Let’s be honest, we all love free stuff, especially free VST plugins for Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Cubase, Bitwig Studio or any other DAW! Tell me one electronic music producer doesn’t!

Ableton Live & XPAND!2. VI25 is bundled with Ableton Live Lite and Xpand!2 by AIR Music Tech, two dynamic pieces of software that enable you to record, produce, and perform with your computer. Ableton Live Lite is a fluid audio/MIDI environment that enables you to spontaneously record, remix, improvise, and edit musical ideas on the fly. Its a limited offer between soundcloud and Ableton. Ableton recently added a new feature that allows you to upload your tracks direct to Soundcloud and to celebrate both companies decided to run this promotion. Soundcloud are offering 5 months of Pro membership to Ableton users and Ableton are offering a FREE version of Live Lite 8 to.

That’s why I’ve written up this review of my top choices for free plugins that you may want to check out and download to use in your music.

Speaking of free stuff, if you haven’t signed up to us yet, you can get free sample packs and tutorials by some of our featured artists from the BassGorilla Podcast – all you need to do is sign up here.

This list is in no order and may be expanded to include other plugins over time. Let me know in the comments if you know any other great free plugins at the bottom of this post!

1. SampleTank FREE

Windows, Mac OS X It’s insane that something as good as SampleTank could be free. It comes with a wide range of virtual instruments, from basses to drums, guitars, synths, organs, ensemble strings and orchestral sections, vocals and much more! You can upgrade to SampleTank 2L or 2.5 XL if you’re impressed with the quality of the sounds you hear in the free version.

• Sample based sounds (parent): 58

• Preset sounds (child): 146

• Combi sounds (combi): 0

• Total sounds: 204

• Total size: 579 MB

2. Flux BitterSweet v3

Windows, Mac OS X BitterSweet from Flux is a free transient shaper plugin. It works well for adding more ‘punch’ to your drums, especially your kicks, snares and toms. The extra punch comes when you turn the dial to the ‘bitter’ setting. You can soften the punch of a sound when you turn the dial towards the ‘sweet’ setting. It is available as a 32-bit and 64-bit plugin. Features:

• Output Gain, controlling the gain at the end of the processing.

• Bypass routes the incoming signal direct to the output for a true smooth transition between processed and clean signal.

• Three different transient processing modes:

• Main, using a regular stereo signal scheme for the processing.

• Center, processing the Mid channel only, very efficient for snare and kick drums.

• Stereo, processing the Side channel only, very efficient for panned rhythmic/transient instruments.

3. Glitch 2

Windows, Mac OS X, Linux Glitch is an audio effect plugin for Windows (VST), Mac (VST and AU) and Linux (VST), available in both 32-bit and 64-bit formats. Featuring a new and improved sequencer which can play multiple effects simultaneously, with the ability to trigger unique scenes from every note on your keyboard, Glitch can be as gentle or as brutal as you like. Add the occasional splash of re-trigger or stretcher to single hits within your drum loop, or fill the entire sequencer with random effect blocks for a totally chaotic trip down the digital rabbit hole… the choice is yours! Features:

Sequencer

• Each program consists of 128 scenes that can be triggered via MIDI notes. Each scene has its own unique sequencer pattern, timing, and effect settings, allowing you to create tons of unique variations for every moment in your song, all ready to go at the press of a key!

• Multi-lane sequencer allows many effects to be played simultaneously, to create interesting layered sounds.

• Improved sequencer timing controls to better match your groove and song structure.

• Intuitive pattern editor with drag’n’drop. Draw, erase, resize, split and join blocks with ease.

Effects

• 9 cheeky little effect modules designed to slice, dice, chop, screw, twist, turn and mangle your sounds into radical new forms.

• Tempo-synced effects can easily be dialled in to precise musical timings such as 16th notes, 8th note triplets, and so on.

• Filter, mix, pan and volume controls on each module, to help shape and fine-tune the output.

