Virtual instruments are software emulations of traditional instruments or hardware electronic musical instruments.
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There is a staggering range of virtual instruments available nowadays, covering multi-timbral rompler modules to dedicated emulations of guitars, basses, drums, keyboards, and more.
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Some of these VSTi plugins (as they’re also called) are free. So in this article we’ll take a look at some of the best free virtual instruments you can download today. Many of which are pro worthy.
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Intro: About Virtual Instruments
The benefits of virtual instruments are fairly obvious. They take up much less space than their hardware equivalents, they don’t overheat, and many of them have virtually unlimited polyphony. They are also much easier to edit and they almost never break down.
Here we run down some of the most intriguing virtual instruments currently available. Although some purists may scoff at the idea of these replacing their well-loved guitars or keyboards, there is no denying that they provide a surprising range of great sounds at a price that even professional musicians will appreciate.
Best Free VSTi Plugins
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The List
The Roundup
Native Instruments’ Kontakt Player is arguably the Don of all free virtual instrument plug-ins. Based on the company’s own hugely successful Kontakt sampler, Kontakt Player effectively hosts all sample-based instruments developed for its more fully-featured big brother.
The compatibility goes the other way as well. All free instruments developed specifically for Kontakt Player will load up and play in the full version of Kontakt. Between the two, there is a staggering assortment of free and paid instruments, all boasting of the trademark Native Instrument quality.
To get budget-savvy musicians and producers started, NI offers a free Kontakt Factory Selection consisting of 50 premium instruments. Some of these are slightly cut-down versions of the instruments developed for Kontakt, while some are full versions developed specifically for Kontakt Player.
While Kontakt Player focuses mainly on standard instrument libraries, Native Instruments’ Reaktor Player is geared more towards the synthesis side of things.
Demonstration
Reaktor is of course the full-blown modular synthesis environment that gives users unparalleled and unlimited opportunity to design virtually any type of synthesizer, sequencer, or signal processor they could think of from scratch. With Reaktor Player, users are able to play back a wide variety of instruments and effects developed in and for Reaktor, with a more modest set of editing capabilities.
As with Kontakt Player, there is a huge range of ready-made instruments available for use in Reaktor Player. NI even offers two free devices to get you started: the Blocks Wired pre-patched modular synth and the Mikro Prism synthesizer.
Reaktor Player obviously doesn’t come close to providing the depth of power and customizability offered by the full version of Reaktor. Nevertheless, it is a good introduction to modular synthesis. Furthermore, the availability of hundreds of Reaktor instruments cover a board range of sound-crafting options.
Ample Guitar M Lite is the free version of Ample Sounds’ popular AGM guitar simulator. Emulating the warm, rich tones of the Martin D-41 acoustic guitar, Ample Guitar M Lite is now on its second version.
For the price of a free download, you get an enhanced set of features that now match the capabilities of the full version. The note range now spans E1 – C5, and the plug-in now works as a standalone instrument. Even if you do opt to use the instrument in your DAW, multiple instances will take up much less resources than before, and they will load up faster as well.
Demonstration
As you may have guessed from the name, Ample Bass P Lite is Ample Sound’s free bass guitar sample player plug-in. A cut-down version of the full Ample Bass P II component of the company’s Bass Series product line, this plug-in has fewer samples and fewer round robin variations than the full version. It also has a smaller note range than the paid product, covering D1 to F4. Nevertheless, the Ample Bass P Lite does a good job of cranking out the distinctive tones of the Fender Precision Bass, which it models.
Manda Audio’s MT Power Drum Kit is a free drum sampler that has a fairly wide selection of acoustic drum kit sounds. Great care has been taken to record and process the original samples, giving users a range of high-quality drum sounds perfectly suited for pop, rock, and even metal.
Those who wish to process their drum sounds with their own plug-ins might not appreciate the fact that the MT Power Drum’s sounds are already processed. Nevertheless, EQ and compression were applied quite tastefully, and the sounds should fit in well in most mixes.
Demonstration
Togu Audio Line has garnered quite a bit of acclaim for its excellent line of synthesizers and effects processors, a number of which are free. NoiseMaker is one of these, and it compares favorably to the company’s own paid emulation of the Roland Juno 106 analog synth, the TAL-U-NO-LX.
The NoiseMaker incorporates some of TAL’s more popular effects processors on board. There is the Juno-derived chorus with two modes for starters, along with a reverb, a delay, and a bitcrusher, all of which exist as free standalone plug-ins.
DistroCore’s DC Bazz::Murda is a bass and kick synthesizer that is capable of a surprisingly wide array of sounds. Although aggressive and distorted industrial sounds are its forte, it can be dialed back for more subdued tones as well. Even so, this is one plug-in that was obviously designed to get as loud and nasty as possible. For some users, that could be a good thing!
Top Pick
Native Instruments’ Kontakt Player and Reaktor Player are a couple of the best free virtual instruments that you can get, without a doubt. They provide a superb one-two punch that simply can’t be beat.
Between the two, you pretty much have all your bases covered, whether you need bread-and-butter rompler sounds, exotic World Music libraries, or synthetic sounds ranging from vintage to cutting-edge.
Given the wide range of sounds they cover and the trademark NI quality, these two are neck-and-neck as our top picks for best virtual instrument plug-ins.
Like friends, soft synths come and go, but only a few will be there for you year after year. In this sense, Z3TA+ 2 is a firm ally of ours.
It’s been that way ever since the first version, programmed by René Ceballos of rgc:audio, debuted in 2002. A few years later, Cakewalk took on rgc:audio, and in 2007 gave us Z3TA+ 1.5. After that, though, it looked as if Z3TA+ was going nowhere, until v2 was unexpectedly announced a few months back.
