 Do you like free plugins? Do you like good free plugins? I've got you covered. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you will. I've got some great free plugin news for you today, including a reverb, a doubler, a gator, a gator. I guess it's a kind of a crocodile and a crusher. We'll be gate crushing. Let's take a look. So just a few short weeks ago, I made a video about free reverb plugins. I'll put a link for that on the top right here. This one was new out at the time, so didn't quite make it in there. So here is today. This is Room 041 from Analog Obsession. Now I've covered their plugins on the channel before. They make great plugins, but this is their first reverb plugin. And I've got to apply to some female vocals. And for regulars on the channel, these will be very familiar female vocals. This is Suzy singing what we do. We're going to have a listen first without the reverb switched on. So we've got a little bit of context. And now with it switched on. So really nice sounding reverb. So what are the features? Starting at the top left hand side, we have this stereo separation control. I think the idea here is to make the sound of the reverb wider. Now you would need to make sure whenever you're applying a stereo effect like this, that the channel itself is a stereo channel. And often we record vocals, of course, in mono. So we need to make sure after we've recorded those vocals that we either send them to a stereo bus or we switch the channel to a stereo channel. I'm going to talk about this control a little bit later at the end. Next we have the pre-delay control. This creates a little bit of space between the end of the dry signal and the beginning of the reverb. This is useful for making sure that your original dry signal stays present. Next we have decay. This is really like a size control, a room size control. So we'll just have a listen to the vocal again. I'll play around with this a little bit. So it's really useful for controlling like, say, the room size. Next you would have seen me play with this a little bit already. We have the mixer control so we can blend our dry and our wet signals. Now what I often suggest to people here is if you are using this, using a plugin like this on the track directly, so as an insert, then definitely make use of these controls and blend the dry and the wet signal. However, if you're using a plugin like this on a bus, then I would suggest turn the dry signal all the way down to the bottom, wet all the way up to the top and then use the fader on the bus to blend in the effect. Okay. Now we're going to move on to this pre-amp section over here. So in that case, I'm just going to turn the wet signal up a lot. I'm going to turn the dry signal down. This pre-amp section adds a little bit of a sort of distorted effect if you like, an overdriven effect, which can be really nice to gritty things up and add a little bit of character. Now if we have it completely turned up wet like this, it's going to be extremely apparent and probably not very pleasing sounding, but let's have a listen anyway. As I say, not great by itself, but when it's blended in with the original signal, it does add a little bit of color and character to the sound. Next we have a high pass filter over here. I'm using that to get rid of any low end muddiness in this pre-amp section. And over on the right hand side, we have an EQ. This is a post EQ. So it's applied to the reverb after the fact rather than can apply to the signal on the way into the reverb, which is a bit of a different thing. There's basically two frequency ranges we're controlling here. On the right hand side, we have a knob where we can select frequencies from 20 up to 2k in terms of hertz. Now the gain control over here can either be used to reduce the particular frequency range we've selected or increase it. So over here, I've selected around about 150 hertz and I've done a reduction there just to get rid of some of that low end. On the other side, we have frequency controls from 200 hertz here all the way up to 2kHz. I'm selecting something around about 10 to 11kHz there and I'm doing a boost. Okay, that's to add a little bit of sparkle to the high end. So that's the overall controls here. Going back to this stereo separation control, I've had a little bit of a play with this and I'm not sure I'm hearing much difference. I'm going to invite you to follow the link in the description, download it yourself and have a listen. Maybe there's something that you'll hear locally that we can't really detect on YouTube. It's certainly not very, very obvious. I have made sure that I've got this on a stereo track and we've got stereo output. I'm going to play it again. I'm going to have the wet signal turned up fairly loud and the dry signal just down a little bit. I'm just going to play with this again, see if you can hear much difference. So I need a bit more dry signal there. And again with dry lap full. I'm just not convinced it's even working. It's a new plugin. Maybe there's a bug there. Let me know what you think in the comments down below. GateLab is one of those plugins which is actually really deep once you delve into it. I'm not going to go deep here today, but I'm going to give you an overview to kind of wet your appetite. And it's one of those plugins which is also best listened to so you can hear what it does rather than talk about. So first of all, let's listen to this track that I've got prepared without GateLab switched on. And I want you to pay attention, particularly to the long chords being played by the keys. And GateLab works best on long sounds like that. So let's switch it on and hear what it's doing. So essentially what it is doing is sequencing volume changes. So it's dividing the track up into time. We've got 32 steps in here. And then we've got volumes in steps here for the left and the right channels, which is why we're getting that nice kind of stereo effect where it's bouncing from one side to another. And you may be saying, well, that's not really gating. That's a sort of a volume control. It does have a gate feature. Okay. If we switch from this flow mode that we're on at the moment through to the gated feature, and then we just click this randomize button here, then