 All five plugins that we'll look at in this video are completely free and can be heard in this demo Hi folks, I'm Mike, and I hope you will I've got five amazing freebies for you in today's video I've got some instruments got some effects and something which helps out when you're mastering as well All of them were used at some point during the process of creating the demo that you heard there at the beginning of this video I'll talk about how they were used as we go through each one Let's start off by taking a look at the drums So a major element of the opening demo was the drums and for that I use the new free vintage drums library From Spitfire Audio now this library gets used in their free labs player as well Let's just have a quick listen to how they sound out of the box Now for the demo I actually added this control in this is normally an expression control in the lab's player but I feel like it's just adding in more of the room Mike's sound Let me know in the comments down below if you agree with that Let's have a listen as I slide it up Now I rather like the kind of the liveliness that that added to the drums so I had that up pretty high Now another way that you can change the sound of these drums over all is by first of all using this grit control here let's add some of that in and you'll hear things break up just around about here have a listen Now I didn't use that in my opening demo so I'll just pop that all the way down to the bottom The other control we have is for reverb just click in the middle here switch over to reverb and then you can control the reverb and we can get a really big sound with this But again for my demo I had this all the way down to the bottom Now before you go ahead and follow the links in the description down below and download this just hang in there because I want to point out a couple of quirks things you may miss about this like I did in actual fact the first time I use it The first thing is you'll notice with the keys down here that there's two main zones where you can play the drums okay and they're kind of duplicates of each other so for example down here we have on the on the lower end on the C as you would expect we have the kick drum and then higher up on the other C have the same kick drum same for the snare and all the other drums now I actually find this to be quite useful to be honest with you especially if I'm say using toms and I want to do some quick succession of notes almost like a roll or something it's really useful to have that the same sound on two separate keys you see this occasionally in some other drum drum libraries or plugins but um you know I'm sort of I can see why they've done that here it seemed a bit redundant at first but it's actually quite worthwhile now as you sort of look at these and you focus on the white keys and some of the black ones in between you may make the same mistake as me as you play these you'll listen to the hi-hats there's some closed ones and some open ones and you'll get to the top and think hang on where are the symbols there's no symbols in there when they're kind of hidden away you may not notice them but they're just on these three black keys here which are actually slightly gray yeah you can find those symbols there now another thing you may miss is the fact that when you download this drum kit you actually get another one with it so I'm using this 1975 kit but there's also this animal kit as well not quite so many drums with this one but some slight variations on the other sound so some different sounding kick and snare there and and some toms there as well you could use a combination of both of them on different tracks I reckon it's amazing that you get all of this for free and I do recommend you follow those links in the description down below now I guess the star of the show in the opening demo was the guitars I had two guitars panned left and right and they were sounding like this and they were both using this plugin this is tone xcs from ik multimedia this is a modeling plugin where you can model amps and pedals and cabinets etc now in this free version you can't actually do any modeling but you do get 20 models included and you can download another 20 from the community as well to use I have starred or favorited the ones which are included with the free version here okay you can see them all here this just makes it easy for me to find them you will find when you first open this up there's a whole bunch of models in there but when you click on them it's going to say that you have to buy the you know the other version of tonex to do it so I kind of went through and found all the free ones and then as I say I starred them so if you want to quickly come back to this video and just look at the list here this is what you've got available and I think this free selection is really quite amazing now one of the things I like about this is you can audition the sounds right away by clicking on this play button up here okay so if I select this black angus amp here and then click this play button then I can audition the sound yeah switch to another amp like this and do the same again and as I say there's things like sort of pedals in there as well this tonex pedal crazy stuff hey now don't forget just because it's modeled doesn't mean you have this sort of fixed sound to it okay when you load these up you can still go in and change the settings on these amps and then sort of craft your sound a little bit there and another thing you have is is sort of some different effects and things you've got a noise gate up here which you can use you've got some controls for that here you've got a compressor and you've also got a reverb as well in there which you can add to that now I am sure that they are doing this tease you into wanting to buy the paid versions who can blame them but I must say even with this free version um if you already have an amp sim of another kind another another plugin this can only complement that there's some really great sounding stuff in here there's some clean sounds there's some really dirty stuff what you heard there as well and also there is one bass amp in there as well let me just find that I think it's called yes the fridge okay and I use that sound for the bass guitar on my demo also in just a moment I'm going to be showing you how I further enhance the sound of those electric guitars using a really simple free plugin I love simplicity especially when I'm releasing my music which I do through our sponsor one of the great things about distro kid is its simplicity for the simple price of $19.99 per year you can upload an unlimited number of