VST Hosting VST plugins are hosted within DAW software. Audio and MIDI input from your DAW can be sent to a VST plugin for processing. The plugin can send its audio output directly back to the DAW or to another VST plugin. In order to host a VST plugin from within your DAW, it is not necessary to install the plugin. Instead, configure your DAW so that it looks for plugins in your plugin folder.
Every DAW that supports VST plugins has an option to configure plugin folders, typically in a Preferences or Options menu. Some DAW programs that support VST plugins are Ableton Live, Steinberg's Nuendo, and Sony Acid Pro. VST Files VST plugins are typically single files. On a PC, a plugin is usually a DLL file which you place in the same VST folder to which you direct your DAW. On Mac OS X, plugins are called Audio Units, and have the.au file extension. In order to use an AU as a VST plugin, you must use a program called a wrapper, which wraps the AU in code that makes other software recognize it as a VST plugin.
Furthermore, if a VST plugin uses samples or involves other files, make sure those accompanying files are in the same folder as the main plugin file. VST Effects vs. VST Instruments VST plugins occur in two general types: effects and instruments. A VST effect is used to process incoming audio signals. Many VST effects emulate common effects found in pedals and rack-mount units, such as reverb, delay, compression and equalization. VST instruments, on the other hand, actually generate sound. Most VST instruments create synthesizer sounds and other sounds frequently found in electronic music.
Plugins also exist for emulating analog instruments such as strings, woodwinds, brass and organs. Inserts and Sends Depending on the DAW you use, there may be a number of places that you can put your VST plugin. If you use a VST plugin as an insert, it will be placed directly in the audio chain of a particular track, and affect the track before it is sent anywhere else. If you use the VST plugin in a send channel, audio from any of your tracks can be sent to that channel and processed. Therefore, if you wish to apply an effect to multiple audio channels or blend the audio output of a channel with processed output, sends are more efficient.
With a gorgeous interface, this free delay and filter plugin offers 3 fully configurable independent delay bands (Low/Mid/Hi) with complete and accurate control over the frequency width of each band. Each band is split into left and right channels with independent delay time and feedback and there’s a comprehensive filter bank section. Each band has its own fully featured filter on both left and right channels complete with cutoff and resonance controls. There are a total of six filters and six LFOs. Blue Cat’s Freeware Pack contains some excellent mixing tools for Mac and PC in all major formats. The Chorus is a vintage chorus effect with variable delay, the Flanger sounds great on everything from guitars and drums to vocals, and the Phaser rounds out the modulation effects. Gain Suite contains a series of gain utilities that let you use MIDI automation to control the volume of several channels at the same time.
Finally, FreqAnalyst is an excellent spectral analyzer that helps you better understand what’s going on inside your mixes. This free limiting plugin has five modules: an RMS compressor, peak limiter, high frequency limiter, clipper and a true peak limiter.
Both brickwall and soft limiting are supported and use different timing settings depending on the effect you’re going for. Mid / side is supported and there’s a multiband mode which is useful for getting more precise control over the limiting of different frequency bands within a track. 4x oversampling is available and you get retro level meters as well as choice of two different GUIs. A mini synthesizer that is controlled by audio that you route into it, this plugin uses three different oscillator waveform modes (pure sine, ring mod sine and phase mod sine) and the idea is that it turns any sound source into a series of dynamically generated basses, bleeps, blips, sweeps or glitches. Just like VJ software makes graphics respond to the characteristics of incoming audio, Zap does it with synthesized sound.
It’s a quick way to beef up beats by adding auto-generated synth elements. A1 TriggerGate for Mac and PC is a rhythmic gate audio processor that can be used to get the popular effect that’s heard a lot in dubstep, house and other electronic styles of music. There’s a variable onboard step sequencer where each beat consist of four steps, or three in triplet mode, and each step has its own volume fader. Designed to be as simple as possible, the effects sound great. Although highly programmable, the effect also has a randomizer for punching in a whole new bunch of settings instantly.
Atom is a filter with a focus on dynamic, tempo-synced modulation. With five different resonant filter types each with three slope settings, you also get two modulators with multiple waveforms that run at rates ranging from 1/128 note to 16 bars.
A chaos function randomizes the amplitude of each modulator cycle and you get a lag switch to smooth out the waveform curves. It also features an different kind of interface, with simple graphics rather than the kind of GUI you might be used to seeing. Advanced transport sync algorithm and support for tempo and time signature automation round out the feature set. This chorus effect uses a phase randomizing filter that avoids any unwanted comb filter effects from the signal. It can simulate up to six additional voices and the pitch and loudness of any of these can be tweaked. You also get an integrated EQ and a pre-delay section to create modulated and diffuse echo effects.
You get undo and redo capabilities, A/B of setups and a preset manager. It comes in VST or AAX formats for Windows and VST, AAX or AU on the Mac, all in 32 or 64-bit versions, and with support for 96kHz sample rates and mono or stereo processing. The Sonalksis FreeG plug-in for Mac and PC is a simple master fader plug-in that can actually be inserted on any channel, not just the master buss. It gives you a physically much larger fader to work with, with finer controls, plus very accurate metering. You get multiple metering ballistics types, peak and RMS level meters, pre and post metering options and a selectable pan law control. There’s also a Fine mode for more sensitive calibration of the master fader and a mono mode for when you are working with mono tracks inside a project.
Span is a realtime FFT audio spectrum analyser that can give you an accurate visual readout of what’s going on in terms of the frequency and amplitude of your audio. It’s highly configurable, letting you specify FFT block sizes and visual slope amongst other things, and supports multichannel analysis or displaying spectrums from two different channels or groups at the same time for comparison. You also get output metering with adjustable ballistics and metering time, headroom estimation and clipping detection as well as correlation metering.
This free plug-in visualizes up to four different audio signals in realtime in one window and helps you identify overlapping frequencies within a mix. It’s a 31-band spectral analyser with multitrack functionality though limited to a sample rate of 44.1kHz. For more features you can upgrade to the full version. By analyzing your signal accurately you can see where problematic areas are occurring in the mix and use EQ to fix them. Software analysis is generally more accurate than relying on your ears alone. Things like chorders, arpeggiators and other tools that interpret your input are great but they remain virtual until you render them to audio, whereupon you lose editability. This plug-in does things differently by turning live-generated MIDI parts into editable regions on a MIDI track.
From there you can work with the parts directly since they are no longer virtual. You insert the plugin at the end of the MIDI effects plugin chain and then use it to freeze the MIDI part, at which point it is rendered down to a MIDI event on the target track.
If you work with arpeggiators and the like a lot, it’s brilliant. This vocoder is a digital / analogue hybrid model for Windows that can vocode and mix with two different engines: an FFT-based digital engine or a filter bank analogue version. It works as a VST instrument with a special plug-in to deal with the carrier and modulator components that are required for taking input signal and using it to create the vocoded effect. You get built-in eight-voice polysynth plus the ability to use recorded audio as the carrier, up to four inputs to use as the modulator and a buffer freezing function. Six band graphic EQ and an effects section with delay, chorus and reverb round out what is a pretty awesome package.
Free Vst Effects Plugins 2017
Advanced MIDI Gate can be used to easily mute an audio/VSTi track via MIDI and can be used to create the stuttering effects commonly found in trance and psy-trance. The envelope can control a filter instead of a VCA and noise can be added to the signal to make the sound more aggressive. Either the left or right channel can be delayed slightly to fatten the sound and when you stop your sequencer, the plugin disables itself so that you can edit the gated track without having to switch the plugin off.