This week DUY announced their Z-Room Reverb effect (Windows RTAS; Mac VST|RTAS|AU|MAS/MOTU) is now free.
DUY Z-Room features
High quality density and diffusion provide an unparalleled sound quality.
Total control over parameters which had never been available to the user before, with a friendly and intuitive user interface.
Three modes: Deluxe, Economy and Earlies. The second allows to free processing time, and the third focuses the strength of the algorithm on the processing of Early Reflections.
An exclusive Rehearsal Mode allows you to set the parameters while hearing the real impulse response of the reverb. This is one of the finest tools to evaluate the quality of the reverb.
You can choose between several room responses (reverse, gate, hall, room, stage…). All these values can be modified with the Stretch and Pre-delay parameters.
Processing time is freed when you choose not to include Early Reflections.
Internal 64-bit processing.
Independent mixing controls for each of the three selectable bands, as well as for the Direct, Early Reflections and Reverb signals.
Total control over the iteration depth, with six levels of calculation.
Over 50 presets are included.
Z-Room is the only reverb that allows you to control the time base of the reverb’s algorithm.
Visualization of the Direct, Early Reflections and Reverb signals in the time domain.
Good god it’s ugly, but DUY makes good stuff and you can never have too many options for reverb. Worth a try, if it sucks let me know in the comments.
Here’s an old but still great plugin. Last weekend I had Georg over to make some music and one of the toys that came out was LiveCut. I never understood it before and he showed me his usual approach to using it. (I’ll share that on the next Podcast). Anyway now that I’ve started using it, I’m sure it will be come a tool I’ll be reaching for often.
What does it do? Play a drum loop through it, instant jungle style chopping, stuttering and glitching.
It’s been a while since I’ve come across a nice cross-platform FREE plugin so when I heard about this today I knew I had to spread the word. Elysia makes some very cool hardware & software so getting just a taste of that for free is fantastic.
Niveau filter is a balance control over bass and treble. Simple layout and operation with only a few controls. VST, RTAS, AU – Mac, PC
Here’s what Elysia have to say about the Niveau filter:
Get the niveau filter section of our famous mpressor plugin – it’s free! Add punch to muffled snares, reduce the harshness from active pickups, create some wonderful Dub and LoFi sounds… there are so many ways to benefit from this little tool. It’s fast, efficient, and most important: it sounds great!
This filter is a specialist in changing the overall sonic character of a signal with ease. It features two comprehensive controllers and is capable of producing convincing results in no time at all. Whenever a classic shelving filter would be too limited and a fully parametric filter would be too much, the niveau filter is the perfect tool.
Its main function is to change the proportions between high and low frequencies. The principle is quite similar to a pair of scales: Dependent on the gain setting around a variable center frequency, the high frequencies are boosted whereas the low frequencies are attenuated (or vice versa) at the same time.
The center frequency can be shifted continuously between 26 Hz and 2.2 kHz or between 260 Hz and 22 kHz respectively (when the x10 switch is activated). The characteristics of the filter change in the extreme positions of the EQ Gain controller: the fully counter-clockwise setting will give you a low pass filter; fully clockwise position will result in a high pass filter.
One of the cool new products from Steven Slate is now ready for you to try. Trigger is a realtime drum replacing software that claims to be phase accurate, easy to use and comes with a great set of Steven Slate drums samples. Below is a video where bedridden (seriously!) Steven takes you through what Trigger can do.
I see this topic come up a lot, “what are the best free rtas plugins?” I’ve answered the question so many times but I’ve never addressed it on the site.
Below is my list of 10 (in no particular order) free 3rd party RTAS plugins I think everyone should have on their system. There are many more out there but these are the ones I use on a regular basis, they are useful and are stable.
