Can you handle all this free stuff?
There’s a lot of free software on the way for Christmas…
You’d be forgiven for thinking that everything – and we mean everything – is just about to treble in price, and if you want a turkey for Christmas then just forget it. Lorry drivers, Brexit, Mrs
Brown’s Boys… whoever. Whatever. They are all to blame for increased prices across the board and the resulting lack of variation in cheeses for your Christmas lunch. But not so the music software world. We don’t need lorry drivers because we use the internet! And that means there’s a whole load of bargains still to be had. And not just any old bargains either; ultimate bargains. Free bargains!* Not strictly ‘bargains’ then, yes we know*
Yes, we have a raft of free plugins to announce this month, and first up it’s SampleScience – who are no strangers to the odd free instrument – with both Analog Waveforms Ds and Deep Jupiter. The former instrument requires the company’s Decent Sampler plugin (think Kontakt but on a slightly smaller scale) which is also free. It includes a sample set from Dave Smith’s Mopho analogue synth with each waveform sampled note by note and 10 seconds in length. You even get four effects, a filter plus plenty of envelope and filter options.
Deep Jupiter is SampleScience’s analogue bass sound module featuring “the the sound of a famous 80s synthesizer with the name Jupiter in it”. Mm, how could we possibly say which one? It has eight bass sounds and a surprising number of tweakable parameters.
Talking of Kontakt, Native Instruments are celebrating their 25th anniversary – they started just before us. As well as a bunch of limited edition hardware (Ultraviolet and Vapor Gray Komplete Kontrol, Maschine and Traktor) they’ve also announced Twenty Five. This is a free Kontakt instrument that lets you create sounds via presets from 37 different instruments from NI’s history, going right back to Generator. It’s only available until 31st December so download it fast!
Fourth up, reader Mat Ward has developed a free iOS and Android Serum controller described as “the closest you’ll get to a hardware version”. Check out the video clip at https://youtu.be/Vyc0KOImpyo which looks pretty cool!
Finally, phew, United Plugins have released a free version of QuickBass. Well, essentially it doesn’t spit noise out after the 15-day trial but disables some tweakability. Still works though.
unitedplugins.com, samplescience. com, native-instruments.com