Top 50 Free Realistic Guitar VST Plugins With Sound Examples – Rock Guitar Universe

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The 8 Best FREE Guitar VST Plugins () - Producer Sphere. 

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Best free plugins for guitarists | Guitar World.

 

The Wagner Sharp honestly sounds a lot like the to my ears maybe with some slight throatiness , but why not experiment for yourself and see which you like best? This plugin comes with a built-in guitar synth Guitsyn , seven amp types, seven EQs with compression controls, six speakers with bypass and adjustable mics, separate MIDI volume control, Hot Sync and Tap Tempo for tremolo and delay.

You also get three modulators tremolo, triangle and square , two compressors pre and post , wah, drive pedal seven overdrive types , chorus with filter, flanger, phase shifter, delay and reverb and factory presets. The SimulAnalog Guitar Suite is essentially like it sounds.

The distortion sounds authentic to my ears, and by that, I mean about as good as Boss pedals sound. The PS-1 and Univibe are highly usable and sound great. Everyone loves a vintage tweed amp, right? Fortunately, you can still find plugins like the ACE 50s 5W tweed amp head.

As with the original Peavey Classic 50, the volume on this baby goes to 12 take that, Spinal Tap! If you need some classic tones, it might be worth adding to your arsenal. Capturing the ideal acoustic guitar sound can be a real challenge, since you typically need to use a sensitive mic, like a small diaphragm condenser or a series of sensitive mics, including a room mic just to capture the true, honest tone of the instrument. Then, some producers will even record the plugged-in sound of the guitar, if available.

Okay, but is it really that good? Well, this plugin offers a good amount of sparkle and shine. Strumming also sounds a tad artificial, but not bad at all. It also has built-in effects. Each do have a very different sound. DSK Guitars Acoustic is a simplistic acoustic guitar plugin. Your only controls are Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release and Level, which can be used to produce some interesting sounds.

The tones are closer to what you might hear on an old synth. But again, you can have some fun with it. If you already have one, perfect. They are solid DAWs for the money. The exact installation process for VSTs will vary. Then, locate the plugins settings on your DAW. Tell your DAW where to find the plugins and have it perform a scan.

Once this is done, the plugins should be installed and ready to use within your DAW. Specify which tracks you want to use which plugins with. When I first heard that term, I had no idea what it meant. Impulse responses basically duplicate the sound of a speaker cabinet.

This gives guitarists the opportunity to mix and match their favorite heads with their favorite cabinets. This has come to mean less and less in an age of ultra-realistic emulation. Anyway, while some preamp or amp head emulators sound good all on their own, it never hurts to pick up an impulse response convolver basically an amp cabinet, where you can load from any impulse response you have available like NadIR. Guitar VSTs are insanely fun to play with. You can add a lot of tones to your arsenal simply by downloading the plugins on this list.

Of course, they should be complemented by awesome impulse responses, even if some can be used without. Of course, it will likely mean downloading and installing individual plugins, mixing and matching, and keeping tabs on when and how to use each. It ships with a decent IR and a chain of optional pedals, including a noise gate. However, generally we had the best results while using the included noise gate and an external drive, such as the Mercuriall TSC which you can read about below.

As well as the Roots, there's also a free Stevie T collaboration, the Djentgod, which also sounds pretty good out of the box. Especially for, well, 'djent' sounds, the 'thall' preset sort of does what it says on the tin, for very little effort. One of the cardinal sins of bad mixing is a boring stereo picture. However, it's understandable why many choose not to experiment with their stereo placement — it's easy to cause phase issues when placing tracks.

Moreover, some classic tricks like using a short delay line to increase stereo spread can store up problems for the mono mix. Luckily, Wider is designed expressly to not introduce phase issues when summed to mono, and allows you to push a mono sound source beyond the normal stereo field.

The effect is hard to describe, but when working with more impressionistic genres, being able to place wet guitar parts wide in stereo space frees up the center of the mix for leads, vocals, and bass. It's the sort of plugin that, once you have it, it will crop up on every song you make from then on. Though it's based on the legendary chorus in the Roland Juno 60 synthesizer, the Magic Switch isn't a straight-up clone.

It's a little darker, a little more characterful, and it also sounds fantastic on guitar. It's got a wide, lush stereo image, and is fantastic for adding some movement to a rhythm part that needs to elevate a track. With only two controls, a mix and a bypass button, it also forces you to use your ears as you dial it in. You'll be amazed by just how much you can get out of it.

However, look a little closer, and you'll find that every band has a dynamics section that allows for a variety of gain manipulation techniques, beyond simple level control. This includes frequency selective compression, wide-band compression and multi-band compression.

