VST freebies & cheapies, what do you like?

There are acres of free homebrewed Kontakt instruments here - https://www.pianobook.co.uk/

I think you probably need to make a Spitfire Audio account, but that's worth it just to get access to their free 'Labs' series also.

speaking of free Kontakt instruments that spark joy, i've been keeping myself very entertained by Lockdown Kitchen. tons of fun percussion sounds, (almost) all of which were sampled from banging on things in the engineer's kitchen:

https://www.rattlyandraw.com/new-products-1/lockdown-kitchen

Beta versions of some new Noise Engineering plugins for free:

https://www.noiseengineering.us/blog/public-beta

Audiority's Polaris reverb/echo is on sale for $22, loving it - it's based on early digital echo/reverb like the Ursa Major Space Station, so it's kind of thin and diffusion just slightly softens the delay lines instead of turning into a big Lexicon-y reverb.

https://overloud.com/free-gem-mod/download?id=0

Free licenses for Overloud's new Roland Dimension-D plugin. I haven't downloaded it yet but their quality on effects generally seems to be good?

Good looking out

The Arturia demos that work forever but time out are great for goofing around for free (slash deciding if it's worth buying at Black Friday) - the newer digital recreations sound great, the Ensoniq SQ80 and E-Mu Emulator especially. There's a kick preset on the SQ80 that I want to sample for future use.

Cool I'll have to check out those demos. I've been considering pulling the trigger on a couple things, and I just know I'm going to buy them before they go on a ridiculous sale next month.

Black Friday sales coming through, Pigments here I come!

Hell yea. I've been waiting for Black Friday, too. If anybody ITT finds any particularly juicy VST/plugin sales, please share! I'm also watching for sale announcements on Sound On Sound's New Products & Industry News forum.

Audiority has a new free phaser pedal VST. I haven't downloaded it yet (slow reinstalling everything after a reformat because Universal Audio drivers suck) but all the Audiority stuff I have is good.

any suggestions for good dissonant and droney north african pipe/reed/flute sounds on the cheap? instrument or sound library or whatever

Dunno if this is what you mean, Nick B, but I programmed the ones you hear on this track on the FM8. At the time I couldn't find a decent soft synth that could emulate those sounds.

https://templo.bandcamp.com/track/the-valleys-of-paradise

ha, neat track! ideally looking for something a bit more 'real' though, and something where you get good buzzy timbral shifts as you blow harder through it, but can also be quite soft. also, a pony

Thank! hahaha ! Let me know if you find it ( that elusive vst, not the pony).

very tempted by 50% off Pigments

Pigments seems very deep so far, only scratching the surface but I still have hopes this could be my 'forever synth', or at least a main axe.

Baby Audio has a freebie one-button random fx vst.

Nick, sounds like you're looking for a Kontakt instrument? Haven't used them but I've seen some like you describe.

Can pigments be controlled with a Push 2?

xp yeah, i might jump for that if i have any spare cash at the end of the month - it's half price at the moment too. will keep searching to see if there's something that works with kontakt player or similar first though.

pig 3 is amazing, i got v2 last year and then a free upgrade when it launched. amazing they made something that deep whilst remaining a thing that i, a doofus, can still understand (mostly)

Another "free" one - https://soundpaint.com/

Kontakt-like sample player, you get one free grand piano sample set (I can't play piano for shit but it sounds good - it's a big sample library if you're space-constrained, 7GB or so) then buy more but the intro ones are pretty reasonably priced AFAICT.

Hi Moodles. Yes, Pigments can def be used with Push, but there may be some assembly req'd. (IDK if any the default presets are configured with mappings to Push's continuous controllers, but I didn't see any.)

What I do to get Pigments (or any non-native plugin in Ableton) to work with push is:
1) Drop an instance of the plugin into an empty Device Rack
2) Click the little arrow button that exposes the plugin's parameter automation config. (IDK what this is called, it's there for each plugin in the device chain.)
3) Click "Configure," which is now exposed, and click on whatever parameters I will want to available by default for automation/hardware control.
4) Click "Configure" again to stop selecting parameters.
5) Right-click the name of the plugin and select "Save as Default Configuration." Now, every time you instantiate this plugin, it will have all of these parameters configured as shown.
6) Each parameter now has a slider in the config section we've exposed. Right-click each of them and map to one of the Device Rack's macros.
7) Save the Device Rack as a User Preset and name it e.g. "Pigments Rack."

The "Pigments Rack" is what you'll open if you want the macros available on something like Push, without having to do all these steps every time you open a new instance of the plugin. I mapped Pigments' 4 macros, filter cutoff and resonance, and a couple other things I am forgetting rn.

