 This is Cecium, a completely free chorus plugin from Green Oak and the first of five free plugins I have for you in today's video. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you well. We'll get back to Cecium in a minute but first of all I'd like to thank the sponsor for this video, DistroKid. If you follow the VIP link in the description down below you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music around the world. Now Cecium in many ways behaves like other chorus plugins that I've tried but it's got a couple of controls which actually have me puzzled. Perhaps you can help me out with that as we take a listen. So I have Cecium applied to an electric guitar part here but I've actually got the mix down to zero at the moment. In other words we're only going to hear the guitar before the chorus is applied and then I'm going to gradually blend it in so that you can hear the effect. Let's do that now. So a pretty kind of standard chorus type effect. Now chorus is affected by two main things. First of all we have delay normally in a chorus effect and the other thing is pitch variation okay. So it takes the the normal pitch and it oscillates it between a pitch higher and a pitch lower okay. So it does that over time and the main controls for that on this plugin are depth which controls how much pitch variation we get and also rate which controls you know sort of how quickly that happens over time. Let's just play with that for a moment. It's going to sound pretty weird, it's going to get pretty extreme but you'll get the idea. Have a listen. Yeah so that's just a very exaggerated version of what you're probably going to do with that just to give you an idea of what's changing there okay. So those are our main controls and we've also got a selection of waveforms to control just exactly how that oscillation between you know above and below the pitch actually happens okay. So you can see the controls for that in the middle there. Now in terms of the delay you know we've got the control up here which controls how long the delay is yeah we can see that here and then at the bottom we have feedback control which you know it's the same as most of the delay plugins where it's going to control how many repeats you get okay. So those are those basic controls. Now also on this particular plugin we have a width control which is one of my favorite things is to add some stereo width to a chorus effect. Let's have a listen as I push this up and just by the way there is a little bit of a crackle as you adjust the controls for this plugin okay and that is coming from the plugin. So buyer beware it's free look don't complain. Let's have a listen to the width control. Probably especially if you've got headphones on you're going to hear that more. We'll talk about that a little bit more later on but I do like to have it on a lot of the times fairly wide okay. So one of the other controls we can see here is the tone control which appears to me to be behaving like a filter when it's in the middle so it's on 0.5 at the moment the value it just you know sounds like the regular sound without any filtering. I'm going to put the mix all the way up to 100 so we're only hearing the chorus effect and hear what happens as I adjust this tone control. So you can hear that it's filtered out all the high frequencies and up to the top and the other extreme it filters out all of those lower frequencies. Now this can be quite nice I actually kind of like this with the higher frequencies all the lows cut out and then just sort of blend it in with the mix control and I like the sound of that. You get the idea with that it's really quite nice. Now let's go on to a couple of controls where I'm not really sure what they're doing and you know maybe you can help me out. The first one I think I know what this is doing and that's the invert switch okay. I suspect that this is just inverting the direction of the oscillation which is happening with the pitch. So in other words with it may be going up first and then down and then if you flick it over it will go down and then up maybe I'm right about that. I'm not absolutely sure but let's have a listen and I'll flick it see if you can hear any difference between the two. I can't hear any difference maybe it needs some other settings to be correct to really hear the difference. If you download it and play with it perhaps you can update me on what you think it's doing. The other control is this one over here. It's really nice this but I'm trying to figure out exactly what it's doing and this is the thick control okay. Now to me when I flick it over the stereo width is sort of getting more wide if you know what I mean and I do think there may be a bit of a low end boost but you can let me know let's have a listen. Let's switch it on and off and on again. Well that's what I think let me know in the comments down below what you think. I do feel like not enough people know that the T-Rex classic equalizer from iK Multimedia is actually completely free and I do think it has its place especially for me in mastering. Let's just take a quick look at the basic controls. We have a low cut filter here. We also have a low shelf here with some frequency adjustment there. We also have a couple of bell curves in the middle with these middle bands here. They both of course have the ability to adjust the cue as well. Then moving up we have a high shelf there and also a high cut okay. So nothing remarkable there that you probably don't already have on your EQ but let me talk about what I think this is kind of useful. Well first of all I think it's rather nice to use for sort of broad sweeping changes to