 In this episode of free plug-in news, we're going to be hearing about this great free channel strip, a beautifully simple saturation plug-in and a way to roll the dice with some wet spatial effects. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Let's get this free effects rundown started with a very lo-fi piano. Lo-fi piano from Steinberg is, as its name suggests, a lo-fi piano plug-in and there's a few things that sort of add to that and it's mainly these filters or effects that you can see on the screen here right now. We'll go through those in a moment, but primarily it's a piano yet with these effects applied. So let's just have a listen to that piano from the low end to the high end so you can get a bit of a sense of it. And you can already hear that kind of lo-fi quality and that's mainly because one or two of these effects I feel. First of all the flutter here on the left hand side, this is a sort of a pitch variation effect, the kind of thing that you may get on a tape emulator where the speed of the tape is going up and down. There's a compression effect here and then this is saturation effect and that's turned up fairly high so that's making it sound a little bit sort of gritty. We have this reduce effect here which is turned off at the moment, but this is a kind of a bit depth sort of an emulation thing. So when you turn that up high there's a real low bit depth for this. Then we have this filter which I'm going to talk about more specifically later on that's immensely adding to the lo-fi quality of this piano and then there's some different reverbs as well. Let's have a listen though to this piano more with a piece of music now and I'm going to play around mostly with these first three effects that you can see here flutter, compress and saturate. Now you notice I didn't mess around with filter there, really filter and the imagery suggests it's doing a low pass and a high pass filter there so you're just getting lots of mid-set. Really filter I feel is adding mostly to the sound of this. I'll show you what I mean I'm going to play the same piece again but I'm going to turn off flutter, I'm going to turn off compress, I'm going to turn off saturation, I'm going to turn off reverb, I'm going to have this bit depth control here down to zero again and I'm going to turn filter all the way down to zero. Now I have a listen to this again and what I'm suggesting to you here is why this is interesting because I reckon once you get rid of those there's not much too lo-fi about this piano but it's just a really nice sounding but very gentle piano. I think it's great for this year so if you're not really interested in that lo-fi quality but you would be interested in a kind of just a very gentle piano then I think this would be a really good plug-in for you to download and try out. Now the eagle-eyed amongst you will notice this isn't really a plug-in as such as much as a library. It's being played in this player that you can see the name of at the top left here. This is Haleon Sonic SE from Steinberg. Now don't worry this is a free player as well I'm going to put a link for that in the description. So this is the library for that player. Make sure you follow the instructions it's one of those ones where you've got to download a download manager to download the other parts so you know carefully follow the instructions there. The reason I point that out to you though is because that directly links to the next plug-in in our news today. So while I was downloading my free version of Haleon Sonic SE I noticed there are another few libraries free libraries available for this and one of them was this one novel piano and I thought I'll just give this a quick try and I really really liked it. As you can see there's hardly any controls for it just this release noise a character control and a reverb. Now I'm using a preset here where you can see just at the top here on the right this is the fairy tale piano. I'm going to play the same piece of music again as I did earlier today when I first heard this and we'll hear how it sounds with this piano. I really liked it let's have a listen. Now it seems like the designers of this particular library have the intention of creating libraries which work really well with things like computer game music. I mean I think there's many other uses for it as well but the thing about this is it's sort of quite unintrusive so if you've got other things going on perhaps dialogue and that kind of thing this is not going to be you know intrude upon those other sounds just by the very nature of it's kind of I guess pulled back gentle nature of it so I think this is a beautiful piano library to also download for Hally and Sonic SE. So you remember how the first plugin Low Fire Piano made that piano sound really low fire well I've done the same thing using this plugin to an acoustic guitar this is Beria or Buria not quite sure and the idea of this plugin is really to add a bit of grit and things or a bit of character I should say with some saturation but it does have this low cut and high cut filter on it which you can see I've turned up and down here and I've done that to mess up this acoustic guitar which initially sounded like this but now sounds like this now I guess that's not really the intention of this plugin to make things sound really really sort of low fire like that but I've done it with this low cut filter here which I'll now turn down in this high cut filter which I'll now turn back up so we're not cutting it out any of the frequencies we're just adding some saturation here interesting feature as I add and decrease the saturation you'll see the output volume is changing there as well because saturation can have the effect of adding to the sort of loudness of things you can switch that off by using the link control here and you can also mix between the the original signal and the saturation as well using this mix control just mix control just one other control to talk about which really doesn't do anything but you know it's nice eye-catching and that's the GUI control here we can switch through some different looks there I like the red ones I'm going to leave it there I'm just going to turn this saturation knob down to zero I'm going to play this guitar part again I'm just going to gradually add some more saturation so you can hear the effect now on this particular track you can see it really starts to break up there around about six or so but I mean it will be different depending on the source that it's receiving there I think around about back here where I had about five or so maybe a little bit lower it sort of adds a nice bit of warmth to that guitar which I really really like so it's worth grabbing this if you just want a quick and dirty way to add some saturation to your sound now another way to add a little something would be to use this channel strip from analog obsession it's called is it called chaniv or chaniv or channel v or channel five I'm not really sure what it's called but it's a channel strip and it's got some great features to if you've never used a channel strip before then this may be a great one to download and give a go because with a channel strip you can do almost all of your processing apart from sort of reverb and delay etc in one spot it's a great economical way to work and it's also a wonderful way to work and use your ears rather than sort of all this visual stuff that you may get with some other plugins I think it's good for that reason anyway has it what has it got in it it's got a mic pre-section over here now when you turn this up it doesn't really increase the volume so much as it increases the sort of initial drive and you can get a little bit of sort of distortion there if you push it all the way up and there's things like a low cut high cut filter on there as well as some other EQ stuff there so a way of sort of crafting the initial sound of your input we have a ds here which is of course useful if you're recording vocals also useful and things like electric guitars as well by the way that's a whole other story but you've got one of those in there then we have the whole equalizer section in the middle here focusing on the low mid and high frequencies again another great way to sort of craft your basic sound then we have a compressor and a limiter over here as well as a tape drive over here which adds a little bit of a saturation and drive over there I'm not going to demo this because there's just too much to show you in a short period of time on one track but I would recommend that you download it give it a go and start playing around with this and find if you've never used a channel strip before find a really different and interesting way of working with your tracks or by the way when you get to the end of this video and you've seen all of the plugins let me know in the comments down below which ones are your favorites that really helps me out because it lets me know which other plugins I should look out for you guys so baby audio have a commercial plugin called spaced out a spatial effects plugin and you can control all kinds of things within that plugin now this plugin magic dice has all of the engine of that commercial plugin but without the controls yes by pressing that dice symbol or die symbol in the middle there you get a random sort of setting using that engine each time the only other control you really have is this mix control so there's really not much for me to talk about with this plugin it's kind of fun I've got to tell you so I'm just going to play this guitar part here and every so often I am going to click the die and we're going to get a random sound now don't worry once you found a sound you like it will stay there when you next load up your session let's have a listen so as you can hear just an enormous range of different sounds there download it have some fun you just may find that sort of random thing that you may never have thought of which adds a whole lot of character to your track so if these free plugins are not enough for you that's fine because I've made a whole series of videos about free plugins you can use in your recordings I've put them together in a playlist and you can watch that playlist right here so I suggest grab yourself some coffee grab yourself some nuts sit back and enjoy the videos and yes I just asked you to grab some nuts