If you’re anything like me (yeah, an average guy, bedroom-producer making music as a hobby), you barely have enough money to support yourself… you don’t have the spare money to buy all those expensive high-end plugins and the hardware “bad boys” use.
Well, you shouldn’t stop making music, and you shouldn’t think your music can’t sound good just because of that!
Ok, you’re probably gonna want me to stop already, so i will. Ehm, just one more thing…
Here’s a list of FREE plugins I use on a daily basis that also help me save some money 
Illformed Glitch
What does it do?
Pattern-based effects sequencer that takes the incoming audio, breaks it down into user-defined slices, and applies different effects to each slice. Effects can either be programmed by hand to create specific desired patterns or chosen pseudo-randomly based on each effect’s probability level, with a user-defined seed value that optionally allows the same sequence of “random” effects to be chosen each time; or combined into a mixture of both methods.
Download / More Details: Illformed Homepage
Voxengo SPAN
What does it do?
SPAN is a real-time audio spectrum analyzer plug-in for professional music and audio production applications. It supports multi-channel analysis and can be set to display spectrums from two different channels or channel groups at the same time.
Download / More details: Voxengo Homepage
TAL Effects
Delays, Reverbs, EQ’s, Bitcrushers, etc. You’ve got all major types off effects here. And they sound really good!
Details / Download: ToguAudioLine Homepage
Flux Bitersweet2
What does it do?
I know, that big knob looks killer right? Bittersweet2 is a simple, yet effective transient designer. Turning the central button to the sweet side decreases the transients amplitude. To the bitter side, the transients amplitude is magnified. Features 64 bit floating point processing, up to 8 channels and up to 8 FS (384 KHz). Center and Stereo Modes are only available in stereo processing (2 channels)
Details / Download: Flux Homepage
Sonimus SonEQ
What does it do?
SonEQ is a digital equalizer that takes parts from some vintage gear and combines them. SonEQ has 3 bands, bass, middle and treble. Also, SonEQ has a pre-amp section.
Details / Download: Sonimus HomePage
Other good plugins:
- DoublePrecisionEqualizer : As the name says, it’s a double precision equaliser
- A.O.M. Invisible Limiter: Transparent brick-wall limiter with automatic attack/release-time optimization.
- AC1 Compressor: Dynamic plugin optimized for low CPU usage whilst maintaining the highest precision in signal processing.
- TSE X30: High-Gain Guitar Amplifier plug-in based on the Engl 530 preamp.
- FerricTDS: Tape Dynamics Simulator. Features 4x oversampled core algorithms, performance-critical parts are written in assembler and it is SSE-optimized. (Winner of the KVR Developer Challenge 2009!)
Please support the developers and donate some money, if you have the resources! They will help keep these great plugins free.
What other free plugins are you using? Leave a comment below!