things. Let's say I want to add some highs to this track. Let's have a listen. So you know if I just wanted to add a bit of air like that really really quickly and easily this EQ is good at doing that with broad sweeps and the thing is it's quite economical. It's quite good with system resources this plug-in so that's useful as well. But I do think that probably the most useful features are the ones over here. We can do left and right processing independently of course you can see it's selected as left right at the moment and I could select say just the left channel and then I can make some adjustments and you can see the right channel is staying where it was okay. But probably more importantly for me in the mastering phase is the fact that it's got mid-side processing okay. So if we click this MS button here you can see that these two buttons up here have changed okay and I can choose just to adjust the middle frequencies or the side frequencies and this is really great if you want to add some well maybe some air like I was doing at the moment but also some width as well. So at the moment I'm just going to adjust the side frequencies. Let's have a listen to that. Was it the moment we shared? Was it the way that I dared to love? That kept you running? I never- You can hear there there's just a little bit of extra width there to the whole thing as well as those highs being boosted. So look a really nice free plug-in from ICA Multimedia. We've actually got another really good one later on which has well several effects in one. Hang on for that. This is Flash a free transient shaper from Waves Factory and transient shape is really useful when you want to control both the attack and the sustain of a sound and I find them particularly useful on drums. I'm using this in a little demo project I've made here which currently sounds like this and I want to make the kick drum in this a little bit punchier. Currently the kick is sounding like this. Now before we get into the main controls I just want to quickly mention the three controls on the bottom right. We have a mix control so that we can mix between our original sound and the process sound. Then I have a clip control here in the middle. I'm going to switch this on and this is going to prevent the signal from going above 0 dB and clipping and then we have an overall output control. The main controls with this plug-in are the attack and sustain. With the attack control as I push it up you're really going to hear the transient of this kick being exaggerated. Have a listen. Yeah and if I push it all the way down the opposite happens and it sounds kind of I'm going to use the word flabby. By the way it's also quieter as well which is why you'd want to use that output control. If you want to actually get the effect without simply making it just quieter okay. So I'll put that back to 0 for the moment. Then we have the sustain control and I want you to pay attention to the tail end of this kick. As I push it all the way up you're going to hear the ring of the kick and you're going to hear more of the sort of ambient sound as well. Have a listen. That's pretty much the opposite of what I want so I would go the other way. It's really going to shorten the sound of the tail of this kick. You're not going to hear any of the ambient or the ring. Have a listen. If I combine that with a much heavier attack here and we have a listen to this in the mix it's going to sound quite a lot punchier. Now another control that I want to mention because it's just a little bit unusual I don't see other transient shapers necessarily with this on and this is this mid side control okay. So it's just in its regular mode at the moment it's set in the middle. If we push it all the way down to the bottom then just the middle of the mix is being affected by this plugin and push it out to the side and the sides are being affected okay. The only problem is I can't demonstrate that to you on this kick. It really needs a sort of a stereo signal to really hear this working properly. So I invite you to follow the link in the description down below download it and give it a go on some stereo signals as well. This is tungsten another free plugin from green oak this time a delay plugin. Tell me what you think about their rather interesting interfaces. It's got this kind of a steampunk thing going on. Do you care about that? Does it attract you to a plugin or would you just like it to be functional and much more plain? Let me know in the comments down below. I really like what some of the things that you can do with this plugin however. I've got it applied to that electric guitar again that I had previously with the chorus and I'm actually going to play the whole demo all the way through this time. It's about 25 seconds long and have a listen to this kind of shimmering effect that we get on the electric guitar. I really like that shimmery tail on there. I don't know if you notice though that it sort of swells up and down. We'll get back to why that is in a moment. But it's really nice effects and it's one of the effects that you can get with this plugin that I don't see on all other delays. But let's look at the basic controls before we dive into some of these effects. We do of course have a timing control. You expect to see that on a delay and we can either sync it to the door or we can just control it in milliseconds. We can switch that with the sync control here and over on the right hand side we have our big mix control to blend our dry and wet signals as well. Now interestingly we have this duck control in the middle. When we duck something like a delay or a reverb we'd be using a compressor normally