I browsed the whole internet and found the most unique, useful, and, most importantly, free plugins. I tested more than 100 of them and picked out only the ones that are unique, useful, and produce a high-quality sound. I skipped all the plugins that are boring, poorly designed, and sound of low quality, focusing only on those with a premium feel.
Number one: Ghost Radio by Quil.
This is a gothic-looking plugin that will make your sounds feel as if they’re coming out of a ghost radio. You’ll be able to talk with your ancestors and dead people.
You can run any sound through it, and you have a bunch of different features. If you don’t enable the spirit, you won’t be able to hear anything. If you move, there’s a ghost hand being here controlling that and it adds some weird ghost-like effects to the sound. You can also run this without any sound; it simply produces this type of sound, and you can use still tuning.
Number two: Mayor Choir by Somerville Sounds.
This is a very interesting plugin because the creator of this choir used their family—like, I mean, asked them politely if they wanted to participate in the creation of this plugin—and they recorded a choir. You can see all the people right here: Luke, the youngest, Austin, Sandy, and John. All of them are singing here, and it creates an insanely natural and alive sound in the choir that you mostly don’t get with other plugins. You can decide which family members you want in the choir to be playing. For instance, you can have Austin only, or Luke, and you have the effects to make it sound more like a choir and less mono. There are also some different presets—only boys, for example—and you have the ADSR here, so you can also make it staccato.
Number three: Pitch M by Vo Samples.
This is a pitch shifter that could potentially be an alternative to Little AlterBoy by Soundtoys. It allows you to pitch things and also do some formant shifting, and it is very clean when it comes to pitch shifting. The formants are okay, not the cleanest, but the pitch shifting is super clean. You can even put it on the master and shift the whole song without leaving grainy sounds, like, for example, Kilohearts’ pitch shifter. For generating some ideas, you can put it on the master and shift the whole song to spark new concepts.
Number four: Visco.
This is a very interesting sound morphing tool that allows you to morph between two different sounds with some controls. You upload two different sounds into it. For instance, on one side, you have a simple kick, and on the other side, a huge kick. You can morph between them and create unique samples. What’s interesting is that you can literally shape the blob into whatever form you want, and you’ll get goofy sounds. The coolest thing about it is that you can upload your own sounds. With some experimentation, you’ll find the exact sound that morphs nicely.
Number five: The Masker by Cinemystics.
This plugin is similar to Trackspacer or Soothe in terms of sidechaining options. It’s designed to make two colliding elements stop clashing, which is helpful for mixing. You put it on a melodic group, set the vocal track as a sidechain input, and the masker will carve space in the melodic group for the vocal. It precisely curves the frequencies of the vocal into the melodic group, helping avoid clashing.
