 I've got five really nice free plugins to show you today and I'll be using them all on just one demo. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. I'll be running through how I've used these five free plugins in my demo stroke groove in just a moment but first of all I'd like to thank the sponsor of this video DistroKid. If you follow the VIP discount link in the description down below you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. Now let's dive in and use these free plugins. So first up I have Delay 11. I think they're called Platone Studios the makers here. Now before I switch this on and I demo this let me just play you the thing we're going to be applying it to which is this piano. So I'll bypass to begin with. I think you get the idea then I'll turn bypass off. This is initially set to quarter beats. Now you can either sync this to your door or you can set it to milliseconds down here. I'll have it sync to my door and it's currently going to be sounding like this. Okay so we've got some delay happening there but it's not the most interesting delay in the world so I'm going to change this to eighth notes and then dotted a bit of a classic delay setting. Have a listen now. Getting interesting now. I'm just going to turn the mix down a little bit so we've got a little bit more of the original and then the next thing I'm going to play with is a little bit more feedback meaning we'll just get more delays. That's working nicely for me and the balance control I'm not going to be using but as you can imagine it either pushes the delays to the left or to the right. I'll skip that and let's add some width to this. Nice I like it. Now we've also got sort of two tone controls if you like brightness and darkness. I'm not going to add any darkness or sort of low into this. I'm just going to add some brightness so we get a sort of a tiki-taki feel to it. So note that these controls get applied to the delay not to the original signal. And then finally my probably my favorite part of this is I'm going to add in a little bit of well quite a lot of drive. Some grit which again is only going to be applied to the delays. Have a listen. Okay I think we're off to a good start. We have another plug in here from Platone Studios. This one is called Flex Reverb. Quite a straightforward reverb to use but again has a few tricks up its sleeve. Now I have applied to the piano but I've switched off the delay for just a moment so we can hear just what the reverb is doing. Have a listen to it and it's more or less default setting as you may expect. Okay now what I like about this is when you push the size control up so we sort of make our room bigger. There's a nice amount of modulation on there which I rather like. Have a listen. You can just hear some pitch modulation happening there on the on the reverb which is rather nice. We've got a width control. It's already up pretty wide. We can make it more narrow but I like it wide as you can see. We've got a dampening control which sort of suppresses some high frequencies and then we've got a pre-delay as well. If you don't know what pre-delay is, it creates a little bit of a time delay between the initial sound and the reverb coming in. You get some pretty interesting effects with this pre-delay as we push it further up. Have a listen. You hear how it sort of makes some of those notes really stand out. I'm going to leave it like that because I rather like it. Now as you can see at the top here we have a low pass filter happening. We can move that around. Low pass filter is super super handy on a reverb plug-in because you can cut out all of that low end build-up that you tend to get with reverb, especially on full range instruments like a piano. But also we can add more nodes in to control this EQ. So if we do one towards the top here, I'll just double click, that automatically creates a low pass filter there. This one's a high pass, that one's a low pass. Or you can add in some sort of regular EQ nodes in here as well. You can control some of this with your mouse. I'm using my mouse wheel here. Or you can just use the controls at the bottom. So you can just change the frequency, change the cue like so and adjust the gain for that node as you would with a lot of EQ controls. So it's super nice that it's got that in there. I think it's really well presented as well for a free plug-in. So we've got that now applied to our piano. Let's turn our delay back on and see what we've got so far. I like it, but there's a lot of top end information. Let's have some bass in there. A simple man with simple taste, which is why I like this AI bass mini. This is a cut-down version of a full product. You'll find out that some of the features aren't available in the lower half of this piano keyboard. If you play them, it gives you a message to say they're only available in the full blown product. But it is still useful as a free plug-in. If you just want a straightforward electric bass sound, which sounds like this. So that's what you want. You'll get that right out of the box. Now in the demo, I have used some