What freeware do you still consistently use?

[dellboy]

And let me even go one further. Let's assume I have no talent. A lot of people here seem to think so and that's fine. Don't give a crap what they think.

How much worse do you think my stuff would sound if I used all free plugins?

How much worse would this sound?

https://soundcloud.com/steven-wagenheim ... on-masters

You have great talent.

Some of the stuff you do would translate well to Broadway,minus the "cyber diva".

In fact you are one of the people here whose music would greatly benefit from the big studio full orchestra treatment with a good female vocalist.

[wagtunes]

And let me even go one further. Let's assume I have no talent. A lot of people here seem to think so and that's fine. Don't give a crap what they think.

How much worse do you think my stuff would sound if I used all free plugins?

How much worse would this sound?

https://soundcloud.com/steven-wagenheim ... on-masters

You have great talent.

Some of the stuff you do would translate well to Broadway,minus the "cyber diva".

In fact you are one of the people here whose music would greatly benefit from the big studio full orchestra treatment with a good female vocalist.

You're making my point for me. My years of submitting music to publishers, A&R people, talent scouts, you name it, I was told the same thing by EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM.

"Your songs are fine. But you need better productions. Publishers today need demos to be near radio ready. They have tin ears. They can't hear a good song on its own. They need the glitz."

This was right from the industry itself. But I couldn't afford great productions. So I continued to make my home demos and got nowhere.

Now I don't know if things are any different today (this was back in the late 70s, early 80s) but when I was growing up, that was the reality.

[evilantal]

Take your Bob Dylan or your Sheeran or whoever you want. Don't care who. Doesn't matter. Put them in room with the absolute cheapest equipment or free for that matter. Let them record their song. Greatest song ever written.

Now put them in a million dollar studio with anything that they could possibly want and have them record the same song.

If you honestly think that the first recording is going to sound as good as the first recording, with all their talent, you're daft.

I also always fail to see the logic of people that deny this.
Seems to be some cognitive dissonance reduction going on or something...

Back on topic. I love to try out good looking free stuff, just for the fun of it.

Mainstays are MSED, MFreeEffects Bundle, Airwindows, TrackControl amongst others.

[Michael L]

Paul McCartney tours solo, and with a band. Both good, but different.

[wagtunes]

Paul McCartney tours solo, and with a band. Both good, but different.

We're not talking about playing solo or playing with a band. It's not the same comparison. Paul McCartney doesn't tour solo playing a toy piano and a $50 Epiphone Guitar.

So can we please get real about this?

[BlackWinny]

Here are the freeware plugins I consistently use, in almost permanent accompaniment to my purchased plugins.

• AM Music Technology - Pro SoloVst + RMI-EP + VL-122
• The excellent emulations of three instruments that Tony Banks made legendary. The ARP ProSoloist (remember The Cinema Show), the RMI-Electra Piano (by far the preferred electric piano of Tony Banks, remember The Carpet Crawlers), and the Hammond L122 spinet organ which was the cheaper (and lighter) equivalent to the extremely expensive (and extremely heavy) Hammond B3. And these three emulations, even if they are old, remain the best emulations ever of these three legendary instruments, for many songs and not only to try to imitate Tony Banks. You can find them three on my webspace here.

• Benjamin 'BeRo' Rosseaux - Sobanth
• I use other SF2 players which are payware tools, but this one is extremely friendly because its extreme simplicity so it makes the job in the quickest way for many things, and it is multi-instrumental up to 16 independent channels. I just have to use a few effects downstream and there I go for many samplesets in SF2 format. For 16 noises, for self made 16 elements drum kits, for kits of effects similar to Jarre's effects produced with his EMS VCS Putney, etc. I just trigger these noises and effects with pads of my MIDI controller or I connect any SF2 bank to my MIDI keyboard.

• All the Blue Cat's Audio freeware pack
• Excellent traditional effects (a chorus, a flanger, a phaser, an equalizer, a frequency analyzer and a suite of gain utilities) which are very good.

• Revitar 2
• A set of excellent acoustic guitars, using physically modeled synthesis. It is open source, and being not in new developments currently, it can be downloaded (with all the sources) on my web space here. I also use Spicy Guitar that we'll see below.