While the interface has had a significant functional and aesthetic makeover, the synthesis architecture hasn’t changed.
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Z3TA+ 2’s most distinctive feature remains its oscillator section, featuring six wavetable oscillators with waveforms ranging from analogue favourites (saws, squares, etc) to grungy, harmonic-laden affairs. There’s an eight-voice unison mode, oscillator reset/sync and typical pitch controls.
Each oscillator is connected to the next, in a circular fashion, so the sixth feeds back to the first. The Group controls determine how they interact: the Add mode mixes them, like normal synth oscillators, but you can also use ring, phase or frequency modulation and hard sync.
Already this gives the oscillators potential for everything from smooth analogue tones to the weirdest, dirtiest noises imaginable.
The part of your brain that deals with soft synthesis is no doubt throbbing already, but get a load of this: each oscillator has a waveshaper with 16 sliders for radically reshaping the waveform.
Some are self-explanatory, such as LP and HP Filter, but others have an abstract effect that cannot be described.
There are four new waveshaping styles: Random All, Random Odd, Fold and our favourite – Spectrum.
Throwing shapes
In previous versions of Cakewalk Z3TA+, wiggling the waveshaping sliders showed potential for some cool sounds, but frustratingly, you couldn’t target them using the modulation matrix.
Well, now you can, and this is perhaps the most exciting new feature of Z3TA+ 2 in terms of raw synthesis power.
Of the dual filters, in addition to the nine variations on low-pass/high-pass/band-pass/band-reject (which are decent, but not breath-taking) and formant filter, there are three new stacked resonant modes (which make use of the new Separation control) and a comb filter.
When pushed, these additions can lead to rasping, squealing sonic mayhem that’s great for contemporary dance genres, and the per-filter limiter option can keep them under control.
Serial offender
The filters can be arranged in serial (Dual) or parallel fashion and panned individually. The way Z3TA+ 2 handles stereo signals (ie, when using stereo unison oscillators) is still limited, however, because when you run the filters in parallel, they operate in mono, and you thus need to use both of them to achieve stereo filtering.
The mod matrix is much the same as before, with 16 slots and Range, Curve and Control columns for more control than most synths, but it’s not so intuitive compared to more visual modulation schemes, such as in NI’s Massive.
Main mod sources are six envelopes and six LFOs. The new graphical view makes envelopes easier to edit and the potentially complex LFOs readily grasped.
One thing we’re not keen on is the non-standard labelling of tempo sync modes, where ‘1’ means one quarter note (ie, one beat), ‘1/4’ means a 16th-note, etc. Weird.
Oversampling options are the same, going up to 2x (but no higher). There is a new ‘Highest’ option for wavetable quality that can reduce artifacts in certain grungey patches.
Flying fingers
There are a few new performance features for Z3TA+ 2, and the most novel is Adaptive Pitchbend.
Normally, when you use the pitchbend wheel, the wheel’s maximum always gives, say, a two-semitone increase. Thus it’s pretty easy to bend notes out of key. Not so with Adaptive Pitchbend. Enable this, set the desired key, and the maximum travel of the pitch wheel always gives a note that’s in key.
It even works on chords, reconfiguring major triads to minor on the fly, for example. If you don’t want to play in a fixed key, there’s an adaptive mode that will attempt to follow you, and it works quite well.
In use, this is all tremendous fun and very inspiring, whether you’re a grade-eight wiz on the keys or a one-fingered plonker.
Elsewhere, there’s an XY pad mod source that can be controlled by MIDI or even a joystick.
Finally, the arpeggiator has been improved, now displaying the pattern (note that it’s not an editor).
There are also Humanize and Swing controls (the latter lacks the option to swing eighth-notes or 16th-notes, however), and most excitingly, the option to import any MIDI file as a pattern.
This latter feature was actually present in previous versions, yet it never seemed to work properly. It does now, though!
Distorted reality
The effects (distortion, modulation, delay, compression, reverb, EQ/amp sim) can now be dragged into any order, making them all the more useful.
The Distortion module has new routing modes, and its Smart Shaper is replaced by the HyperTube mode, which sounds similar but seems capable of a tad more grit without compromising clarity, and so works well on chords and complex patches.
Oddly, Valve Amp mode now offers slightly more drive, but the Heavy Metal option has far less, and is now the meekest of the lot.
Oh, and there’s no effects version of Z3TA+ this time around. Shame!
Previously, Z3TA+ attracted microtuning fanatics with its multiple optional tuning styles and ability to import tuning files. These features have disappeared for v2 – we’re sad to see such forward-thinking geekery struck off the list.
Cakewalk Z3TA+ was always known for its masses of great patches, and as well as a bank of classic Z3TA+ patches, there are more than 1,000 new ones that really do show off what the synth can do.
There are ace atmospheric pads; glassy FM bells; dance sounds ranging from funky and classic to modern and hard; 70s/80s analogue-alikes; some wicked FX and drum hits; laudable attempts at recreating real instruments; ‘one-finger’ evolving sequences and more.
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While the underlying sound engine hasn’t changed much, the sound quality stands up to other modern soft synths, especially since it’s now more feasible to pile on lots of oscillators and leave the 2x oversampling on as standard.
We’d recommend Z3TA+ 2 to anyone looking for a powerhouse synth, especially at just £69.
If you’re a newcomer to synthesis, expecting to make all your sounds from scratch, you could be out of your depth, although it’s great as a ‘preset machine’, and it’s easy enough to tweak presets to your taste.
Those who will get the most out of Z3TA+ 2, however, will be hardcore synthesists and sound designers, for whom a world of aural exploration awaits.
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File name: | Z3TA2.FullPC.zip | Z3TA2.FullOSX.zip |
File size: | 157 MB | 162 MB |
Upload date: | 10/06/2019 | 10/06/2019 |
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