Hey guys, in this video we’re going to look at 10 of the best free virtual instrument
plugins you can add to a digital audio workstation to create music in your computer with MIDI.
Since they’re all free, we’ll link to them in the video description, so go ahead
and test them out for yourself, then let us know what you think about them in the comments.
Also, before we get started, make sure you subscribe for more videos on this channel,
where we have a lot more content like this.
Dexed, by Digital Suburban is a frequency modulation synthesizer with 32 different algorithms
and 6 operators.
It’s based on the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and has a bunch of built-in synth sounds that
we can play around with using the presets, or by tweaking the sound of the operators
and the algorithm.
Dexed is a fairly tricky plugin to work with if you’re trying to change the presets on
your own, but there are enough to work with and it makes it a worthwhile plugin to have.
BeatFactory Drums is a simple electronic drum machine plugin with 10 included drum kits.
It’s got an 808 kit, 80s kit, 2 dubstep kits, 2 hiphop kits, an indian kit, 2 sample
hit kits, and 1 trap kit.
The kits have sounds like kick, snare, hit hats, claps, cymbals, and various other hits
depending on the kits.
You can’t combine them, but you could always add multiple tracks with the plugins to combine
the sounds of the various kits if you needed to.
For the controls, we have levels for each part of the kit, along with panning.
After that, we get attack, decay, sustain, release, panning, reverb, and volume for the
entire plugin all together.
Synth1 is based on the Clavia Nord Lead 2 synthesizer.
We get a lot of presets with this plugin, along with two oscillators, LFO, filter, effects,
arpeggiator and a lot more knobs we can use to dial in our sound.
Sweetcase Electric Piano is a simple electric piano plugin, and it’s one of my favorite
electric piano sounds.
It only has one electric piano sound, but it does have a nice sound to in and we can
make some minor tweaks to the tone of it.
We’ve got a bass boost knob, bell sound, modulation with intensity and speed, reverb,
and volume level controls.
Ample Guitar M II Lite by Ample Sound is a free acoustic guitar plugin.
We’ve got a few controls for the guitar itself, like panning, doubling, and more.
We can also switch between palm muting and open with MIDI with the lower MIDI notes as
triggers.
The plugin has a strummer tool, can load tabs, and has effects pedals for compression, overdrive,
EQ, chorus, phaser, delay, reverb, and wah.
Out of all the free acoustic guitar instrument plugins out there, this is the only one that’s
actually worth getting.
All the others sound like really terrible synth sounds, and barely even pass as a guitar
sound.
Acoustic guitar can be really tricky to program with MIDI, but I was able to fake-strum some
chords with my MIDI keyboard to make it sound good, but I would limit this plugin to simple
chords and notes, because complex strumming patterns would be very difficult to program.
Drum Pro by StudioLinked is another great free drum machine plugin.
This has 20 drum kits, so it’s more than the BeatFactory Drums plugin that we looked
at.
We’ve got attack, decay, sustain, and release controls, and volume and reverb.
Again, we get volume and panning for each part of the kit.
The kit setup is also similar to the BeatFactory drums kit, with parts like kick, snare, clap,
hihat, and other hits.
Both of these plugins are really simple and sound good, and one is not really better than
the other, but Drum Pro just has more sounds than BeatFactory Drums.
Keyzone Classic by Bitsonic, is a plugin that has both electric and acoustic pianos, but
I mostly use it because it’s one of the best and most realistic acoustic piano sounds
you can get for free, besides maybe some very limited demo plugins.
We’ve got a Yamaha Grand Piano, Steinway Grand Piano, basic electric piano and a Rhodes
piano.
Like most plugins, it has an attack, decay, sustain and release control.
We’ve got reverb and detuning controls, and a velocity curve for whether we’re playing
hard or light.
We can also have a few LFO controls.
MTPowerDrumKit2 by Manda Audio is one of my favorite free acoustic drum plugins that is
made to replicate the sound of a real acoustic kit using samples.
It’s only got one kit, but it’s a good clean sound that’s very versatile.
This plugin has mixer controls for all the parts of the kit, and we can even route them
to different audio tracks within our DAW to give us more mixing control with individual
plugins.
The great thing though is that this plugin is pre-mixed and everything sounds great as
it is, so we can change the sound if we want to, but it’s not completely necessary.
The plugin comes with MIDI clips that can be combined to create a beat that we can then
drag onto a project and use them there.
This plugin’s versatility means it’s usually one of the first acoustic drum plugins I go
to on a new project when I don’t want to have to mess around with it too much, and
I don’t want to spend a lot of time testing a bunch of different kits to find the right
sound.
TAL-NoiseMaker by Togu Audio Line is a great free synthesizer plugin with a lot of different
built-in sounds, and really easy to use controls to make adjustments.
It’s got two oscillators and a sub oscillator, wave and pitch controls, LFOs, envelopes with
filter and ADSR, and effects like reverb and delay.
This plugin and all the other plugins we’re using work great with a MIDI controller, especially
one with a modulation wheel and pitch wheel like the Akai MPK249.
This programmable MIDI controller has a 49-key keyboard, 16 drum pads, and continuous controllers
and faders to control plugins and tracks in a digital audio workstation, all with a simple
USB connection to set it up.
Using one of these MIDI controllers makes composing a lot easier than using the piano
roll alone, and it saves a lot of time as well.
To get your own MIDI controller or learn more about them, check out our links in the video
description down below.
The Studio Instruments package by Cakewalk is the included plugin set with Cakewalk by
BandLab.
This package is included with the digital audio workstation, but can be installed and
used with another digital audio workstation of your choice as we covered in another video
on this channel.
What’s great about this is that it includes 4 instruments in one package all for free.
We get an electric piano, drums, bass guitar, and strings, all of which have different instruments
with sampled sounds within them.
This gives us a huge range of sounds compared to some of the other plugins.
I don’t use the keyboard too much, but I do use the drums, strings, and bass on a lot
of my tracks.
The drums are great because they allow us to choose different kits, but also adjust
the tuning of the parts of the kit to change the pitch, instead of just the volume and
panning.
This package also has the only worthwhile strings plugin available for free, with a
lot of orchestra strings available within it and a very natural realistic sound to it.
The bass gives us controls for level and panning, plus some EQ, drive and compression, and a
pickup selector.
Finally, the electric piano has different instruments to choose from with their own
samples, and then we can tweak it a little with the drive, chorus, and tremolo pedals
at the top.
If you search for the studio instruments plugins online, you’ll be redirected to the Cakewalk
by BandLab page, so you will need to install that program to get them installed, so check
out our tutorial on getting that setup.
Thanks for checking out this video on free VST instrument plugins.
Let us know what your favorites are in the comments below.
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