Created by: Flux. Features: The BitterSweet Transient Designer. BitterSweet v3 is Flux:: acclaimed transient processor used by hundreds of thousands of users for audio transient management with the simple turn of a knob – Turning it to the Sweet side reduces the transients, and turning it to the Bitter side magnifies the transients – No dongle or registration required – 100% Freeware! Perfect for drum loops, instrumental attacks, or modifying room acoustics, Trans-X transient shaper plugin revitalizes individual tracks and full mixes alike.
Flux BitterSweet is probably the most popular free transient designer out there, and there is a reason for that: It’s very hard to mess up with this one. Getting results with the bitter/sweet knob is easy. Check out our new site for even more FREE DOWNLOADS! Free Plugins Transient Shapers. It can produce results on par with studio mainstays like SPL’s Transient Designer and Waves’ Trans-X. This simple plugin can achieve a wide variety of effects. Turn the knob to the right to add punch to drums, enhance the pluck of an acoustic guitar, or boost the consonants in a vocal performance.
It’s the end of the month, and your bank account is empty…
…again.
Oops.
And as much as you might feel like buying that new Waves plugin…
(You’ve had your eye on it for months, right?)
It’s probably not a good idea.
But if you’re still looking to expand your plugin library, don’t worry.
Sometimes, the best things in life are free…
Here are 7 of my favorite free plugins. Each of them offers something new and unique (no boring EQs or compressors). Download them all to extend your sonic palette and ultimately, craft better-sounding tracks.
And if you’re looking to dive deeper, I also put together a list of five plugins I use on every mix. If you’re wondering which plugins I recommend, download the list below to make sure you’ve got my top tools for the job.
Neutrino is the baby brother of Neutron—iZotope’s newest channel-strip plugin. While Neutron has a number of innovative features, Neutrino spins off the best of them.
Neutrino tames undesirable resonances caused by poor room acoustics, cheap gear, and heavy-handed processing. iZotope calls the effect “spectral shaping,” and it can sound similar to gentle, low-ratio multiband compression. This can make tracks sound smoother and more polished—like sanding the rough edges off a freshly cut piece of wood. I find Neutrino particularly useful on electric guitar tracks, which often have lots of harsh resonances.
People say “don’t mix with your eyes.”
Meh.
The truth?
Tools that provide visual feedback, when used properly, can help you make better mixing decisions.
A spectrum analyzer is one of these tools. It plots the frequencies of sounds out on a graph, which allows you to “see” what tracks are comprised of.
SPAN is my favorite spectrum analyzer. You can control the ballistics and response of its graph, which makes it flexible enough for a wide variety of tasks. You can even route multiple tracks into SPAN and compare their frequency content.
(P.S. Voxengo has a few other free VST plugins. They’re worth checking out too, but SPAN is my favorite.)
Bx_solo is a no-frills, stereo-imaging plugin. While it’s the least sexy of this bunch, it can still be pretty useful.
I like to add bx_solo to my mix bus. While I rarely push the stereo width past 100%, collapsing it to zero is an easy way to check for mono compatibility. The mid and side solo buttons are also useful. It’s great to have this one around—you never know when you might need it!
Mixing is a race against time.
The more time you spend on a mix, the more attached you become to what it sounds like. This makes it progressively harder to make good mixing decisions. Given enough time, even the worst mix will start to sound decent.
This is one reason I recommend mixing quickly and impulsively. You’ll get to the finish line faster, retain more objectivity, and ultimately, craft better mixes.
The first step towards more efficient mixing is to track how much time you spend doing it. Without this information, it’s easy to get lost in a black hole of endless tweaking.
Project Time makes this easy. Add it to a track, and it will start counting. The timer automatically stops when you close the session, and starts when you open it up again.
Keep an eye on Project Time, and you’ll train yourself to mix faster and more efficiently. It’s also an invaluable tool if you bill by the hour!
MeldaProduction makes some great plugins. They’ve earned the praise of many notable engineers, including mastering guru Ian Shepard.