4. Zebralette

Windows, Mac OS X Zebralette by U-He is just one of its big brother Zebra2’s oscillators packed into a simple, easy-to-learn framework – but you have everything you need to make some pretty amazing sounds. Sounds that can be directly loaded into Zebra2 later. And should you eventually decide to upgrade to Zebra2, you will already know everything there is to know about the oscillators. Zebralette has two LFOs (one per voice, one global), a multi-stage envelope and three on-board effects (chorus, EQ, delay). Not forgetting Zebra2’s famous dual spectral effects, which include several squelchy filter algorithms. Download Zebralette Here

5. Camel Crusher

Windows, Mac OS X 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! Teamviewer this device supports screen sharing only. Features:

• Two different distortion types.

• Warm, analogue-modelled resonant low-pass filter.

• High quality, easy-to-use compressor, with ‘Phat’ mode.

• Powerful ‘MIDI Learn’ function.

• A collection of useful Preset patches to get you started.

• Randomize for instant inspiration.

I love RX by iZotope. I especially love the dialogue/vocal de-noise module. I just click the button, sample a bit of the background noise, and run the algorithm. Next thing you know the noise is gone and there is a minimal effect to the dialogue or vocal.

The one downfall of RX is its price. It is completely worth it if you need to use it a lot, but for those of us on a budget the price tag can be a bit hefty especially if we only need it every now-and-then.This got me thinking. Is there a way to get similar results using audio effects native to Ableton Live?And, as it turns out, there is. It isn’t on the same level as RX, but it gets the job done and what’s more, it is automated. Let’s find out how to do it! Step 1First record some dialogue or a vocal.

I am using this clip I recorded directly into my phone. This is what the original sounds like +9.5 dB.AUDIO SAMPLE: original plus 9.5 dB.wav. Step 2Now for the important part.

This needs to be done before we being the de-noising process.We need to use a compressor to even out the dynamic range of the vocal. Don’t worry though, it’s really easy to do. Just put a Glue Compressor after the EQ and turn the threshold down to -15 dB.This value is going to be different for every vocal clip.What you are looking to do is bring those really high peaks down with some gain reduction so the overall volume is closer to being the same level throughout the clip. This is going to help us in the near future.

Obviously you don’t want it to be flat, but bringing the peaks down a couple dB should be fine. You can see how many dB of gain reduction is being applied by watching the Glue Compressor’s needle and how far it peaks.AUDIO SAMPLE: original plus 9.5 dB – EQ - Glue.wav. Step 3Now we are ready to start the de-noise process.

What I do is duplicate the original channel, so we can always go back. Then on the new duplicate I freeze and flatten the track making the EQ and Compression permanent.Next, I duplicate that new channel. That should leave you with 3 channels in total. You can deactivate the audio on the first channel as we don’t want or need to hear it.Now take a Utility Audio Effect and drop it on the third channel. Then click the Phz-L and Phz-R buttons at the bottom of the device. This is inverting the waveforms for the left and the right channels.

If you play the second and third audio tracks together right now you should hear nothing as the exact opposite waveforms will cancel each other out when they get mixed together in the master channel. Don’t worry, that’s OK! Now, for the magic. Step 4Solo the third channel—the channel with the Utility device on it. Take the Gate Audio Effect and drop it behind the Utility device. Click the “flip” button, because we want the gate to allow everything except what passes the threshold.

Also turn on the “Lookahead” to 10 ms - I found this helps with the very short attack settings we will be using.Now you need to adjust the Threshold and the Return parameters so the vocal is set right in between the two.When the dialogue is being played you should hear the noise section but the vocal itself begin to be cut out. Get it close.

Don’t forget to set the floor to, so that you can’t hear any of the dialogue or vocal coming through. We want just noise.This is the goal here. You want the gate to cut out the audio when there is someone talking or singing and ONLY at those moments.

The Attack and Release parameters will help to smooth things out after the other parameters are set.This were my final Gate settings. Now we can play the second and third channels together and the large areas with just noise will be completely quiet and the dialogue will be allowed to pass through. That will save a boat load of time right off the bat!Now, the part with the dialogue with still have the noise, so this method is a little limited. But, overall we already have a massively improved result that will handle itself no matter how long to the audio clip is. Step 5However, there is one more trick we can pull off to clean up that final output a bit more.Go back to the original clip, drop a spectrum analyzer on the channel, and loop a section of just noise. Look for any clear peaks in the spectrum. That is where the noisiest parts are.

As you can see from the picture below there is a big problem around 15 kHz and something fishy around 330 Hz.