Top 10 Free Plugins for Metal - 2019 edition!

Can you mix using only free plugins? You bet you can! Here's my top 10 list & a sample mix using only FREE PLUGINS!

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The Intro & Outro song - "The Eagle Has Landed"

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About Spectre Sound Studios:
I'm Glenn Fricker, engineer here at Spectre Sound Studios. I love making records, and after doing it for sixteen years, I want to pass on what I've learned. On my channel you can find tutorials on how to record guitar, bass, real drums and vocals. There's reviews and demos of tube amps, amp sims, drums, mics, preamps, outboard gear, Electric Guitar, Bass Guitar, and plugin effects.
We've covered Moon on the Water, played Bias FX, given you the absolute best in Stupid Musician Texts, ranted & raved about bass guitar, and this channel is where The Eagle has Landed.
Everything you've wanted to learn about recording Hard Rock & Heavy Metal can be found right here on this channel!

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[michaelinglis]

For those who haven't discovered it yet the ignite amps emissary has "trim pots" on the back of the amp for biasing the power tubes. It's a control you'll instantly love especially if your reamping and want a fuller tone. The pots sweep reacts very realistically which is impressive. The kt88's set about at about 3/4 of the way up really give an excellent tone. I'm a firm believer that plugins will never be as good as a real tube amp but the emissary set right sounds really great. But you have to set it right in other words makes sure you input an output levels are set correctly. The emissary is nothing special with everything at noon but as soon as you dial it in it really is something special.

[JensLarsen]

Fantastic recommendations, Thank you! Will go download a lot of these! I think it is worth mentioning for the YT Video people that VST plugins can work directly in Premiere Pro so you can use them to improve audio there as well.

[StuartHetzler]

I want to add one: Softube's saturation knob. Simple, easy, sounds great

[seenbelow]

Everything from Tokyo Dawn Labs. Everything. And Variety of Sound.

[jeffbridges]

Dead Duck makes killer stuff. But my favorite multiband compressor is STILL TDR NOVA. It's just hard to beat and it's free from Tokyo Dawn. I was surprised not to see it in your list.

[SSNUTHIN]

I really love this guys energy. I needed some better compressors for my DAW. Thanks!

[mikedixon]

I'm so early I can smell Glenn's conditioner

[razmigdemirjian]

I’m loving ..., it’s unexplainable how you find all these good free plugins.... to be honest I never expected any good free plugins but man you always surprise us

You rock man 🤘🏻

[hjmvisuals]

did anyone else get an a7x vibe from the full mix great job glenn

[SC]

I think I'll try that Kotelnikov. I'm working in a square room, so I can use all the help I can get for taming a mix. Thanks for this one, man.

[czdot]

Ditch pulse and use Nadir 2.its also from Ignite Amps along with Emissary 2. 🙂

[michaelleggatt]

Grabbing all of these as soon as i get home, thank you Glenn.

[jeremythornton]

Wow! This all sounds killer! Thanks Glenn. Once again, you knocked it out of the park!

[nekromachine]

Tokyo Dawn Records/Tokyo Dawn Labs do the finest plugins which make life easier, The "Gentleman's Edition" of each where applicable/available are worth every bit of the extremely reasonable asking price (or better yet pick up a license for all of them
as it comes in even cheaper than purchasing a license for each). Fabien and Vlad who are the main developers are proper top-notch human beings along with Herbert aka Bootsy whose own Variety of Sound plug-ins took freeware to a new level and his genius can be heard whenever using the TDR VoS Slick EQ with the differing saturation that can be dialled in to taste in a number of flavours which in conjunction with the smooth curves of the equalizer create an Equalization plug-in which is ideal I find placed right after a surgical, subtractive/cuts-only equalizer and then gate/expander and compressor of your choice just as you find on any mixing desk/console. Along with Jan who's equally great plug-ins which are co-developed and released by Tokyo Dawn Labs as Ohlhorst Digital (OD in the plug-in name that is Jan's), Fabien's label is great for electronic music and Jan Ohlhorst is a very good mastering engineer with a real ear for detail, Also a great person. The most important part though is their command of the dark arts of coding truly stunning plug-ins, They are so good that they transcend the analogue versus digital paradigm and I happily reach for Tokyo Dawn Labs plug-ins equally, Maybe even more so than I do patch in a selection of very decent outboard equalizer options that I have to choose from, The same is true for Kotelnikov and compressors as it is that good. Limiter 6 is an amazing modular peak-limiter, clipper and loudness maximizer toolkit, I prefer it over any other plug-in options which I have most of the time. Absolute bargains each one is already and honestly, I can't recommend their plug-ins any more highly FWIW.


There are also other smaller developers whose quality rivals and depending on your needs/wants can better the big names.
Aleksy of Voxengo, Dave Gamble of DMG Audio, Tony Frenzel of Klanghelm, Andy of Cytomic Audio, Sean of ValhallaDSP, Jeroen Breebaart of ToneBoosters, Boz Digital Labs, Kazrog, HoRNet, SKnote.it, DDMF (DocuDead'sMusicFactory), Scott of Stillwell Audio/Schwa and apulSoft are a handful just off of the top of my head of many other smaller but damned great digital audio signal development processing overlords, Yet not the big team brands that are around and develop great stuff that you don't pay through the nose for/don't cost the earth.


Great stuff as always Glenn, Sorry I'm a little bit late to this one, Life is life. Cheers

[MrMatt]

Nice mix! And this song totally has an A7X feel

[wongsanggar]

Honestly, this is one your BEST MIXING VIDEOS EVER!
Thank you Glen.

[Zeroaddone]

Glad to see the BOD getting some love. I have a multitude of bass amp sims that I've tried in the past - both free and paid for - and the BOD blows them out of the water.

[ayahtzeenazi]

Getting a strong a7x vibes here, i love it.

[bonzzo]

I just had to cancel my 2 VST-Bundle subcriptions and go full free cuz of money issues.. This is such great timing. Thanks Glen!

[omnitone]

i knew about loudmax before i saw this but im glad he mentioned it. absolute miracle of a plug-in, way too good. 👍