TAL Filter inspired in Moog VCF (the gem for those who love tweaking filters). Also reverb/chorus plugins, a vocoder...

Quikquak Upstereo - this is THE stereo imager. Makes anything larger, wider, deeper and more impressive.

RGC High Frequency Stimulator, which used to be downloadable from their site for free. This is DX, not VST, but is here anyway.

RNDigital Inspector, with a lot of fuss around what is a pretty nice spectrum analyser plugin. One of those essential things for monitoring a mix.

Ambience reverb plugin, which is likely one of the best out there.

Bauer stereo plugin, transforms "speaker stereo" to "headphone stereo" by simulating natural head & ears crossfeed. Works as a "stereo image helper", too.

Eric Beam's plugins. The valuable one is EXP-1, which is a dynamic expander, as opposed to compressor. So yeah, that's for when you've made everything flat or just want to add more dynamic contrast.

Tweakbench, with a lot of analoguish synthesisers and effects, including NES and Commodore-style chip soft synths.

[Pumo]

OK, here I got also some other great free VST plugins:

Nasty DLA (Variety of Sound) - Here you can find some superb free VST effects including NastyDLA, a great tape-style delay and chorus. Highly recommended.

mda VST plugin pack - A great pack with a lot of useful small and free plugins including filters, ring-modulator, delays, degrader, de-esser, leslie emulator, limiter, detuner, amp & speaker combo emulator and more.

WarmerPhaser - A (now free) great and flexible phaser effect with several controllable features.

FFT Tools - A collection of great FFT plugins that includes a very cool Robotizer and some more interesting stuff like 'Warp' (a plugin that swaps frequency band defined by a couple of parameters while leaving all other bands unchanged).

Blue Cat's Stereo Chorus - A very nice and simple Stereo Chorus effect. It has a very warm sound and it's easy to control.

Chip32 - A nice pulse wavetable synthesizer where you can manually shape the waveform to create chip-tune style sounds.

FMMF - A simple and compact 4-operator FM synthesizer with multi-stage envelopes and LFOs. It has tempo-sync features, delay and arpeggiator also.

String Theory - Great physical modelling plucked string synthesizer with a good bunch of controllable options and very nice and clean sound.

Hope all you find these VST plugins useful!

(BTW, I have the Spitfish, Blockfish and Tweakbench chip-tune synth and Mellotron plugins, and as well as S-Priest I also recommend them a lot )

[Sidhe Priest]

You know what would be great? An FFT EQ like in Cool Edit, but as a VST plugin.

[Kaiaatzl]

Some nice stuff here, both of you.

Just out of interest, Pumo, which songs of yours did you use these synths in, and what did you use them for?  (I mean more the instruments, not so much the effects).

Anyway, I have only  two real links (both instruments), but they're good ones, and all free: http://dskmusic.com/ DSK Music.  He has some really high quality emulators of (sometimes pretty obscure) ethnic instruments and also strings and guitars, which I used in songs like "Timewinder" and "To Overworld", and also some good synths.  The ones that sound best are the ones where he gives a bunch of preset sounds and you can combine them (synthopia, etheral pads).  Others, like ZetH, where you can define the sounds completely, tend to be hard to use and not as high quality.  One thing to watch out for is sometimes when you reload a project you'll have to redefine the parameters of some synth because it reverts to its original state or turns off for some reason.  Because of this it's good to save the preset before you save your project.  BTW, the chiff bass in "Molten Driller" and the pan flute sound in "Into Darkness" were made with Synthopia.

Another good one is "String Synth" by Algomusic: http://www.algomusic.net/freeware.html.  I cannot count how many times I've used this for so many different effects.  A couple of examples that I do remember though: The sweep pad in "Oblivion" from Operation Otter, the "serpent strings" at the beginning and the end of "Call of the Serpent", the wierd sweepy synth in "Into Darkness", and the secret level music in Army of Haloon.  (The secret level isn't in the demo).

[Pumo]

Well, for Chip32 and FMMF I only used them on real-time play (haven't used them on any song project as for now) but for String Theory you can listen to it here:
http://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/241320

It's used on the main plucked melody.

[Sidhe Priest]

Oh yeah, Stringsynth can also be used with a phaser/delay to make those Oxygene-style sweeping strings (a-la Eminent electric organ).

[Sidhe Priest]

And BTW about Oxygene... Check out this video's comments on Youtube, this is Oxygene II reproduced with free VST instruments.

<a href="" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win"></a> Details

[Kaiaatzl]

I listened to some of the Stringtheory presets, and I thought they sounded very... Pumo-ish.

[Terminal Error]

GTG Synths A large collection of free synths; together they can produce plenty of sounds.

Voxengo Boogex Cool guitar amp simulator.  The custom cabinet impulse response feature provides some interesting experimental opportunities.

I'll post more if they ever come to mind

[Sidhe Priest]

Hey, http://www.gtgsynths.com/Tracks/NR2010_patchtest.mp3 has a demo run of the second half of Rendez-Vous II, my favourite synth passage ever :-)