The MFreeFXBundle contains 30 free VST plugins. They range from workhorse tools like a compressor and EQ, to less common effects like a ring modulator, flanger, and oscilloscope.
If you’re looking to fill some holes in your plugin library, this is a great place to start.
BitterSweet is among the best transient shapers out there. It can produce results on par with studio mainstays like SPL’s Transient Designer and Waves’ Trans-X.
This simple plugin can achieve a wide variety of effects. Turn the knob to the right to add punch to drums, enhance the pluck of an acoustic guitar, or boost the consonants in a vocal performance. Turn the knob to the left to soften tracks and push them back in the soundstage.
Sometimes a little crackle is a good thing.
Vinyl will make tracks sound like they’re being played on a turntable. You can vary the intensity of the effect by controlling the volume of different types of noise, the degree of wear and tear, and the decade your sound is from. The results range from subtle filtering to Edison phonograph.
This plugin is great for special effects, like filtering down a vocal or making an intro sound tiny.
I hope these 7 free plugins help you craft tracks that sound fresh and unique.
If you’re looking to dive deeper, I also put together a list of 5 plugins I use on every mix. If you’re wondering which plugins I recommend, download the list below to make sure you’ve got my top tools for the job.
Before you go—what’s your favorite free VST plugin? Share your pick in the comment section below.
/good-free-graphic-vst.html. It’s the end of the month, and your bank account is empty… …again. Oops. And as much as you might feel like buying that new Waves plugin… (You’ve had your eye on it for months, right?) It’s probably not a good idea. But if you're still looking to expand your plugin library, don't worry. Sometimes,
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Whatevermusic you make (maybe with the exception of some ambient styles), havingbalanced transients is super important for a good mix. Transient shapers can giveyou more control over the dynamics of your transients by changing their amp envelopeshape. This could be in the form of increasing the transient and adding morelife to a sound or by decreasing it and tucking the sound more into thebackground, for example.
Unlike compressors, there are only a handful of free transient shapers available. For this article, I tested several different free transient shaper VST, AU and AAX plugins and made a few awesome discoveries. Here’s the list – download links included:
Format: VST, AAX, AU; 32 bit + 64 bit
OS: Windows + Mac
Audio Examples
Dry:
Wet – “Bitter”:
Wet – “Sweet”:
FluxBitterSweet was created with simplicity in mind. This becomes clear from justlooking at the user interface. A big knob in the middle lets you choose ifyou’d like your sound rather “sweet” or “bitter”. Turning the knob towards“sweet” will reduce transients in volume and will put your audio materialfurther into the background, while turning it towards “bitter” will increasetransients and make your material more percussive.
To make thetransient shaper work with any type of material, you can choose how fast theplugin detects transients (fast, medium, slow). With the “period” slider, youcan adjust how fast the transient declines again.
But what ifyou want to only affect the transients in the middle or on the sides of thestereo field? No problem – BitterSweet has a dedicated slider that lets youchoose which signal should be affected: main (everything), center (the middle)or stereo (the sides).
The output levelcan be adjusted manually or linked to the main knob. If you link knob andoutput level, the overall volume will decrease when you’re increasingtransients. This is super convenient because it means you don’t constantly haveto adjust the volume while playing with your transient levels.
Flux BitterSweet is probably the most popular free transient designer out there, and there is a reason for that: It’s very hard to mess up with this one. Getting results with the bitter/sweet knob is easy and doesn’t really lead to extreme results, even if you turn it completely up or down. However, this also means that BitterSweet is a lot more subtle than other free transient shapers. Whether that’s good or bad will depend on your taste and project. However, for general mixing purposes, this plugin is definitely worth a try.
To use Flux BitterSweet v3, you first have to install Flux Center, which you can get here. When you open Flux Center, simply choose BitterSweet for installation.
