Best things in life are free - Sand, software and sound

Yep, still here and no trouble staying busy! We’ve been hit by a tsunami of free on-line content and software sales. The good news — it’s free (or at a discount). The bad news — the amount of time required to download, install, activate and maybe, gasp, actually use some of these samples, plug-ins, etc.

The list of free stuff is astounding. The Loopmasters, Loopcloud, Plug-ins Boutique and Producer Tech conglomerate has been veru generous during the pandemic and the summer season. The first stay-in and create promotion distributed:

Bearcubs Late Night Electronic (samples)
Reel People Sounds for the Soul (samples)
Bashiri Johnson Skins (samples)
Plugin Boutique Radio (plug-in)
iZotope Neutron Elements (plug-in)
Loopcloud (Free samples for subscribers)
Producer Tech All Access 3 month trial (training)

That’s a bunch of good stuff, especially Neutron Elements. I haven’t dipped into Producer Tech, as yet, but the Ableton Live tutorials are inviting.

I just cashed in the summer stay inspired promotion:

Stay Inspired Vocals (samples)
Baby Audio I Heart NY (plug-in)
W.A. Productions Vocal Splitter (plug-in)
Pulsar Audio Smasher

These plug-ins are really worth it and useful. I Heart NY does parallel compression, good for mastering among other uses. Vocal Splitter separates mono vocals into stereo (ye olde split, delay and detune trick). Smasher is an Urei 1176 compressor emulation dedicated to the British all-buttons-in sound. Sure, the plugs are somewhat single purpose, but they sound great and are simple to use. Frankly, with all of this free content (!), I don’t have time to dial things in. 🙂

Other notable free plug-ins are:

Softtube Saturation Knob
Audio Damage RoughRider
Vallhalla Super Massive
Acon Digital Verberate Basic
Analog Obsession LALA
Voxengo Latency Delay

Sweetwater ran a promotion with iZotope, giving away the Ozone Elements mastering suite. Between Ozone Elements and Neutron Elements, that’s half of the iZotope Elements suite for nada.

I need to mention my favorite score from the Christmas holiday season: Arturia’s EMT-140 Plate Reverb. I have a fondness for plate and Arturia put together a beautiful EMT-140 emulation.

If that’s not enough, shake in the Korg software sale including Korg Module Pro and discount Cubase updates from Steinberg.

Plugin Boutique had a sale on zplane deCoda. deCoda is like Yamaha’s Chord Tracker on steroids, building on zplane’s experience in spectral analysis. Sure, it’ll identify the measure, sections and chords. However, you can draw MIDI notes on top of a spectral plot and export the MIDI to a file. A great way to capture a melody line from a song. deCoda has a focus panel which restricts analysis and playback to a specific frequency band and area within the stereo field. I see many uses beyond chord extraction!

Check out this introductory deCoda video. zplane have a v1.1 update in beta testing now. The beta adds the ability to save the chord progression to a file — a must-have feature. In v1.0, you need to jot the chords down by hand.

Hey, hey. If you keep your eyes and ears open, you can save some serious cash. The plugs and stuff mentioned here are first-rate, not sleazy hacks. Nows all we need is a time machine to learn, experiment, and put everything to good use.