 This is a free plate reverb plugin from Black Rooster Audio, RO Gold, I'm not sure, and the reason you can see two is because I've got one applied to my acoustic guitar track and the other one applied to my main vocal. Let's switch them both off for a moment so we can have a quick listen to the track without them applied. Okay let's switch them both on have a listen again with this lovely lush reverb applied. I really enjoy the sound of a plate reverb especially on vocal and I often use it on the way in for the vocalist to hear and it kind of gets them in the mood with their singing. Now even though this is free I would probably still pay for it to be honest with you because I think it's a really nice sounding reverb. It's just got a few controls to look at but they're all pretty important. The first one is this base cut control you can see here. I talk about this a lot on the channel I think it's really important often to get rid of the low frequencies in your reverb that gets rid of the muddiness. To show you what I mean by that let's just have a quick listen to this vocal again but this time we're only going to be hearing the reverb okay not the original vocal and have a listen to see how it sounds and let's put it back to where I had it before with some of that low end cut out have a listen that's really handy just to get rid of that muddiness as I say. Now another control we have here is the damper control essentially this just controls the decay time of the reverb so we heard quite a long one there if I turn it all the way down here have a listen again okay pretty obvious what that one does very very useful to have it there and then we have a pre-delay here this is the amount of time before the reverb kicks in after it hears the signal okay and this can be quite useful again in terms of separating that sort of main vocal from the reverb because sometimes reverb can have this effect of actually making the vocal sound more distant in the mix you don't always want that okay so handy to use tools like this and the base cut to have that separation now finally we have a mix control here I've got it fully up to wet here that's because I almost always use my reverbs on a bus but if you did use this in the channel directly then you would use that dry mix dry wet mix control there yeah to blend the two signals together this is the first of some amazing free plugins I've got to tell you about today in this video hi folks I'm Mike and I do hope you're well I've got more free plugins for you again five all in all don't forget to follow the links in the description down below so you can get hold of them for yourself now I was rather enjoying Susie singing at the beginning of this video but if you don't have a singer available you may want to try out a vocal library like this one this is sirens freebie a free vocal texture library which works with wait for it the free version of contact players so nothing to pay for here folks now this is a cut down version of the full sirens library where we just get the sounds okay now I've taken the basic sound and I've adapted a little bit using the controls on the interface here and this is what I've come up with there's actually a lot of different ways that you can sort of adapt the basic sound that you get here what I essentially did was I changed the attack time here in the envelope section yes I just gave it a slightly slower attack okay so it felt a little bit gentle as the notes came in then I went to the effects section here I turned up the reverb pretty high as you can probably hear then I use this widening control here to make it super wide you can have things narrow or wide there I pushed the gloss control up just a little bit here that just added to the high end and I made sure I had this blur control all the way down when you push blur up it just sounds a little bit sort of thicker but less crisp okay now you may want that but I didn't want it in this case now I use this energy control here yeah which goes from shallow through to deep and I had it sort of midway have a listen to it yourself and see what you think it's actually doing I'm not absolutely certain to be honest with you what's going on under the hood but I played with it and I found it made quite a big difference of course I liked it just around about here some of the other controls you have a sort of mix controls and things like that there's kind of an interesting one here I think is useful if we go to the mix section we've got this far away mic in the middle of the mixer here we've got a closed mic if we move this control here yeah it sort of blends the two now I reckon if you actually use some MIDI the MIDI learn function on here and associate it with a control on your keyboard it could be quite useful during performance to adapt that have a listen again in here you can use it as a kind of a swell therefore the higher frequencies especially there's a whole bunch of controls that I recommend you play with after you've followed the link in the description down below and downloaded this beautiful library if you're not entirely happy with the snare sound on your track at the moment that you may want to give this plug in a try this is called liquid death snare let's see how it sounds mixed in with the other virtual drums on my track now this is useful because you get quite a lot of control over your snare sound for example we've got this big knob here which is controlling the tuning okay it can be very important to tune your snare drum sound but all of your drum sounds but the snare can really stand out let's try this with a low tuning and have a listen to see how that sounds again a really different sound there okay now we can play this drum from three different keys on our keyboard the first I'm going to show you is the F key okay this is where we've got our multi-velocity snare sound like this yeah we can also play it sort of full on all the time with the rim shot sound that's on the D1 key that's always going to be sort of full on snare now you can actually flick a switch here the one-shot switch and that just makes sure it uses the same sample every time when you're using the rim shot so you get a lot of or a very very consistent sound you may or may not want that but that's handy that that is there now on the E1 key we've also got a flam sound quite useful yep when you want that flam sound okay now apart from that it's mostly just a mixer now this this drum sound is made up from seven different mics sort of set ups all in on you can blend them together starting off with the top one here let's have a listen to that so just