We live in a golden era for budget-conscious music-making - never has there been a broader range of free plugins and music software available to musicians and producers looking after their bank balance.
Some would have you believe that mind-boggling sounds can only be achieved using mind-bogglingly expensive tools, but there's no truth in that. Here, we've rounded up six of the best free plugins for tweaking timbres, textures and tones, proving that you don't have to have deep pockets to get deep into sound design.
1. Newfangled Audio/Eventide Pendulate
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Sound design can demand the weird and wonderful and Pendulate from Eventide certainly delivers both. Billed as a monosynth, it’s not like other synths due to what NFA calls a ‘double-pendulum oscillator’. Modulation is also key with a looping envelope generator, among several sources operating on Pendulate’s three modules for wild, gritty, often unpredictable sounds. Probably the best freebie for sound design out there.
2. Valhalla Supermassive
It hopefully tells you how much we love this plugin that it gets included in this roundup alongside other entries – our own included – that contain tens of plugins. A decent reverb/delay is an essential tool on any sound designer’s hard drive and with 20 modes to choose from, with names like ‘Great Annihilator’ and ‘Large Magellanic Cloud’, Valhalla Supermassive will give you some huge options to manipulate your sound, with almost guaranteed lovely results every time.
3. Surge XT
For a free sound design synth, Pendulate will give you the weird, but Surge from Ujam will give you the more traditional and musical. We’ve long been bigging up this open-source synth and for very good reason. With 2,800 sounds, three oscillators with 12 types each, and massive filter and modulation options, this is a formidable free synth. It might be more suitable for experienced users but its sound design potential is huge.
4. Sonosaurus PaulXStretch
“PaulXStretch is designed for radical transformation of sounds,” says Sonosaurus, and it certainly ticks all of our sound design boxes in that regard. This is an extreme time-stretching tool so is ideal for really pushing your sonics to their limits. In fact, just experimenting with it might not get you what you were aiming for, but that’s half the fun of sound design. Great for making anything more textural, atmospheric and ambient. Just don’t expect anything ‘subtle’…
5. Melda MFreeFX
As we’ve included our own free bundle, we really should give a nod to Melda for its mighty MFreeFX bundle. You will have to download the lot but pick and choose what you need because with 37 effects it can be overwhelming, but there’s some incredible stuff for sound design including MBitFun, MRingModulator, and MFreqShifter. Something so good shouldn’t really be free, so get it before Melda realises…
6. The CM Suite
It would be remiss of us not to mention our own suite of plugins as a free option for sound design. The CM Suite is bundled free with every issue of our sister magazine, Computer Music. We’ve leaned heavily on good old ZebraCM for many tutorials and it’s one of the best synths no money can buy. But there are plenty of other synths, instruments and effects in the extensive collection.
