 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. I wanted to make this quick video for you because there's some free plugins available at the moment from some absolute giants in the industry, but they're only available for a very limited amount of time. In fact, they're only really available for the next couple of days at the time of making this video. I'm not going to muck around too much. I want to get started with the first of these, which is from one of my favorite companies, Arturia. The first up, we have Tape Malify from Arturia and I have to say I absolutely love the concept of this plugin. What Arturia are doing here is enabling you to have the character of an old instrument called the Melotron applied to your recordings. Now, if you don't know, the Melotron was an instrument from the 60s, which was really like an early sampler, except rather than having a digital ability with sampled sounds, you had sounds on little tapes, okay? Now you could play those sounds using a keyboard on the Melotron. Now this instrument was far from hi-fi in sound because it was tape-based, it had imperfections and it's really those imperfections which makes the Melotron so lovable. As I say, what Arturia are enabling you to do here is apply the character of the Melotron to your instrument or your recording, I should say, using the controls they give you here. I'm going to be applying it to this acoustic guitar, which sounds like this. I'm going to go through each control one at a time and then I'm going to switch them off just so you can hear what each individual control is actually doing, but then we'll combine them all towards the end. So first of all, we have this noise control here, which just kind of adds tape here if you like, sounds like this. It's funny isn't it? Back in the day, we spent our time trying to get rid of the hiss sound and now we've got plugins to add it, go figure. Now the next control we're going to look at is Drive over here. This is a saturation control. Now if we push this really hard, it will really distort the signal and we'll hear that in a moment, but I think most of us will use it fairly subtly to add a little bit of sort of character and thickness to our sound. So it sounds like this. So I'd probably use it back there as I say, but you could use it in extremes if you want to. Now switch that off and go over to this tone control. Now this is an interesting control because for me, as soon as you switch it on, you get a nice sort of vintage degraded sound, but the tone control itself goes from a really muffled sound over here on the left to a very sort of middly sounding effect on the right hand side. Let's just go through that range as we listen to this guitar. So that's a really nice instant way to get that sort of vintage old sound to your modern recordings. Now moving over to this tape section over here, we've got four controls and I'm going to start off with the bottom right one here, the mechanics. Now remember this instrument actually had a tape player inside of it, a very mechanical thing so we can get the sound of that added into our recording. Sounds like this. So that's the mechanics sound, we'll add some of that in later and then we've got this wear control over here which simulates the sort of degraded tape because remember the tape would degrade over time, okay, we've become less and less perfect so we can hear that in our recording now. Again I would probably use it sort of back there somewhere to be honest with you, but if you want it to sound really degraded, you could switch that, turn that right up, so I'll turn it off for the moment and then we'll have a listen to these two controls, Flutter and Wow. Now these controls are to simulate the pitch variation that you would get in tape because if tape didn't run at a constant speed and it sometimes didn't, then you would get these pitch variations. Now the Flutter control is for the quick pitch variations and the Wow control is much slower. So let's have a listen to those two, I'll play with both of them as we listen to our track and again you can go really extreme with these or you can use them much more subtly if you want. Now a really interesting addition to the sort of actual sound of the Melotron which Arturo have given you here is a little bonus, is the ability to add stereo width with these in mind and what they've done to create that stereo width is done some sort of variations in the pitch change from the left and the right channels. So at the moment it's switched off, but I'll switch, I'll start off with it switched off and then I'll switch it on so you can hear that stereo width effect. So as you can hear there's just a really nice effect there and if you just turn these down nice and subtly it's a really quick way to get some stereo width. So I really like those, we'll turn those down for a moment and then I'm going to skip this section here which I'm sure you really want to know about because the interface is really interesting looking isn't it? Just go over to the right over here, outputs speaks for itself, it's just like a volume control, but we do have this filter over here which gives us the ability to go between sort of a low pass and a high pass filter. It's kind of like a tilt control if you like, let's have a listen to this. So a great way to just quickly adjust the sort of colour and tone there of your music and if you automated this you can get some really wacky effects with that as well. Now let's go to this control in the middle here, this is a slow down control so this simulates you pressing you know stop while you're listening to this track and if you remember things like tape or even sort of record players would slow down gradually and you don't get that with digital stop of course, but you did get it back then let's just have a quick listen to see what it does out of the box and that does it just like that sounds awesome if you want that effect now at the moment I've got this switched onto instant here if you can see at the bottom so if I click this button again that it's just going to start off instantly or if I switch this over to fast forward and then just press play and stop it again we get that slow down effect but because it's now on fast forward if I press this again you get that opposite effect where it's going to start off fast and then go down to its proper speed have a listen to this so that's the fun thing to have that now you can change the amount of time that this all happens over so set to two bars at the moment you could change it to four or eight or you know you know smaller numbers than that so you've got a few options there for that now another thing which is kind of fun about this is you've got the option of kind of momentarily slowing it slowing it down and letting it speed up by clicking on this wheel that you can see in the middle here and you'll see that the button sort of lights up as I press my mouse down and then release the button it goes off again how does that sound when I play the track what it sounds like this okay fun I guess anyway let's combine all of this together I'll play the guitar track and we'll see what we can get out of this so that is tape mellify from Arturia click the link in the description down below make sure you get this while it's still free now I'm going to do something extremely unusual for this channel and I'm going to ask for your forgiveness in advance because I'm going to recommend this free library to you 25 but I'm not going to be able to demonstrate it to you and that's because 25 is a free library which works with the free contact player from native instruments now I have the full contact on my system and you can't have them both installed at the same time or I haven't found a way at least so that means I'm not able to actually play sounds from this library for you however I didn't want you to miss out on this because from what I've heard from demos I've heard elsewhere it sounds really awesome there's lots of great options on here and I didn't want you guys to miss out just because I'm missing out so anyway 25 is a collection