BEST FREE VST SYNTHS

I recently came across a challenging format, not in terms of difficulty but in terms of restoring all the SW I had on my workstation that I normally use to produce music.

I found myself in front of my empty machine, still ‘virgin’, which hadn’t happened in a while. In a moment of reflection to decide what to install first and what after I wrote down on the classic sheet of paper a list of everything I had and what I considered strictly necessary.

It is precisely this last area that I would like to focus on in this article. For years my DAW of reference is Ableton and I have a 64bit architecture (this article refers to my case but if you need support write in the comments and we will see together the best solution for you).

I premise that this article is born, yes to make you the list of the best free VST3 Synths around, but also to give way to myself to save time during the next formatting or if some friend will want my support, to set up a project of this kind.

This is to tell you that it will be updated when I find or you signal me other plugins that deserve to be listed, subscribe to the newsletter if you want to receive updates (the form is at the bottom of the site).

At the moment I’ve decided to only use free plugins, as you’ll see below some are really great.

I certainly don’t mean to say that Sylenth1 or Rob Papen’s suite are not up to the standard I’m about to list. Absolutely not, that’s not my purpose, let’s see together the free alternatives in the world of music production.

what is a VST?

I can’t assume that everyone knows what we’re talking about, so before writing my personal list of the best free VSTs let’s do a little review.

VST (Virtual Studio Technology) was born in 1996 at a time when recording studios switched from managing multi-track music projects on reels to managing them on personal computers, later called DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations).

The period of strong change has put musical instrument producers in crisis, some were not able to ride the wave of renewal and disappeared, but some instead have rolled up their sleeves and together with developers have reproduced in software what before was exclusively analogue.

We can therefore define the VST as a real technology created at the time by Steinberg to give programmers the opportunity to faithfully reproduce hardware instruments.

If we define a VST as a Plugin, we also see them in the case of music production as an extension of certain functionalities to a DAW.

VST slang

In the world of plugins, there are three macro-families that differ in their function, and VSTs are not all the same. As I wrote before, each of them acts as an extension for its own DAW. The families are:

• Virtual Instruments, emulators of analogue instruments, whether they reproduce a synthesiser or a classical guitar they will fall into this category.
• Tools, useful tools for analysis such as the spectrum analyser, the decibel meter or the stereo aperture meter, we can define them as utilities suitable for reading analysis and not for direct intervention in editing.
• Effects, these are real signal processors such as compressors, equalisers, reverbs, etc.

Maybe surfing the net you’ll find various terms, VST and VSTi, I for one was a bit confused at the time, I want to make it simple. The term VST includes the categories of Tools and Effects, while VSTi includes all the virtual instruments.

There are several formats of these plugins, I list all the ones I found:

• VST topic of this article, to summarize you can install them in all DAWs except Logic Pro and Pro Tools.
  Audio Units or AU only available in iOS format.
• AAX developed by Avid for its Pro Tools DAW from v11, both for Windows and iOS.
• RTAS identical to the previous one but for versions prior to Pro Tools 11.
• TDM identical to RTAS
• Rack Extensions plugins dedicated to those who work on Reason.
• LV2, unlike its predecessors, is also available on Linux and is open to the development of programmers.

You will often find the distinction between the standard VST2 and VST3, will always tend to go towards the latter, I do not feel like analyzing the other formats because I’ve never deepened. Steinberg itself has announced that it is no longer supporting VST2. Apart from being the simplest and leanest technology for programming, among the various differences, I opt for VST3 for one reason above all. The smart processing (the plug-in does not remain in the processing phase if there is no audio signal present. So it saves CPU, and we all know how important that is, so I’ll tell you!

Vi ritroverete spesso la distinzione tra lo standard VST2 e VST3, a tendere si andrà sempre verso quest’ultimo, non mi sento di analizzare gli altri formati perché non li ho mai approfonditi. Proprio Steinberg ha annunciato la cessazione al supporto VST2. Oltre ad essere la tecnologia più semplice e snella per la programmazione tra le varie differenze io opto per VST3 per un motivo su tutti. Ovvero lo smart processing (il plug-in non resta in fase di processing se non è presente un segnale audio. Quindi risparmio di CPU, sappiamo benissimo tutti quanto importante è e quindi ve lo dico!

32 or 64 bit?

I’ve wrestled with this dilemma a lot of times and I think you have too. Starting from the base, 32 and 64 are the architectures of your operating system and your DAW (don’t confuse them with the quantization of 16, 24 and 32, they are different topics).

Before you start installing like there’s no tomorrow, whether it’s the list you see below or plugins you’ve bought, the first step is to check the architecture of your operating system. In my case it’s 64 bit and in the future the tendency is to move away from 32 bit even though big VSTs have not yet been rewritten to make them 64 bit compatible.

A few years ago I found a way to install a VST emulator to run 32bit VSTs in my 64bit Ableton. I don’t recommend this procedure, at most I can dedicate a special article if someone is interested.

the best free vst synth 64bit

Sorry for the extensive preamble, but I felt I had to, more than anything else because when I do this kind of article I write them for people like me who are just starting out. They could never find complete information on a particular subject, I hope I have cleared up some doubts.

Here’s my personal list and what I’m still using today:

MONO/FURY

Are you all familiar with Korg’s Mono/Poly marketed in 1981? If not, then watch this performance. The Full Bucket team has practically emulated this historic synthesizer, doing a really excellent job.

Manufacturer: FULL BUCKET

OS: Windows (32 e 64bit) e iOS (64bit).

Format: VST e AU.

DEXED

Now we’re going to look at the Yamaha universe, and more specifically at the first digital synthesizer they released in 1983, also known as the DX7. If you don’t remember it, watch it in action here.

Dexed is definitely the best emulation released in recent years.

Manufacturer: DIGITAL SUBURBAN

OS: Windows (32 e 64bit), Linux e iOS (64bit).

Format: VST, LV2 e AU.

PENDULATE

Born from the fruitful collaboration of the programming houses Eventide and Newfangled Audio. Many blogs define Pendulate as a chaotic digital synth. Because its peculiarity is to use its own oscillator to reproduce sounds different from any other synth and it is equipped with a chaotic osc based on a double pendulum. At first glance it may seem random but you will find that there are constant feedback loops underneath.

Manufacturer: EVENTIDE

OS: Windows (32 e 64bit) e iOS (64bit).

Format: AAX, AU e VST.

At the moment I’ll stop here, after formatting I’d like to go on with these plugins and explore them really deeply, in the past I did but with time I realized that it doesn’t make sense to have 100 installations in your workstation and always use the same 10 things.

I’d like to hear your experience and if you have any recommendations after trying them out I’ll gladly add them to the list so it can be a reference for everyone and keep it updated over time.