you'll see in this case, everything is either on or off. Have a listen. But as I say, in the flow mode, which I personally prefer, you can go in and you can make volume changes. I'll just go to the preset down the bottom here and set it back to where we started. So there's quite a lot of options. Obviously, you can change the numbers of steps. There's options to copy things from one track to another. There's options to randomize things in all different kinds of ways, which is really great. But a couple of things I want to point your eye towards are things like this. If we go down to a step here, we click on this button here, we can start to divide that little step up. So you can see now I've divided that into three little parts. Have a listen. Then if you pick that up, I might be able to make it more obvious over here. So such a great fun effect to use. As I say, it has got lots of randomization features, things that you could automate, you could even use it for live performances really, really effectively. This is GateLab. I highly recommend that you download and it's not just for things like electronic music. I think this would be great on long sort of distorted electric guitar chords, things like that. Give it a try. You know, I love free plugins and I love telling you guys about free plugins. But if you want to make sure that you hear about them, do make sure you subscribe and ring the bell. That's the only way you can be guaranteed to get notifications about those free plugins. Also, while you're at it, could you go ahead now and hit the like button for me, not just for me, but because it will make sure that YouTube tells other people about this great news about these plugins. It's kind of a community service, if you will, back to the video. So this plugin is not new, but it's new to me. So maybe it is to you too. This is VocalDubbler from Isotope. The great thing about vocal doubling is you can make vocals sound larger than life. Very, very useful for things like choruses and things where you really want them to sound huge. Now, you can double them up in terms of manually re-recording them and then separating them in left and right channels. But that option may not always be available to you. So a plugin like this can come in very, very handy. And I like this particular plugin because there's just so few controls. I love plugins like that. First of all, on the right hand side at the bottom, we just have this amount control, which is a mix control between the dry and the wet signal. We have two other parameters which we can change, separation and variation. We'll get to what they are in a moment, but we simply change them with this knob in the middle. So as we drag out from the center in any direction, we increase the separation. So that is the delay between the dry signal and the doubled up vocal. So essentially, there's a small amount of delay which is added and then it's spread across the left and right channels. Okay, we'll hear that in a moment. Then we have the variation control. As we move this around like so, you'll see the variation moving. This is pitch variation. Okay. And this can really help to create a wider effect. So what I'm going to do here is play that vocal again, and I'm going to play around with these controls. It's going to get fairly extreme. Let's have a listen. Let's add that piano in there again. Now, that is sort of a bit too obvious for most cases unless you want to use it as an effect. So naturally, you would bring the mix down a little bit. It's a great thing in terms of automation, you know, to use automation with these types of things so that you can make your vocals sound a little bit more narrow in things like verses and then sort of bring them to life, as I say, in the choruses. A great plugin, definitely worth downloading. Music producers are strange creatures. We spend half of our time trying to make things sound pristine. And the other half of our time just trying to mess them up as much as we can. And My Crush is a case for messing things up. This is a bit crusher, a kind of a resampling type of plugin. And it's there to make things sound nasty. We're going to make things sound nasty now. And the main two controls that you're going to use for that are the resample and reduce controls. So we've got our original track here. Let's mess with resampling. And you can hear those nasty artifacts that, as I say, we're normally trying to avoid, but they can become interesting. I think it gets even more interesting when you use this reduce control here. Have a listen to this. Yeah, things are getting really nice there. We also have some high pass and low pass filters here, both pre and post. Okay, so if you just say, want to knock out the bottom end here, and you can hear it's really aggressive there. There's no slope on that at all. It's just cutting off at a certain point. Or you could just, you know, reduce the top end, as I say, both pre and post. We've got our mix control here. That's fairly obvious. And then we have these sort of EQ curves here. It's on flat at the moment, but we've got a few presets here. I'll go through those. Let's leave it on smile. Who doesn't like a smiley EQ curve? So there's a few other features. This stutter one here, and there's this split feature up here. I'm not absolutely certain what they do. The documentation is a little bit thin. Would be nice to see some documentation for each control. I may have missed it on their website. I don't think it's there. The split control obviously has an effect on the stereo image. We'll have a listen to that now. Switch off again. So I'm obviously using it here on the master bus. You could use it on individual instruments, that kind of thing. Really, really handy if you want to mess things up. So I want to hear from you. Let me know in the comments down below. What's your favorite of these plugins? Which one are you going to download right away? And what are you going to use it for? What plans do you have? I'd love to hear from you guys about that. Also follow the links in the description if you do want to download them. And check out the link for my Patreon page where for as little as $1 per month you can help me help you by making more videos like this. See you in the next one.