to suppress it while the original instrument is playing and then we sort of release it so we can hear it during the gaps. It's nice to see a ducking control in the delay plugin itself. Pretty unusual in fact. So that is why we were hearing that kind of swelling of the sound while we were listening to that demo. Another control we have here and I've never used this on any of my delay plugins but it's often there and that's a freeze control okay. So if I just play a moment of this guitar and then hit freeze you'll hear what it's doing. So essentially that will go on forever if I didn't switch it off. So look I guess it's an effect you may use sometimes. So then we have this granular control which we can see in the middle here. That was giving us that shimmery effect. I assume Gran is granular by the way. Could be something else. What else could it be? Well it's not grandma. Let me know. Anyway if we switch that off we get a much more traditional sort of delay sound and switch it on. It can be a very very nice effect. Now another control that we have is this reverse control so we can actually reverse our delays, have a listen. It's a pretty cool effect. I really like that one. And then we have this dual control down here. Normally when we're using a dual delay implies there's two separate delays and they can have different settings and then they can be pan left and right different timing settings. It seems to be we get the effect here of a dual delay. As we push it up I hear it more sort of in stereo and you get that effect but we don't have control over the two individual delays so it's there and it's very nice. We have the feedback control which I've been grabbing here often which just controls the number of repeats that we get with the delay. And then we have this smear control. This is really interesting and actually very useful. I'm going to put the mix all the way up to 100 so we're only hearing the wet signal. I'm going to play that guitar again. I'll put the smear all the way down and have a listen to what happens to the transience. The beginning of each note as I push it up. Here you know when we're right at the top there it almost gets rid of the transience completely there. It's really nice and just creates this sort of dreamy effect in my opinion and great when you mix it in with your original sound of course. And then we have the wear control which seems to be acting like a filter have a listen. So as we push that up then we get a much you know we're cutting out all of the highs here and we're getting just all of the lows there. So you combine that smear and the wear together and you can really kind of have a dreamy delay and you can blend it in with your original. It sounds like this. And overall for a free delay plugin this is really quite cool. Now in a moment I'm going to let you know about eight free effects which are combined into one plugin all really really useful which you can download right away. But first of all let me tell you about a great feature from our sponsor DistroKid called Hyperfollow. This is the Hyperfollow page for one of my EPs Wonderland. When people visit this web page they can choose for themselves which one of these great platforms they want to listen to my music on. But I didn't have to create this page it was generated automatically for me when I uploaded my EP to DistroKid. If we visit my DistroKid page here and look at this EP and scroll down you can see the section just at the bottom here where they supply the link for me to share. Now I can share that on places like Facebook where they will automatically be generated my album artwork and people can just click on this and go straight to that hyperlink page. Now this is all included with the base price of DistroKid which is just $19.99 per year. If you follow the link in the description you'll get 7% off of that already great price. If five free plugins isn't enough for you or how about eight? All kind of in one plugin. This is Mixbox from iK Multimedia and you may not be aware that there is this free version. The reason it's free is because rather than having loads and loads of effects included like the paid versions too this one has just eight. I say just eight it's free okay and you can see all eight of them on the screen here. Of course with this plugin the idea is you can load different ones in at different times you can you know change their order etc you can even go you know and sort of mix them their levels independently etc etc okay. So let's just go through what's included when you get the free version. First of all with this first unit we have Flexi which is a kind of an amp simulator okay. We've got different models of amp we can choose here then we've got our sort of basic controls here and then we've got some different cabinets yeah. Now this actually is pretty good. I'm impressed with this when I use it by myself by itself and if you just don't want to load up a full amp sim you want something which is pretty you know good in terms of CPU usage I like this one. Then we have a channel strip here you know it's got an EQ control it's got EQ controls on here and also a compressor. Then we have a digital delay speaks for itself a distortion effect here a limiter here and then a couple of modulation effects here we've got a phaser and a chorus effect here and then finally a really nice digital reverb here. So if you want you know eight quick free effects all in one there follow the link in the description down below. You know I've looked at hundreds of free plugins over the years and I try and pick the best of them for you guys. I've put them all together in a playlist which you can watch right here.