Nice, thanks!

I'm strongly thinking about getting this because it's a nice discount and I'd like to make some cool space sounds. It looks more intuitive and flexible than Ableton's synths.

I've only used the sampler module so far, which is fun and has lots of possibilities for mangling audio. The other synths weren't as instantly usable for me, gonna have to dig into those next time.

It's a lot of synth for the price

Ohhh so that's how you do modulation routing in Pigments, now we're talking

yeah it's not immediately that bit! also don't ignore the fx tab :)

jordan, this was one of the best pigments tutorials i found, lots of little tips in there, super useful. v2 but it all still applies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tui94lfKlhM

Thank you!

I went ahead and bought it and have been playing around. Very fun and pretty straightforward once you figure a few basic things out, but there are definitely various controls that are a mystery to me. I don't know much about round design from a technical perspective so it's all trial and error at tge moment.

This really helped me understand what you can do with the sequencer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwW-reZhn9o

that was excellent, thanks moodles

Lol, Rolling Pigments 2022.

Still so much to learn, but my next trick is to find a good bit with one of the synth engines (or Razor), bounce it, and then bring it into the sampler. Rinse & repeat. (and then use that as the basis for a wavetable? Have not tried that yet.)

Or I should say my current trick, I've gotten my first usable results that way.

Native Instruments stuff on sale too, I got Form for half off. And now I swear I will not get any more new things, and will make all my tracks in 2022 using these. :)))

I just got Chromaphone 3 which is an acoustic resonmator modelling thing that i wanted for percussion stuff but it does a whole lot more too:
https://www.applied-acoustics.com/chromaphone-3/

pigments is only $49 if you own other arturia stuff, just hopped on this train

xp I was considering a Korg Minilogue xd desktop but as that is £££ and Reaktor 6 is 50% off I might give it a shot, particularly since my current PC won't melt under the strain. Last version I used was v4 just after it came out which was (checks notes) 18 years ago. Have to say I always enjoyed wiring up my own obnoxious sounding synths.

Just joined the Pigments 3 train

Ok now I might really start a Pigments IMM thread

I definitely feel like I need to learn some basic sound design concepts. I can come up with something kind of cool just by tinkering, turning knobs, and linking things together, but I wish I actually knew how to dial up a specific at will.

Cherry Audio has a new Arp Quadra softsynth. I can't vouch for the accuracy of any of their synths but they're all pretty cheap and very fun.

https://store.cherryaudio.com/

i also bought form. now im done. preset + lots of modulation + some corny M4L deterministic sequencing = instant youtube ambient

jordan start the pigments thread, wanna go deep on that one.

I did!

Rolling Pigments 3 Tips & Trix

Not a freebie but XLN Audio’s XO is available for £5 a month on Splice.

It’s an AI based way of navigating huge collections of drum hit samples, automatically creating a map of similar samples / removing duplicates / swapping samples by similarity.

Doesn’t sound very exciting on paper but it’s been a revelation finding uses for long forgotten drum samples and makes navigating a huge library weirdly fun and productive.

Jamie Lidell talked about making a M4L patch to work with that (or something like it) to bring in a random sample from somewhere in your folders, matched to the key & tempo of your current project. I don't use ableton but that would be amazing for serendipitous sampling.

Boz Digital's black friday sale is sweet. I picked up the Big Clipper and Sasquatch Kick Machine, as well as the Claps, Stomps & Snaps bundle. Hopefully my days of slogging thru kick and clap one-shots are behind me now.

I also went for Klanghelm's SDRR saturation plugin, because it's pretty, and Eddie Bazil raves about it. You can never have too many saturation/distortion plugins.

Plugin Alliance's sales are tempting, too... I can hear Soundtoys' Phase Mistress and Little Alter Boy call my name as I am pulled ever closer to the Eventide Blackhole :o

Klevgrand has some good sales, I went for their shaken percussion vst. Not something I would normally go for, but I'm so sick of chopping tambourine loops, lol.

Little Alter Boy is surely my most used Soundtoys plugin, along with the filter one. And the plate reverb they offered for free a few years ago.

Good stuff. Skaka (the shaker plug) has proven to be very useful... might've influenced my decision to get all the single-serving kick/clap/stomp/snap plugins from Boz. I also got Klevgrand's Pipa and Slammer. Swedish design is generally really fucking good.

Decided not to get Blackhole. I-lok sucks and I'd prefer to support Valhalla, so I'm likely to buy their Shimmer reverb instead.

Fuck Waves for throwing out this interesting freebie then making it part of their V13 bullshit licence, scamming c*unts.