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Best VST Plugins!?


SKATOR

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hey everyone, I was searching through for free plugins and could only find the basic stuff however what I'm interested in is finding any Leads, Electric Piano, Electric drum kit and some more great sounds that are free which I can use for producing my songs. 

I know I'm being really picky and I'm aware there is not much great stuff when we talk about FREE plugins and i'll need to buy some in the coming future. I just started playing in cakewalk and getting started in Music but only finding the basic drums basic guitar and basic pianos in free plugins is very restricted to the genres I wanna explore producing with this Daw.

So please let me know if you guys have found some free plugins with leads or electric instruments or something that better than basic or pre-installed instruments.

thanks :)

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Kurre, your post made me chuckle but we oughta lighten up a bit. The OP is brand-new to this stuff and unaware that there are lots of free instruments out there that you might have to do a little research to find. Every noob embarrasses himself by asking questions that have already been answered many times before. That's part of the feet-wetting process. If you don't remember ever doing that yourself, then your memory is failing. Gingko Biloba is supposed to help with that.

SKATOR, start with Michael's link. That should keep you busy for awhile.

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I've stopped poking at people for not using the Search function because as I understand it, there's a generation or two that hasn't grown up with threaded discussion forums being a thing. And one of the big things about threaded discussion forums is that the knowledge in them is way less ephemeral than on Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram or wherever else, which is what frustrates me about those ways of communicating. All the great info that just scrolls away.

So they may not even know about the power of the Search Bar. They're not only new to Cakewalk, they're often just as new to this type of communication. I try to be gentle. Yes, people should at least browse the first couple of pages of threads, should use the Search Bar, but you have to know that you can do those things before you do them.

Anyway, @SKATOR, welcome, and yes, that thread that @Michael A.D. linked to will keep you busy for days downloading goodies. You don't mention a specific genre, but I'll assume EDM.

Here's what I would get first:

In that thread, you'll find a link to Sitala, which is a sampler. Since Cakewalk doesn't yet have an integrated one, for the kind of work that I think you want to do, you'll want some way to load up and use the one-shots you find in sample packs. Sitala is probably the most popular one around here while we wait. You can drag clips directly from Cakewalk's timeline to Sitala's pads, and it comes with a usable sampled 808. Gotta have a sampler.

After that, Surge is probably the most powerful freeware synth around right now. Tons of patches for it, it's in constant development.

Meldaproduction's Monastery Grand is hands-down the best free grand piano, and while you're at Meldaproduction, you can also download their FreeFX Bundle, which has 37 really useful effect and utility plug-ins you can use for free. Dead Duck E-Piano is the best-sounding  free Rhodes-like electric piano I know of. Dead Duck also has a large package of basic bread-and-butter FX plug-ins, also free.

If you have $5 to spend, AIR's Hybrid 3 is a great synth for electronic music, tons of arps, leads, pads, sounds really good and you can get a bunch of free patches for it if you do a little searching. For another $5 you can also get AIR's XPand!2, which is a ROMpler that comes with over 2000 sounds, including multiple really good drum kits.

A|A|S Swatches is a great way to get over 500 sounds for free. Pads, leads, arps, hits, and the quality is the very best, IMO.

That's my suggested starter kit. Any links I didn't supply are in that other thread. The reason I've listed specific ones is that there is so much information in that thread that one can get lost in it and not know where to start. This is the condensed "starter EDM toolkit" version. The two payware instruments are almost free. Hybrid 3 is the closest you can get to Serum or Massive without forking over way more cash, and XPand!2 is a Swiss Army Knife of excellent sounds.

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I belong to the group of people that reads the manual first. Experiment second. Search in books and nowadays googling.

Sometimes i'm nice and sometimes i'm rough. I go with my feeling and this gave the feel of a person that tries to be spoonfed without any real need for it.

So i was rough... suck it up babies.

 

 

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I usually jump in first and then hit the documentation when I run into a snag or just want to dig deeper. Very seldom read the manual first, unless it's necessary to get started. For this reason, good indexing is very important to me. I want to be able to find the section that describes the feature I'm trying to navigate.

I've submitted pages of errata to Morten Saether so that he could amend the Cakewalk Reference Guide. The removal of the ancient (not kidding, this section had to have been Windows 98-era at the latest) advice about how your modem might call AOL in the middle of a session and how to set the IRQ jumpers on your sound card and to disable AHCPI on your motherboard, and how plug 'n' play doesn't work properly, and how WDM is the cutting edge in Windows driver modes, I'm pretty sure that was at my suggestion.

The only people I rough up are the tinfoil hatters who are sure that BandLab must be up to no good, that it's a data-gathering scheme, that the product can't survive, etc. Fortunately, almost 4 years on, with absolutely zero of their predictions coming true, and my (hopeful) speculation coming true beyond what anyone thought was possible, we don't get too many of those anymore. Somewhere around here is a post from 3 years ago where I suggest that there might be very good things to come and I kind of get shot down. I'm happy to have the laugh on that one.

With noobs and youngsters, hey we need that fresh blood on forums, so I try to at least welcome them while telling them that they'll get better help with their audio interface issues if they post in the General forum rather than the Themes subforum.

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For those who derive pleasure from beating up on noobies who don't fit your personal definition of the proper way to obtain information, get over yourself. The search feature is great , but can often lead to tons of useless information as well when it comes to broad topics. Searching may or may not yield relevant responses, but asking directly will have a better chance of weeding out irrelevant information aside from the people who think berating people is somehow edgy.  The OP managed to obtain some good leads.

 

To the OP, one of the struggles when starting is wading through the humongous glut of options. Most of us use only some of the many vsts we own.  A few things that help me decide are watching or well written reviews that really show me the practical use beyond marketing pitch. Some of the best vsts may be absolutely useless to you depending on your needs. 

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1 hour ago, dubdisciple said:

Searching may or may not yield relevant responses

All too true. I'm usually really good at search terms in say, Google, but in this forum, I have a hard time finding the information I'm looking for. It doesn't seem to obey "exact phrase" quotes, rather searches on the individual words.

What I do wish people would do is scroll through a few pages of topics before posting their question(s). Again, not something that comes naturally to someone not familiar in the ways of forums.

As for newbie shoving and shoving the newbie shovers, in the words of Rodney King, "Can we all get along?" Everyone was a newbie at some point, everyone gets grumpy sometimes. There are ways to express this stuff with a positive spin. I hope my "starter kit" helps other people in the future.

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Here is Music Radar's take on the best VST plugins, as of last year. https://www.musicradar.com/news/the-best-vst-plugins-2020-the-finest-synth-drum-machine-sampler-and-effect-plugins-you-can-buy-right-now

They are not free. Here are some that are free. https://bedroomproducersblog.com/free-vst-plugins/

For other free plugins, check out this list curated by forum members. >>>

This...

And this... >>>

 

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