original tracks with no extra fees those tracks will be distributed on streaming platforms such as Spotify, TikTok, iTunes, Amazon Music and many more without you needing to open accounts at any of those places and if $19.99 isn't cheap enough for you follow the link in the description down below to get a further 7% off right away I will also get a small commission at no extra cost to you thank you so one of the things I did add was a little bit of grit flavour to the electric guitars using this plugin this is the little radiator plugin from sound toys it's essentially a tube pre-amp emulator based on the Ultec 1566a pre-amp and as I say I use this just to add a little bit of grittiness extra grittiness if you can believe it to those guitars it's subtle but I just liked what it was doing by the way this is free at the moment but it's normally $79 and that does that's not going to go on forever so you probably want to pick this up right away if you can let's just have a quick listen to the guitars bypass and then I'll sort of flick this bypass switch off and on so you'll see when it's off and on now certainly because I had this heat control turned up slightly it also got a little louder is a pre-amp control after all but there's also an extra something added in there in terms of a little bit of sort of breakup now part of that was because I use this switch here this is the bias switch okay let me switch that off and on so you can hear the difference there so you can hear with it switched on things are just a little bit more fuzzy and less full I liked that sound we've also got a noise switch here as well this just adds in some actual noise listen carefully I won't turn things up but do listen carefully because curiously we all love to add noise back in these days back in the day we did our best to get rid of it but there you go that switch is there as well I think this is worth grabbing if you do want to add that sort of tube grittiness and just sort of make your tracks a little less sterile of course you can use it on a whole bunch of things other than electric guitars that I have here you could use it on much cleaner sounding instruments you could use it on vocals as well for example so definitely follow the links in the description down below for that now right at the very beginning of the demo while I was actually talking I was using this library this is Gaelic voices from spitfire audio a kind of a choir library if you will and I was using it very economically because I was only using the r sounds from it this is what we heard so I use it in its most simple form just using those r sounds then you can change things like the sort of sound of it here with this expression control here gives it a bit more presence and volume and we've also got some effects here as well we can control distance reverb and release as I say I was just using the r sounds if we take a look there's actually quite a few different sounds in there so for example let's try ornaments some quirky stuff like that in their bellowing vowels try something even completely different scattered voices it's very sort of organic and human sounding and you could mix all of those up and get some really fun vocal sounds in your tracks let me give you a scenario for this next free piece of software which I made use of for this demo imagine you're just listening to some music on your computer I happen to be listening to Spotify at the moment but it could be anything could be some music on youtube facebook what have you and you hear some music and you really like the sound of it now I'm listening to the creative source featured artist list this is a playlist over on Spotify and in particular I'm listening to Mimo's guitar swell and I think to myself I really like the sound of this piece of music sonically and I'd like to kind of get that kind of sound in some of my own productions well with this free piece of software you can capture the essence or the characteristics of a piece of music like this without actually having to keep the music itself the piece of software is called audio lens and it's from isotope okay and it does just this it creates a profile of any music that you're listening to on your computer now I should mention quickly this is free at the moment but they're going to start charging for it on the 22nd of November so if you're interested in this now would be a good time to get it so how does it actually work so I'm listening to this piece of music you can see it's hearing it here you can see the eq curve moving here all I have to do is just click on the capture button and I just leave that for a few seconds now isotope says around about eight seconds is fine you may want to do longer if you want to make sure you capture all of the essence of a piece of music I'm sure eight seconds for a lot of pieces of music is just right so I click on stop once I've captured that and then I give it a name so I'll call this one Mimo okay and save that now again I want to stress it's not actually saving the sound it's just sound saving the characteristics of the sound now you can make use of these profiles or targets as they're called in a couple of plugins from isotope one is ozone 10 and the other one is neutron four now ozone 10 is mostly for mastering neutron four is where you're going to focus on individual instrument sound so if you get the opportunity to capture the sound of an individual instrument that could be really useful now if I go over to ozone 10 in my door at the moment you see there that I've actually already run the mastering assistant it's got some profiles happening and I can change to some different genres here rock reggae r&b and it changes sort of eq curves and dynamics to match what's what's typical for those styles of music but now we can be very specific if I go over here so these targets these are my custom targets and you can see without me having to load anything or whatever this has already synced up and you can see that my Mimo profile is there I can click on that and then ozone is going to do its thing and apply the profile of that music to my music and it should sound reasonably similar remember this is only free at the moment so I grab it now even perhaps if you don't have ozone 10 or neutron four now they do say on their webpage that at the moment it works with ozone 10 and neutron four which hints to me that maybe in the future it may work with some older versions not sure but I do recommend grab it a five free plug-ins not enough for you well a bit greedy but if that's the case you should definitely check out this playlist right here I've got absolutely loads for you