• Digital Suburban - DEXED
• The best Yamaha DX7 emulation ever in the world. This plugin is more or less my workhorse plugin (with a few others... which are not freeware). And I have made a huge compilation of thousands of presets in the same type of some compilations you can already find on the web... but mine is without any duplicate, and yet with thousands and thousands of presets. It is available at the mid-height of the DEXED page, and you have a demo of some of these presets from my collection in this video (starting at 7:00). Incidentally at the beginning the video shows also how to use SAVIhost that we'll see below. You have also an A/B comparison with the real DX7 in this video. This beautiful song Soyuz is made only of Dexed tracks, except the drums.

• Full Bucket Music - Deputy Mark II, MonoFury, Nabla, Stigma, The blooo, and The scrooo
• As well as Dexed, there is always at least one of them in every new track I make. Especially Deputy Mark II, MonoFury, Nabla and Stigma. His brand new FB-3100 will probably join them. I've always been a Korg lover, since my teenage in the 70's, I had a MonoPoly and a PolySix (this latter I still have it today, with a Technics KN440 and a Farfisa Syntorchestra, I regret I resold my Casio CZ-101 in the 90's years)... and incidentally I just bought again (in second hand) another vintage hardware synth from Korg, a splendid MS2000b which was built in 2001 and sold a few days ago in totally "new" condition for only €350, almost never used by the previous owner. This Korg MS2000b synth is one of the most efficient for wonderful cosmic pads, as you can see in this series of videos.

• GSI (Guido Scognamiglio) - MrTramp 2
• Although it is freeware... in my opinion for the Wurlitzer electric piano emulation it is even better than AAS Lounge Lizard (don't worry I use other AAS synths that I love).

• Hermann Seib - SAVIhost
• Excellent free tool to make a standalone plugin from any VSTI which is not provided with a standalone executable edition in addition to its DLL. And there is a SAVIhost edition for VST3 as well as for VST2, for Windows in 32-bit and in 64-bit. In 64-bit the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package is required. In Dexed's entry above I have put a link to a video which shows how to use this excellent little tool. Here you have another example with SynthmasterPlayer.

• Keolab - Spicy Guitar
• An excellent compliment to Revitar (see above). I use both because they give very different sounds although both as awesome, so they make together a very good set of acoustic guitars (and electric guitars incidentally, but in that case they of course are to use with good effects downstream to make real impressions). Above all they both are excellent acoustic guitars and they also are able to make almost all the plucked strings instruments, even harps, zithers, sitars, etc. depending how you tweak them... and how you play them.

• Martinic (Theo Niessink) - Combo Model F (Farfisa) and Combo Model V (Vox Continental)
• If you love these two electric combo organs of the 60's/70's then these two emulations are the must to have. They now can be downloaded from here.

• ML-VST (Martin Lüders) - PG-8X
• The only Roland JX-8P emulation. But what an awesome emulation! And not only it is excellent but it also reads the original Sysex of the hardware device, as do DEXED for the DX7 Sysex.

• Togu Audio Line (TAL) - TAL-Bitcrusher, TAL-Chorus-LX, TAL-Dub, TAL-Effects, TAL-Filter, TAL-Flanger, TAL-Phaser, TAL-Reverb, TAL-Tube, TAL-USEq, and... TAL-Vintager and TAL-Vocoder
• They all are among my favorite effects for vintage sounds and new age styles where are acoustic instruments or old electronic instruments. With the effects from Blue Cat Audio above and those from Voxengo below, I don't use almost any purchased external effects, except those I have bought (very cheap, as donation) from Melda Production.

• Taron - Lord of the Springs
• I discovered it way before its recent KVR challenge, precisely the day it was released for the first time in November 2016. Yet having very few controls, it has some totally unique controls that you'll discover using it, and it is a synth which is especially good in making Medieval or Fantasy atmospheres and in creating brand new sounds inspired by old Renaissance traditional instruments and Asian or Oriental instruments as if they were built or as if they had been enhanced in a futuristic world. It is one of my preferred freeware instruments since that day of its very first release. For my "New age mixed of Celtic and Eastern Asia" styles, it is amazing!

