[RWP] SOS: Q What are the best freeware plug-ins?

[James Scholes]

  Hi all.

Just been looking through Sound On Sound for November 2010, and one of 
the questions sent in by a SOS reader was:
"What are the best freeware plug-ins?"

As there has been some discussion on-list lately about what plug-ins 
people like to use, I thought I'd pass along the information that SOS 
came up with on this topic (a subscription fee is needed to view the 
content on the SOS website otherwise).  Also making this article 
particularly relevant is the mention of the plug-ins that come with 
Reaper by default, as well as mentions of some of the Kjaerhus Audio 
Classic series plug-ins that were included in an archive of some useful 
freeware plug-ins posted to this list earlier this week.

Q What are the best freeware plug-ins?
Published in SOS November 2010
There are loads of freeware plug-ins floating around out there now, so I 
find I'm getting swamped by choices. One site I checked out listed 670 
of them! I'd rather not slow down my sessions looking for the perfect 
delay when just sticking with a good one and working with it would be 
much more productive. I've checked out a few of the ones mentioned in 
Mix Rescue and have been quite impressed, so I was wondering whether you 
could give me some further suggestions for a couple for each basic 
category of plug-in. In particular, I'd be interested in any 'go to' 
freeware choices. I'm on a PC, so VST would be best.
Eoghan Brady via email

Some good freeware and donationware VST equalisers: Cockos ReaEQ, Bootsy 
Nasty CS, Antress Modern Black Dragon, and DDMF LP10.

SOS contributor Mike Senior replies: First of all, you could do worse 
than just download the ReaPlugs VST suite, which is a big chunk of the 
Reaper plug-in complement and includes everything you're after, in one 
form or another. I've done whole mixes with just Reaper's plug-ins, so I 
can vouch for their effectiveness. Other particularly worthwhile sets 
I've found are those from Antress Modern (http://antress.er-webs.com), 
Bootsy (http://varietyofsound.wordpress.com), GVST (www.gvst.co.uk), MDA 
(http://mda.smartelectronix.com) and Voxengo (www.voxengo.com), which 
cover a lot of bases between them.
But on to some specific things I like, all of which have proved their 
worth in the heat of Mix Rescue! For general-purpose EQ'ing, I do like 
Reaper's ReaEQ a lot, but for extra colour, try Bootsy's Nasty series 
and the Antress Modern emulations. DDMF (www.ddmf.eu) have a great 
donationware linear-phase EQ called LP10, too. For synth-style 
filtering, I usually just tend to automate ReaEQ, but Camel Audio's 
Camel Crusher (www.camelaudio.com) and Ohm Force's Frohmage 
(www.ohmforce.com) have more obvious attitude, if required. As far as 
dynamics are concerned, ReaComp and ReaXcomp in the ReaPlugs set are, 
again, good all-round workhorses, but things like Georg Yohng's W1 
(www.yohng.com), Buzzroom's BuzMaxi 3 (www.x-buz.com), Bootsy's Density, 
Jeroen Breebaart's PC2 (www.jeroenbreebaart.com) and the Antress Modern 
vintage emulations all get regular use on my projects. ReaGate and 
ReaFIR are a solid bet for most expansion and noise-reduction tasks, so 
I've never really bothered looking elsewhere.
My freeware fallback for chorus, phaser, and flanger effects is Kjaerhus 
Audio's Classic series, and although I could no longer find a web 
presence for them at the time of writing, it's still possible to find 
the plug-ins hosted on other sites via Google. MDA's Leslie and The 
Interruptor's Wow & Flutter (www.interruptor.ch) are cool for general 
modulation grunginess and I use those a lot. For tremolo/chopper 
effects, try Tweakbench's Cairo (www.tweakbench.com) or Oli Larkin's 
Autopan and LFO Chopper (www.olilarkin.co.uk). When it comes to 
distortion/saturation, there's lots of good stuff and I admit to being a 
bit of a collector in this respect. Some of my favourites are Bootsy's 
Ferric, GVST's GClip and GRecti, Jeroen Breebaart's Ferox, MDA's Combo 
and Bandisto, Mokafix Noamp (www.mokafix.com), Silverspike's Rubytube 
(www.silverspike.com), and Voxengo's Tubeamp: so much dirt, so little 
time! For more outrageous grainy and grungy effects, DBlue's Glitch 
(http://illformed.org) is a good bet, as are Jack Dark's outrageous 
Darkware series (www.gersic.com/plugins/hosted/darkware/darkware.html) 
and Tweakbench's Pudding and Sideslip.
The Interruptor's delay plug-ins are good, as are GSi's WatKat 
(www.genuinesoundware.com), Tweakbench's Maelcum and GVST's GDuckDelay. 
That said, I tend to use ReaDelay for basic delay requirements most of 
the time. Smart Ambience is a great functional reverb demo, but 
Christian Knufinke's SIR (www.knufinke.de/sir/sir1.html) with impulses 
from Echo Chamber (www.memi.com/echochamber/responses/index.html) takes 
the cake for me in the freeware reverb department. For stereo image 
adjustment and M/S processing, my clear favourites are Voxengo's MSED 
and Flux's Stereo Tool (www.fluxhome.com). The latter has one of the 
best stereo vectorscope displays I've encountered anywhere. Speaking of 
displays, Roger Nichols' Inspector (www.rndigital.com) was my metering 
and spectrum-analysis plug-in of choice for a long time, although 
Voxengo's SPAN is also good. I tend to use Schwa's payware Schope 
instead for most things these days, however. And speaking of Schwa 
(www.stillwellaudio.com), they have a great freeware bitscope plug-in 
called Bitter that can be handy for digital troubleshooting. The TT 
Dynamic Range Meter is great if you're interested in the mastering 
'loudness wars'; you can get it free on request via the Brainworx site 
(www.brainworx-music.de).
Finally, here's a couple of odds and ends. Although I've yet to come 
across a decent, simple, freeware pitch-shifter, if you're after 
freeware pitch correction, look no further than GVST's GSnap, which is 
pretty effective and has seen use in a number of Mix Rescues before now. 
If you're a fan of Aphex-style psychoacoustic enhancement, also be sure 
to fire up Stillwell Audio's exciter, one of the plug-ins available 
within the ReaPlugs ReaJS host, which does the same kind of thing.
836679

Published in SOS November 2010

T


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James Scholes

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