This week’s round-up of freebies brings you a free alternative to Soothe and a drum plugin that’s heaps of fun. Check out Dagon, Instant, and TheBus!
Free Plugins of the Week
Mercurial Tones Dagon: Smart Resonance Control that Moves with your Track
Is Dagon by Mercurial Tones the ultimate free Soothe alternative? It might very well be. As a resonance suppressor, it helps tame harsh notes and level spikes in your tracks. What’s unique about it is that it detects the relative spectral prominence of such annoyances, rather than the raw input level. This allows for transparent resonance suppression that keeps the character and musical vibe of the track intact.
Dagon offers various modes for studio and live use, including a Smart mode that automatically decides what to do from the musical context. The Focus control lets you dial in anything from smooth cleanup across wider tonal areas – perfect for loops, buses, and complete mixes – to surgical precision for dealing with sharp resonances. You can further adjust the focus area using an EQ that’s superimposed over the spectrum graph. Speaking of, I really like the visualization in Dagon; you can see at a glance what the plugin is doing and what frequencies to focus on.
Dagon is available for macOS and Windows in VST3 and AU formats.
TerminalVST Instant: Inspiring Grooves in an Instant
Instant is a fun sample-based drum plugin that makes short work of building interesting grooves on top of your kick drum. It offers four slots for clap, snare, and closed and open hi-hats, but you can load your own samples into the slots, so the names are just a guideline.
Each track comes with its own 32-step sequencer. A default pattern starts to run as soon as you open the plugin, but you can use the randomization feature to create an endless stream of unique patterns.
If you have a specific groove in mind, you can edit patterns by adding and removing steps and adjusting their parameters. In addition to pitch and velocity, there are couple of filters and a one-knob envelope (shape). Thanks to parameter locks, these changes are per step, and each step can even have its own shuffle value and microtiming (nudge). A record function lets you record automation in real time. When you’re done, you can export the groove as an audio file by dragging it to your DAW.
I found Instant to be extremely inspiring. If you’re looking for a free drum plugin to jump-start your creativity, this could be the one!
Instant is available for macOS and Windows in VST3 and AU formats.
Analog Obsession TheBus: Free Bus Compressor Plugin
TheBus by Analog Obsession is a free bus compressor plugin that works great on drums, percussion, buses, or anything that needs glue. While the name and GUI do give me SSL vibes, the developer points out that the plugin wasn’t modeled after a specific hardware unit.
TheBus offers three attack times (0.1ms, 10ms, 30ms) and three release times (50ms, 400ms, 800ms). There’s also a sweepable side-chain filter, and you can use an external side-chain signal if you wish. Straightforward and useful!
TheBus is available for macOS and Windows in VST3, AU and AAX formats.
Visit our archive for many more free plugins like Dagon, Instant, and TheBus!
The post Dagon, Instant, TheBus: Free Plugins of the Week appeared first on gearnews.com.