of sounds from 25 years of synthesizer instruments from native instruments including things like generator and massive x that kind of thing now you've got 150 presets from what I understand from 37 different instruments and you can see from the interface you've got this sort of a and b on the left and right hand side of the screen this is where you can blend two different sounds together okay and you'll see that on this screen here where you can select the sounds for the a and b sort of banks if you like okay so that's one of the things you can do is combine those sounds together to make your own new kind of presets there added to that you've also got filters that you can apply here to you know even sort of change those sounds even more make them your own as well as a bunch of effects here things like reverb compressors there and replica which is a great delay which comes from native instruments now on top of this it has a fantastic sequencer included as well further enabling you to really make your own kind of sound banks using this free library now I want to say that there's a couple of different places you can get this on the internet at the moment make sure you follow the link in my description because with that link you can get this up until January the 4th some other places you can only get it up until I think December the 31st so make sure that you do give this a go and you know let me know in the comments below what you think of this now trash 2 from iZotope may well be the deepest free plugin that I've ever reviewed on this channel it's got a few different sections with lots of options and controls now for that reason I will not be covering everything that you can see on the screen let's just have an overview so that you can see what's inside okay because if I went through everything then that free offer may be over okay let's start off with looking at all the sections apart from the trash section the namesake of this plugin if you like because that's kind of very obvious what that does but the others are kind of very very interesting in my opinion let's start with this filter section here it looks like an EQ doesn't it and in its default state it kind of behaves like an EQ you can see it's got these different nodes here there's six different nodes and with their settings at the moment in their default position they're all in a clean sort of state there okay and you can move these around just like many EQs boosting or or attenuating different frequencies and then you can also adjust the Q of course okay so you can see that happening there and you could just play your track and use it as a regular EQ now where it gets interesting is when you start to change these settings down here so let's take this number six here we just kind of get that roughly back to its default position and we'll change number six to let's go for a retro low pass filter okay so it's become a low pass filter you can see there but it's also adjusted the rest of the EQ below it to get that retro sound as well now you can still make changes to it with these other nodes but you can see it's got that sort of default line going there another really extreme one for example would be this vowel one here so we'll go to vocal one under the vowel section and you can see we get a really interesting EQ curve there we can still make adjustments to it overall using these nodes but as I say it's got a very specific curve there we can listen to the guitar with that curve so you basically get the idea there now let's just put things back to default for a moment now the other thing that we can do in here is adjust some modulation options so I'll go to the modulation tab here I'm going to start off with this LFO one here okay we've got node five selected I'll go to LFO you can see now there's two nodes for node five and they've got that dot running between them over a period of time we can change that period of time with the frequency control here and you'll hear that what's happening with that if I play the track okay and we've also got this envelope section here now the difference with this is rather than it being determined by time it's determined by signal at that frequency so you can get some interesting effects like that from the filters okay now moving on as I say I'm just going to skip trash for a moment we've then got another filter and by the way you don't have to use these different sections in order okay if we go to the graph control here we'll click on that you can see we can change the different effects if you like to different positions in the chain so just so you know that so we have another filter there which is behaves in exactly the same way as the first one then we have this convolve section okay so we've got some convolution presets here if you ever use things like convolution for amps and things this will be familiar to you in fact let's use one of the amp presets here just for a bit of fun on this I'll play the track and then I'll go to an amp now obviously acoustic guitar is not the best sound to test that on but if you were using some electric guitar that would be very useful you've got amps which are the obvious choices you've got a whole bunch of different effects there let's go for vowels you can see in the vowel section we've got a a u e a o you know those different sounds there let's have a listen so a whole bunch of convolution models there to choose from so that's very cool then we have a dynamics section okay which is actually pretty sophisticated so dynamics in this case being a compressor and a gate as well so you compressor you can adjust that in the regular way you do on most compressors you've got ratio you've got attack you've got release all that good stuff and then you've got this gate as well which you can then adjust the threshold for that yet down here so that's good for cutting out sort of noise in between playing that kind of thing very very useful now not only can this be used as a single compressor and gate but you can also use it in a multi band mode you can click on there and you can see here i'll adjust this first one we've got a second one which will be different for a different range and a third one if you want to see them all at once you can see them like this and if you want to adjust the sort of the frequency zones for those you can go over here and do that as well so we've got a multi band compressor and gate included in you know this one plugin which is just a bonus in itself if you just wanted a multi band compressor okay so apart from the dynamic section then we have a delay included as well now i'm sure you know what a delay does i'll demonstrate it in a moment but you'll notice there's some different types of delay here there's a tape tape tube analog lo-fi digital broken bit and digital so a number of different delays i will just put the wet signal up a bit let's play it so you get the idea there and finally we're going to go over to the trash section we'll turn everything else off the trash section it's a bit hard to describe but you can basically use these controls here to shake the sound i'll mess around with this graph a little bit so you can see what's going on just go to the default position of that let's have a listen let's just zoom in on that area where i'm actually controlling things now obviously you can hear that start to break up there i'll go to one of the presets to demonstrate that a bit more um this could get loud watch your ears we'll go to a crunchy grunge you can really break things up in sort of some pleasant and unpleasant ways as well and i guess that's at the heart of trash there but if you're using combined in combination with all of these other sections you could get some really interesting results now these plugins are available for only a limited period of time but i've made a whole bunch of videos about free plugins which are always available and i've put them all together in a playlist for you right here so i would suggest you start binge watching make a list and start downloading a massive library of awesome free plugins go and click right here