Format: VST2, VST3, AU, AAX
OS: Windows + Mac
Audio Examples
Dry:
Wet – “Sharpened”:
Wet – “Softened”:
Here’s how the developer Auburn Sounds describes its level-independent transient designer Couture: “COUTURE’s goal is to get exquisite control over your dynamics, and particularly attacks. It solves a surprisingly huge range of mixing problems, with very low effort.”
In Couture,the main transient adjustment can be done with a big knob that’s labeled “Sharpen”.Turning this to the right will sharpen (increase) attacks and deemphasizereleases, while turning it to the left does the opposite. This effect can bedramatically heightened by using the x1 / x2 / x3 buttons, which affects howmuch the shaping is applied. To have maximum control over your material, youcan adjust the speed knob, which controls the decay level of your transients andthe front/back knob, which tells Couture where in the transient it should startwith the desired shaping effect.
The choicebetween different detector modes is a useful feature, which allows you toeither treat all transients the same way or depending on harmonic content. “Sybil”targets harsh frequencies and “Human” is supposed to even out the perceivedlevels of the transients, while “Flat” processes all transients the same way. Youcan also decide how much Couture should react to bass frequencies. This can beuseful when you only want to shape your snare sound in a kick and snare loop,for example.
In this free version of Couture, the built-in saturator does not work. However, even without it, Couture is a very useful tool that makes it easy to get control over your transients quickly. I found it very intuitive and the results sounded very musical to me.
You can get the free version of Couture on the Auburn Sounds website.
Format: VST; 32 bit
OS: Windows + Mac
Audio Examples:
Dry:
Wet – more attack, less sustain:
Wet – less attack, more sustain:
Dominion, created by Sascha Eversmeier from Digital Fish Phones, is actually quite an old tool as it was released in 2002! Still, I found it very useful and loved how easy it was to shape sounds to my liking.
What’s niceabout Dominion is that you have dedicated sliders for attack and sustain. Aftersetting the level of attack and sustain, you can set each one’s “length”parameter, which controls the decay of each setting. If you need more dramaticresults, you can switch on the x2 button and affect the level even more.
But this isnot Dominion’s only feature. The VST plugin also has a built-in saturator thatcan add harmonics to transients and therefore emulate analog equipment. Thesaturation can be further affected with a filter section (“hf details” in theuser interface). I found the saturation rather subtle (which I’m sure was thegoal), but pleasant and interesting.
If youchoose to download Dominion, make sure to take a look at the included manual. Notonly does it lay out the signal flow of the plugin, it has in-depth descriptionsof how each element works and can teach you quite a bit about transient shapingin general. It’s really cool that the developer put so much effort into makingthis plugin easy to use.
Warning:Trying out the “mono” switch created a very loud glitch signal for a second orso. Avoid switching this on while it’s processing sound.
Since Dominion is an older plugin, only a 32 bit VST version is available (for both Mac and Windows). You can get the plugin here.
Format: VST (Windows) – 32 + 64 bit; JSFX (Windows + Mac)
OS: Windows + Mac
Audio examples:
Dry:
Wet – more attack, less sustain:
Wet – less attack, more sustain:
Are you looking for a simple transient shaper with transparent sound and easy controls? Then you might want to check out Transpire by Sonic Anomaly. Transpire comes with just four controls: attack, sustain, sensitivity and output. This means that you have less control over your transients than with other plugins, but it also means that Transpire is somewhat easier to use – especially if you’re a beginner.
Thedevelopers from Sonic Anomaly stress that Transpire “does not operate linearly,which means small transients are being affected relatively stronger than largetransients. This is good for bringing up smaller details while not overloadingon large hits. As a result, percussive tracks can sound more steady andcontrolled compared to traditional transient enhancers.”
I foundthat this plugin can change signals in pretty extreme ways. More musicalresults can be achieved with more conservative settings – although this will,of course, 100% depend on your source material.
One feature that should be mentioned is that Transpire’s GUI is scalable – which is very helpful to anyone with a larger screen. A downside is that the VST version only works in Windows (although there is a JSFX version that is compatible with Mac).
Did weleave out any free transient shaper plugin that you love? Let us know in thecomments!