Top Ten Free VST Plugins for Mac & PC
1. BLOCKFISH is a versatile compressor with countless ways to shape the incoming audio. Unlike many other digital compressors, BLOCKFISH has ‘soul’. It likes to bite, but it can be tamed easily once you’ve learned how to use its potential. You can remove the front plate and make further adjustments on the circuit board. Everything is possible: clean, transparent, loud, punchy, silky, subtle, fat. But still with a unique sonic character.
Mac & PC – VST & AU Click here to go to the developers site to download
2. SPITFISH is a dead-easy to use de-esser, aimed mainly at mono or stereo vocal tracks. Just like classic analog de-essers, this unit dynamically filters out harsh, annoying s-like sounds that would otherwise ‘spit’ in your face.
Mac & PC – VST & AU Click here to go to the developers site to download
3. FLOORFISH is a simple expander / gate device, easy to set up and offers a broad variety of processing, ranging from slight expansion, backgound noise attenuation to extreme gating effects. What’s different from similar units is the ability to scan the source and adjust the transistion curve accordingly.
Mac & PC – VST & AU Click here to go to the developers site to download
4. PSP PianoVerb is a free plugin for any VST, MAS and DirectX compatible host (such as Cubase, Logic, Nuendo etc). It reproduces a special kind of reverberation originally provided by piano strings. It generates reverb using 12 string operators with adjustable damping and decay time.
Mac & PC – VST, DirectX & MAS Click here to go to the developers site to download
5. Mr Ray Electric Piano Emulation is capable of producing the sound of the Electric Pianos of the seventies, like the Fender Rhodes and the Wurlitzer EP, as well as the FM Piano.
PC – VST Click here to download
6. CamelCrusher is a free ‘colouring’ multi-effect plugin. It offers two characteristically different distortion sounds which can be blended together to create a wide variety of tones and textures. Great for guitars, drums and plenty more! There’s also a warm, smooth analogue-style low-pass filter with buckets of resonance. Assign a MIDI controller and start tweaking! Finally, let’s not forget the easiest-to-use compressor you’ll find anywhere. It can ‘phatten’ up your sound as quickly as you can turn up the ‘Amount’ knob!
Mac & PC – VST & AU Click here to go to the developers site to download
7. SSL LMC-1 Every now and again a piece of audio equipment comes along that defines the sound of an era. Back in 1979 Solid State Logic gave birth to a legendary recording console. The SSL SL 4000E Master Studio System forever changed how records would be recorded and mixed, heralding a new age in popular music. In less than three years, every major studio worldwide featured at a least one room with an SSL “E” Series console. The SSL Listen Mic Compressor was the secret weapon in many producers sonic arsenal of recording techniques. Originally designed to prevent overloading the return feed from a studio communications mic, its fixed attack and release curves were eminently suitable for use on ambient drums mics. Of course, we’d like to take all the credit for this great sound, but as usual, it was the creativity of SSL users that led to the idea.
Mac & PC – VST & AU Click here to go to the developers site to download
8. SSL X-ISM is a state of the art VST/AU plug-in which can interpret inter-sample peaks, allowing engineers to make informed judgements about the resultant sound quality of the mix. There is currently a trend in the in the audio industry known euphemistically as ‘The loudness war’ in which the engineering process is driven to produce a product which is as loud as is technically possible within the constraints of the medium. Debate rages as to whether this produces problems that degrade and distort the audio. One reason for this distortion is often blamed on the presence of ‘inter-sample peaks’, where signals that are usually missed by the Fs sampling of DAW meters, may actually exceed 0dBfs in reconstruction from digital to analogue domain in some Digital to Analogue Converters (DACs).
Mac & PC – VST & AU Click here to go to the developers site to download
9. Blue Cat Audio Plugin Bundle All Blue Cat Audio freeware audio plug-ins gathered together in a bundle. It’s here! Save download time and get them all in a single package. The bundle contains a wide range of modulation effects, an EQ and analysis tools to get you started with your favorite Digital Audio Workstation, for free! This bundle is available for Mac and PC, in VST, RTAS, Audio Unit and DirectX plugin formats, for both 32 and 64-bit architectures (for the platforms that support them). Enjoy!
Mac & PC – VST, RTAS, DirectX & AU Click here to go to the developers site to download
10. SIR Audio Tools SIR1 Reverb This is a reverb device that works with “impulse-responses”. Impulse-responses are generated by recording short broadband signals and their corresponding room-reflections. What you get contains the information needed to reproduce the same room with other signals
PC – VST Click here to download