octaves together and played those. And there are some small tuning discrepancies, I reckon, between some of these notes, which I rather like to be honest with you, because it adds that little bit of sort of imperfection to it, which I kind of like. So let's have a listen to it in the context of the demo so far. Now we do have a few controls available here. We've got ADSR, which is a Tacticay Sustain Release. So if you want a sort of a really slow attack on this bass guitar, you can make it sound like this. I didn't want that for this demo, so I'll put that back down here. There's also an overdrive section here. Have a listen. Which could work in this demo, but I've opted to switch it off and also a chorus. You can't beat a chorus on a bass guitar. Have a listen. Haven't said you can't beat a chorus on a bass guitar. I actually had it switched off for the demo. So I actually used it in a very, very simple way because I enhanced it a little bit with one of the other free plug-ins we're going to be looking at in a moment. By the way, don't forget when you're ready to release your music, follow the link in the description down below and use our sponsor DistroKid. They're very cheap. They're very easy and they get it out to all of the major platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Google Play, etc., etc. Just follow the link in the description down below. EQ1979 is pretty much a Neve console strip emulation. There's two main sections. You've got your sort of drive section here, which we'll have a listen to in a moment. Sounds pretty nice actually. And then you've got your main EQ section here. Now I could add some drive to this piano. Let's have a listen. But I sort of feel there's enough on the delays already. It's gritty enough there. I could just put it down on a low setting, I think. Now the other section, as I say, is the EQ section. A little tip for you, a couple of tips for you, actually, if you download this and use it, you need to make sure you switch the EQ section on by clicking on EQ over here. Otherwise you're going to play with these knobs and you may even think something's changed, but you'll be tricked and fooled by your eyes. Nothing will have changed unless you switch that on. So I've just used this to boost a little bit of a high, the high shelf there, and also the mid frequencies. I haven't touched the low end on this. Well, I have, but not using this low end. We'll get to that in a moment. Now another quick tip. When you make adjustments here, you need to set the frequency with this mid and low, these mid and low controls. I played around this for a while and I just couldn't get anything to change. You know, I was dragging things around. I was trying to type on there. I couldn't. What you've got to do is left click on there and then drag up and down to select your frequency. Okay, not all that intuitive. I have to say that it's free, so I'm not going to complain too much. And as I say, let's have a listen to what it does if I sort of push these high and mid frequencies a little bit. Now I wanted to get the low end of the piano out of the way of the bass guitar a little bit. So that's why I use this high pass filter over here, set to 50 Hertz there. So that's sort of just, you know, getting it out of the way. It's cutting out those lower frequencies. That's what I use that for. I also use this on the bass guitar just ever so slightly. And if we go over to that instance, you can see that I actually added some low frequencies in here around about 60 Hertz. Okay, just give it a bit of a boost there. Just to give that bass guitar sound a little bit more meat. So I added some drums to my demo and I wanted to mess them up a little bit using this plugin, which is called Rust. This is great if you want to make things sound a little bit more lo-fi, kind of like they're sounding, that they're on a vinyl LP or something like that. Okay, now I'm going to start off by using this age control here. I'll play the drums. You'll hear exactly what it does. Have a listen. Yeah, instantly sounds really lo-fi and nice. I rather like that. Then we've got his control here, which sort of sounds like any tape or electronic hits. Yeah, and we can modulate that using this movement control here. Yeah, that's pretty good. And then also we can add the effect of sort of dust on a record. Have a listen. So obviously you can combine all of those things together. But what I actually wanted to do was only apply this to the snare. So I was just using these rather simple settings for that. And I was also using one of the earlier plugins that we used, which was this delay plugin. So the final effect of all of that using rust on the snare with the delay is this. The best way for me to know which types of plugins I should recommend to is via the comments down below. Which of these plugins are you going to use? Which do you think are absolute garbage? I'd love to hear from you on that. If you want to find out about a whole heap more plugins, a whole heap more, I'll keep that in there. Then follow this playlist down here. You can get more there.