These are all incredibly useful when bussing up and gluing together guitars in the mix, especially for taming bass-heavy chugs. When bedding tracks into a mix, most audio sources benefit from a little extra saturation, and the guitar is no different. This excellent utility plugin from Softube is a straightforward way of dialing in a little extra saturation on your tracks without being overwhelmed by additional controls, or the urge to overdo it.

Crucially, it stacks well with other saturation tools, meaning it plays nice not only with amp sims, but also emulated stompboxes and other gain plugins. While the Supermassive is definitely the biggest inducer of 'how is this free?

The Space Modulator is a simple flanger with great presets — three of which will probably see the most use. There's through zero, barber pole also known as 'infinite' and doubling. By messing with the feedback and rate, it's possible to get strange slapback echoes and hard-to-describe psychedelic artifacts that warp the guitar signal almost beyond recognition.

Crazily, this isn't even the final free plugin that Valhalla offer — they also give away the Freq Echo, which is essentially the front plate of a Roland Space Echo with some additional features. It's a dub monster, as well as being ace for generating vintage and psych echo tones on guitar tracks.

Although some DAWs like Logic ship with a fully featured guitar pedalboard , you might find yourself needing to push a track a little harder, or indeed smash the front-end of an amp sim into saturation. For that, you'll need some kind of saturator. A DAW's utility gain plugin will often suffice, as will a saturator. That said, level gain is easier when the tool is EQ'd with guitar use in mind, and that's where the Mercuriall plugins come in.

Generally, the TSC gets the most use, adding light saturation to guitar parts, and being used as a clean boost as part of longer chains — especially into emulated amps. It can be used to downsample, distort, and crush any input signal, often well beyond recognition, and it's amazing for creative sound design, whether it's a downsampled sweep just before a breakdown, or mangling the guitar to sound like a synth for a chiptune outro.

The IRs and responses may not quite keep up with some of the heaviest-hitting emulations on the market today, but it's doubtful any listeners will notice the difference once they're sitting in a mix.

Join now for unlimited access. Alex Lynham is a gear obsessive who's been collecting and building modern and vintage equipment since he got his first Saturday job. Besides reviewing countless pedals for Total Guitar, he's written guides on how to build your first pedal, how to build a tube amp from a kit, and briefly went viral when he released a glitch delay pedal, the Atom Smasher.

Fortunately, there are options like AmpliTube Custom Shop. This free desktop app comes with 24 pieces of gear.

With AmpliTube 4, you get a digital chromatic tuner, nine stomp boxes, four amps, five cabs, three mics and two rack effects. You can add more via the online Custom Shop, but of course this will cost money. You also get eight double rig configurations with 20 chainable effects, two amps and a preset database. By the way, these plugins are best used in conjunction with a cabinet simulator and impulses. Fortunately, if you follow the above link you will also find the LeCab2 impulse loader, which should work just fine more on that in a moment.

This is basically a classic Marshall style head. With the right impulses, it can sound decent. But we will be looking at more a little later.

Finally, we have a Soldano style head, which offers a warm, throaty tone. This free bundle comes with the ever-popular Emissary 2. Designed for heavy genres, the clean channel can either clean up or break up nicely depending on what you want.

The lead channel, of course, offers ridiculous margins of gain and heaviness. The tone is shapeable, however, and you can get increased high end, more warmth, or whatever else you need depending on how you tweak it. Ignite Amps has got several plugins worth checking out, including Emissary, which I felt was deserving of its own space.

Their focus is on creating high-detailed simulations of tube and solid-state amps, which gives you a sense of the quality they aspire to. This is a zero latency, eight-channel Impulse Response convolver.

The ProF. The Anvil is yet another emulation of a three-channel tube preamp. You get awesome saturation on the rhythm channel and the lead channel gives you that extra push. It basically emulates what a rackmount power amp is supposed to do. The plugin sounds great to my ears. It sounds awesome! It will respond to your exact guitar and technique, as well as how you dial in your tone. So, basically you just get the amp head unless you upgrade. Rather, it emulates a German high gain preamp.

And, it honestly sounds great. I find this plugin to be highly flexible, and unlike some amps, it sounds good even at low gain settings. A plugin that emulates the ever-popular Tube Screamer. So, the rest comes down to tone. The R47 will instantly add an edge to your tone, making it great for leads. Play with the Filter knob to dial in other highly usable tones. Well, that depends on how you use it. You can use it to record a track from scratch, beef up a prerecorded track and even re-amping.

Give it a try. Within a full mix, however, they seem to work great, so these amps are good where it counts. You can use it with your favorite impulse responses too, so that means you can get just about any tones you want using the right configuration.