Top 10 Free Vst Plugins 2018

Hello and welcome to this week's article!
Today we are talking about 10 FREE Vst plugin that we suggest you to try, they can be a good start for a small low budget home recording project, and they can provide you a wide array of tools to get in the recording world at zero cost.

It's important to point out that not all of them came out in 2018, but this is a basic package we suggest to download if you are new with recordings and want to try some nice free plugin.


1) Ignite Amps ProF.E.T.: I have put this plugin in the first position because it's today's new (04/10/2018) that this plugin has won the KVR Developer Challenge 2018 (congratulations!). It is a great guitar preamp simulator, good for a wide array of sounds but focused on rock/metal, and obviously it needs a speaker simulator to run.

2) Izotope Neutrino: this is a sort of swiss army knife; it's a multiband compressor hidden in a super minimalist interface, in which you are allowed basically only to choose the instrument (between vocals, drums, bass and guitar/generic instrument) and the amount of the effect. You just slam these plugins in the respective bus of each instrument group and it will analize the spectrum and apply a subtle multiband compression in the areas that are peaking too much or resonating weirdly, and at the end (hopefully) the final track will sound cleaner and more polished.

3) Klanghelm MJUC-jr: anyone that follows this blog from long enough knows how much I love peak limiters; they are the earliest version of compressors, easy to use and good to fatten up any signal, from single instruments to bus compression. This type of plugins are particularly good for parallel compression, or to fatten up acoustic cymbals tracks, bringing out some of the body of the drumset while limiting the peak of the cymbals.

4) Ample Bass P Lite 2: since not always we have a bass or a bass player at hand, this free vst bass sampler can turn out to be a life saver; it recreates the sound of a clean bass that can be controlled via Midi and processed like a normal bass, and it is ideal to streamline the songwriting process, to write down quick rough mixes to share with the bandmates.

5) Mt PowerDrum Kit 2: this is a surprisingly good drum sampler, free to download, which includes several pre processed kits usable for different genres and midi grooves, and it's an amazing starting point for anyone who needs a good drum sampler to record a rock demo.

6) VSCO2 Rompler: this is a good free orchestra vst instrument which can recreate various sections
of an orchestra with a good degree of realism, although obviously the midi track needs to be tweaked accordingly to make it even more realistic and dynamic. The samples are not bad, and it is definitely a good starting point for anyone who wants to try and write an orchestral part.

7) Ignite PTEq-X: in a world of graphic equalizers, PTE eq takes a different route, by recreating a classic hardware parametric eq with a particular workflow (sections can be boosted or cut in a combined way as explained in the review), and it allows us to achieve very natural and realistic results, manipulating the sound in a very musical way.

8) Sean Pandy Drums: this little free drum sampler has a very particular story: it is a simple drum sampler composed of kick, snare, 4 toms and a sub blower (so it should be used in combination with another sampler that includes cymbals) with various velocities etc, but the cool thing is that it consists in samples created by a famous metal producer who released them for free in the past. Now these samples are not available anymore for downloading, but the home producers community kept on sharing and using them, until this guy took them, created 6 velocity layers for each one (not only changing the volume but also the their attack/decay/sustain and envelope) and put them together in this free plugin, so now anyone can use these good samples for free.

9) Softamp GT: this is a vst recreation of the famous Sansamp Gt2 Stompbox, probably the most famous guitar amp simulator that could be used directly into the mixing board before the advent of digital emulation. It features all the original controls (eq, 3 channels, 3 mic placements) and many more new controls, and it just sounds surprisingly good, both for rock and for metal tones, even for the most extreme and scooped ones, thanks to tons of gain and a very fast and definite attack.

10) Audio Damage Rough Rider 2: this is a different type of compressor compared to the aforementioned Klanghelm one, and it is aimed mainly to rhythmic tracks such as drums, bass and electronic beats, because besides adding fatness and punch, it also adds a subtle saturation that makes them even more warm and present.


What about you? Did you know these plugins? Which are your favourite free vst plugins that you use in your projects? Let us know!


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