that top snare sound well now when we add in the bottom microphone we hear this yep starting to build on the sound here now I'll add in the shell sound and microphone point of the shell and then this u47 one from reading the notes I don't think it was an actual a real a real u47 that they use maybe sort of a u47 clone doesn't really matter this is recorded from memory from eight feet away we're starting to sound a bit more lively now then the overheads I'll switch those on then there was another close mic here 12 feet away and then finally to get a lot more ambience there are these far mics here okay I think they recorded these um they put these outside in the hallway now the snare sounds like this so yeah you can sort of craft your own sound there using that mixer using the tuning and it could be really important to the sound of your song to get the snare right follow the link in the description down below to grab hold of this for free if you want to make your drums more punchy you could do worse than this plug-in urban puncher now before we get into this I just want to quickly explain that if you follow the link in the description down below to plug in boutique you're going to need to use the coupon which I've put in the description down below the coupon code is what enables you to get this for free normally cost around about 70 dollars so follow the process for purchase of this enter the coupon code during the process and you will get it for free at the moment okay also make sure you follow the instructions for installation and registration etc as well so you can get it up and running and you'll be able to see this on the screen here when you do I'm going to play my drums and gradually turn up the punch knob here okay to make them more punchy and no doubt you can hear they are more punchy probably using some compression and maybe even a limiter there to do that but I will say during testing I did notice that the peak level also went up just a tad okay so be aware of that and make sure you counteract that by using the output control here as well now another way that we can add sort of loudness to something is by adding saturation without actually again necessarily increasing the peak level we can make it sound thicker and louder so I'm just going to dial this punchiness back a little bit and then I'm going to turn this saturation up so you'll be able to hear that sounding a little louder so it's a great way of getting a really big thick drum sound the combination of these two without just pushing your levels up now finally I want to point out this control here the destroy button will turn the saturation down again turn destroy on and then push this saturation up again so that's good when you want that really messy almost sort of over driven sound to your drums now the other way that you could get that kind of sound is by using our next free plugin one of the more famous compressors of all time is the Distressor from Empirical Labs and of course it's been made into plug-in versions many times now one of the plug-in versions is from Kyve Audio they do a full version but they also do this cut-down version called Extressor Nuke this is completely free and essentially you've got a few less controls than you would normally have so you don't get direct control over attack and release and ratio etc although you do get just enough control here to really get the sound that the Distressor was or is really well known for and that's for when you want a much more aggressive sound when you're compressing something okay this type of compressor does nothing to kind of smooth things out as it adds in more saturation and harmonic distortion you're going to hear that in a moment okay it kind of goes overboard so let's play our drums and I'm gradually going to turn up this input control so that we add more compression but notice that the output control is also turning at the same time and that's because I have auto gain switched on over here okay that means that we've got output compensation automatically so we're not just making it louder and louder and louder okay so we get to hear the benefit of the plugin without just making things louder let's have a listen first to these drums and then I'll explain some of the other controls in a moment you can start to hear that typical kind of distressor kind of sound there okay now the other control that we do have is this release control here yeah we've got slow normal and fast releases we were on normal just then if we did a slow release what happens is is you're going to hear just the normal drums just for a moment when I play them then you're going to hear that compression kick in and it's just going to stay in okay so it sort of has the effect of making the whole thing a bit quieter in fact have a listen yeah so it just really clamps down on the whole signal because it's it's a slow release so it's just not allowing things through once it's kicked in now if we move it to the fast release you're going to hear it more sort of pumping in and out okay it'll get triggered particularly by that kick drum which we'll talk about in a moment and then you'll hear it lift off again so the drums in between the kick are kind of quite a lot louder and it sort of makes me think about the other control which is kind of important here I reckon which is it's called the sidechain high pass filter I haven't read the manual for this but if it's working the way I think it is what this is is a high pass filter for the signal which is going to the compression so it's not using a high pass filter on the whole compressor you know which would with a regular high pass filter but it's just doing it to the compress sorry the signal which is going to the compression in other words if we use this right it means the the compressor won't the compressor won't get triggered so much by the low frequencies that kick drum okay if I turn this all the way down we've had it up at the moment if I turn it all the way down that's going to mean the whole signal is triggering the compressor and you'll really hear that kick drum triggering it now let's have a listen and let's turn it up again yeah and when it's all the way up it's really not getting triggered very much at all by that low and that is very very useful indeed on a compressor because especially when you're compressing like a drum bus or something because they will tend to get triggered by the kick now the last thing I want is for you to miss out on the other amazing free plug-in switcher out there so I've put together a playlist for you which you can watch right here go on have a binge