Product Reviews by KVR Members

A great free bass preamp pedal, particularly for heavier genres. It's aesthetically similar to the Sansamp Bass Driver, but I felt that it had a more modern sound - not quite Darkglass, but still very nice. While the TSE Audio BOD is still the gold standard for vintage Sansamp tones, this plugin is no slouch either, and it has some additional features that are very helpful, such as VST3 support, a resizeable GUI, input filtering, sweepable mids, and frequency toggles for the bass and mid knobs.

Another free release from Variety of Sound that sounds better than a lot of paid options. It's essentially a glue compressor with a subtle tape saturation module. Both can be toggled on/off, but their order is fixed (compressor > trim 1 > saturation > trim 2). While it may not be suitable for tasks that require more aggressive compression and saturation, it excels at gluing busses together and imparting a bit of analog flavour. The resizable UI is also a nice bonus, as some of the developer's older plugins can be slightly difficult to use on larger screens.

A nice collection of free one-knob plugins covering EQ, dynamics, modulation, pitch, delay and reverb. Sometimes you just want to add some effects to a track with minimal effort, and these do the job well. It's difficult to find bad settings because the plugins' parameters have been carefully tuned, but this does mean they aren't suitable for extreme processing.

The problem with most of these simplified versions of the OTT compressor is that Xfer Records' free plugin still does the job very well. Yes, OTT has more controls, but simply putting it on a track and adjusting the depth and output to taste is usually enough. I think Minimal Audio could have picked better parameters for the XY pad as well. 'Tone' could be 'Dry/Wet', and the 'Dry/Wet' slider could be 'Output'

This is one of the best guitar amp sims I've tried, particularly for my low performance laptop. It's worth playing around with for a while, because the controls work a little differently than you'd expect - 'gain' is pretty self-explanatory, but 'master' controls the amount of power amp saturation/clipping. This means that for e.g. a clean sound, you turn up the gain, turn down the master, and use the global volume control to set the overall level. The included Marshall amp is very good, but another free amp for clean tones would be welcome. The developer also offers some paid amps that can be demoed within the plugin itself, with the highlights being: Orale (crunch/lead), Paevy 5650+ (high gain/lead), Britone (crunch/lead), Califier (high gain/lead), and Dudemeister (clean/crunch). The only thing missing for me is a decent Fender clean amp, and perhaps a gain reduction meter for the rack compressors.

A great looking/sounding saturation device that's incredibly easy to operate thanks to the large X/Y pad in the centre that controls the amount of odd and even harmonics added to the signal. Although it can't be used to completely destroy audio, it's well-suited to situations that call for subtle saturation that preserves the dynamics and character of the original signal. You can also target the saturation towards particular frequencies using the 'cutoff' sliders.

A relatively subtle bitcrusher/sample rate reducer that works best on lower settings. There's no shortage of free bitcrusher VSTs, but this one stands out for its aesthetically pleasing resizable GUI, simple controls, and subtle sound. Put it on drum loops for some vintage sampler sounds.

A really fun, characterful octave wah effect - I wasn't expecting much but was very pleasantly surprised. Stick it in front of an amp sim for hours of fun. A resizable GUI would be helpful but it's not a dealbreaker.

Though the developers say there may be a few bugs, this works perfectly for me in Reaper. Probably the best free alternative to Trackspacer you can find. This video here helpfully explains the features in depth, but here's how I use it on kick and bass:

• The bass is clashing with the kick, so I put TheMasker on the bass bus and send the kick to the sidechain input.
• Set 'MASKED FREQS' to bury.
• Adjust 'SIDECHAIN LEVEL' so the effect is actually triggered.

The result is that whenever the kick is playing, TheMasker cuts any clashing frequencies on the bass.

Great for adding a bit of extra glue and perceived loudness to your final mix. Like the original, it seems to be a relatively subtle waveshaper/clipper.