• Voxengo - Free effects
• With Blue Cat Audio's effects above and those from TAL (Togu Audio Line) above too, it is my third and last set of wonderful free effects. Why purchase expensive effects when almost all can be done with free effects? The only exception I can find is the reverbs. I have never seen any free reverb really competing with a purchased reverb for the best impression (and my favorite one is the one from Melda Production). But quite all the other usual effects can perfectly be done with free tools.

• Wavosaur
• To work on audio files it is the best free tool ever. I consider it even much better and much more friendly than Audacity and than Ocenaudio (that I like both although).

• Wolfgang Palm - Plex 2
• Another freeware which never leaves my setup. Starting from sounds of traditional instruments (cello, violin, clavinet, guitar, harp, flute, sitar, Wurlitzer, etc.) and mixing them and working on ranges of frequencies you transform the sounds to millions of things totally new... and with morphing! It is a quite old plugin, but for me it remains unique in its category. You have here an excellent demonstration of its huge versatility.

I sometimes use other freeware plugins, but I prefer to use purchased plugins (AAS, Cakewalk, DiscoDSP, Korg, Linplug, Modartt, TAL, XILS, etc.). But this little list of freewares above are real gems (and I probably ignore the existence of some others) which are forever in my home studio and used so much often that I could almost not live my music without them and I would even have paid to purchase them as I consider them as excellent as my best purchased tools. They demonstrate perfectly that freeware developments CAN be made with a quality totally of the same level than many payware plugins. It doesn't tell that "the freeware tools are as good as payware tools", it tells that "the freeware tools CAN BE as good as payware tools" if the developers are really tantalous and really serious with a professional level of knowledge and of will.

• Mutools - Mulab
• I can't finish this list without citing the DAW that I prefer. Even if I use it with its comprehensive features (for that you of course must purchase it) it can be used totally freely, without purchasing any license. There are of course some limitation in its freeware state but even in this freeware state it is absolutely awesome and can lead you to totally comprehensive works.

Nota: each time I write "it is the best for", I don't write it as a truth... but simply as my opinion (and based only on what I know and have already heard, given that there are many things that I haven't yet ever heard).

[Michael L]

A full band can make many sounds, like an expensive synth, a solo guitar can make fewer sounds, like a free synth. Both can sound good, really.

[dellboy]

I also always fail to see the logic of people that deny this.
Seems to be some cognitive dissonance reduction going on or something...

You choose to listen to music made by people using the best that money can buy but without any talent,and I prefer to listen to people who use only minimal gear but are truly gifted.

One sounds ultra pristine and glossy,but is ultimately dross,the other sounds basic and raw,but is real.

Takes all sorts.

[Bump1]

Take your Bob Dylan or your Sheeran or whoever you want. Don't care who. Doesn't matter. Put them in room with the absolute cheapest equipment or free for that matter. Let them record their song. Greatest song ever written.

Now put them in a million dollar studio with anything that they could possibly want and have them record the same song.

If you honestly think that the first recording is going to sound as good as the first recording, with all their talent, you're daft.

I also always fail to see the logic of people that deny this.
Seems to be some cognitive dissonance reduction going on or something...

Back on topic. I love to try out good looking free stuff, just for the fun of it.

Mainstays are MSED, MFreeEffects Bundle, Airwindows, TrackControl amongst others.

What are the limitations of the MeldaFree bundle? I really liked the MEqualizer when I tried it years ago...I remember it being 100% free.

[dellboy]

You're making my point for me. My years of submitting music to publishers, A&R people, talent scouts, you name it, I was told the same thing by EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM.

"Your songs are fine. But you need better productions. Publishers today need demos to be near radio ready. They have tin ears. They can't hear a good song on its own. They need the glitz."

This was right from the industry itself. But I couldn't afford great productions. So I continued to make my home demos and got nowhere.

Now I don't know if things are any different today (this was back in the late 70s, early 80s) but when I was growing up, that was the reality.

Life sucks.

Its a cliche,but you just need a break.

There is nothing wrong with your music,it has the potential to be really good in a studio enviroment. If you are the author of those songs,words and lyrics,and you own the copyright to them,then sell the songs,I like them so others will too.
Having said that,they are on Soundcloud,and I guess other places,so you are doing the right things to get noticed.
I like how you can jump from one genre to another and sound different each time. Perhaps being in band would get them out there.

[dellboy]

Paul McCartney tours solo, and with a band. Both good, but different.

We're not talking about playing solo or playing with a band. It's not the same comparison. Paul McCartney doesn't tour solo playing a toy piano and a $50 Epiphone Guitar.

So can we please get real about this?

He is a professional,and like all professionals he uses the right equipment to do the job,as does a carpenter who uses the best stuff to get the job done as efficiently possible.

Horses for courses.

For many of us here music is a hobby and we spend our money accordingly. Most people who do a spot of DIY do not splash out on top quality tools to do an odd job here and there.

This thread is about freeware, and most people who use it are not professionals,ergo they can not justify spending a lot on gear.

But if money were no obstacle then point me to the candy store.

[evilantal]

You choose to listen to music made by people using the best that money can buy but without any talent,and I prefer to listen to people who use only minimal gear but are truly gifted.

One sounds ultra pristine and glossy,but is ultimately dross,the other sounds basic and raw,but is real.

No. I choose to listen to music that sounds basic and raw, made by real people with real talent that have also invested in the tools of their trade to make their basic, raw and real music sound the best it can. Because it's worth it.

What are the limitations of the MeldaFree bundle? I really liked the MEqualizer when I tried it years ago...I remember it being 100% free.

One limitation is not being able to use custom skins (quite important for me and I've indeed paid for the upgrade). This is the list of added features from the Melda site:

- You can change size and style of the plugins.
- You can access the sonogram feature in the analyzers and equalizers.
- You can manipulate (save, load, organise) your own presets.
- Most plugins can perform upsampling which minimizes aliasing, therefore it is useful to improve sound quality.
- The plugins will not display the big red reminder box with our clickable logo at the bottom of every GUI.
- You will make us happy and help us develop more free software .

[Bump1]

You choose to listen to music made by people using the best that money can buy but without any talent,and I prefer to listen to people who use only minimal gear but are truly gifted.

One sounds ultra pristine and glossy,but is ultimately dross,the other sounds basic and raw,but is real.

No. I choose to listen to music that sounds basic and raw, made by real people with real talent that have also invested in the tools of their trade to make their basic, raw and real music sound the best it can. Because it's worth it.

What are the limitations of the MeldaFree bundle? I really liked the MEqualizer when I tried it years ago...I remember it being 100% free.

One limitation is not being able to use custom skins (quite important for me and I've indeed paid for the upgrade). This is the list of added features from the Melda site:

- You can change size and style of the plugins.
- You can access the sonogram feature in the analyzers and equalizers.
- You can manipulate (save, load, organise) your own presets.
- Most plugins can perform upsampling which minimizes aliasing, therefore it is useful to improve sound quality.
- The plugins will not display the big red reminder box with our clickable logo at the bottom of every GUI.
- You will make us happy and help us develop more free software .

Yea thanks...I just bought the upgrade. For what you get with it, totally worth it.

[Zexila]

Synth1 has nothing superior over Spire, except it's free.

Priceless

Tell me than, what's so superior about Synth1 against Spire? Better sound quality/less aliasing, more features, what?

[dellboy]

Synth1 has nothing superior over Spire, except it's free.

Priceless

Tell me than, what's so superior about Synth1 against Spire? Better sound quality/less aliasing, more features, what?

I will have to remind myself as I post that KVR can be pedantic..

Synth1 is "superior" for me,because I have grown attatched to it and love it.

Not in the sense that it is "superior".

One person has a favorite cafe,another hates it.

Someone loves a certain food,another hates it.

It is superior to one person and inferior to another.

But,I am not alone in my love of Synth1 as thousands of presets made for zilch prove.

And every time I mention "Synth1" it advertises it to others.

So keep deriding it and keep the advertising coming.

Because there is no such thing as bad advertising.

And as you yourself said......

" Synth1 has nothing superior over Spire, except it's free"

Priceless.