Free VST's For The Computer Uninthusiast Originally published in TapeOp, 2006. Like a lot of people who read this magazine, I'm a hardware guy, and have resisted the use of computers in my music for a long time. But it came to my attention recently that you could get a pretty good synth and effects rig going for free, if you had a Windows PC manufactured at any time in the past five years. I spent a few days figuring out the world of freeware VST's and discovered that there are a huge variety of amazing sounds out there, available for nothing whatsoever. Now these instruments are a serious part of my studio, and do things my hardware can't. VST's sound best if you have a dedicated audio interface on your PC, but I find the soundcard and headphone out on my laptop an adequate substitute, for the synths anyway. If you want to use VST effects, go for the interface. Tobybear—Minihost (VST player) To run VST's, you need some kind of host. Most computer musicians use commercial software for this purpose, but there is one freeware program out there that will run almost any VST ever made: the oft-updated Minihost, by Tobybear Productions (www.tobybear.de). It is a great little application, putting your softsynths in a discrete window, and giving you a little graphic piano keyboard to play on with your mouse or QWERTY keyboard (I recommend a USB MIDI controller). In addition, a toolbar along the top of the window offers a chord maker (like the toy Casios of yore), arpeggiator, and step sequencer that work with every single synth I've tried. There's also a pull-down preset menu, a CPU usage meter, and both MIDI and WAV recorders. It installs in a flash, takes up almost no space, opens instantly, and never crashes. To use your VST's, just make a VST folder and drop them in. Then direct Minihost to look there for them. With effects, you just set the inputs and outputs to the appropriate place. Piece of cake. Minihost only runs one VST at a time, so forget it if what you want is a big graphical rack of stuff. I think of it as the software equivalent of taking a synth or stompbox out of the closet and plugging it in. If you don't like the little registration reminder screen that pops up when you open, Pay Toby $20 and it will go away. He'll also answer any of your questions, and will direct you to his forum, which is trolled regularly by experienced Minihost users. Okay, now you need to go get some VST's. I've listed mostly synths here, but many of the developers who make them also make freeware effects. If these whet your appetite, and you want more, go to the largest internet clearinghouse of VST instruments and effects, KVR Audio (www.kvraudio.com). Good luck, and enjoy! Tweakbench—Rebar Tweakbench is a one-man operation that produces simple, specialized software synths and effects. Almost everything in its catalog is a one-trick pony, but in every case, the trick is a superb one, and one you're not likely to find elsewhere. One of my favorites is Rebar, a metallic-sounding pad synth that allows you to build your own additive waveform using a clear, simple graphic interface, and then shape it with a traditional amplifier envelope and two modification “panels,” marked “warp” and “delay.” Each contains a square cursor (it looks exactly like the main character in Atari's “Adventure”) which you can move around with a mouse through an X/Y axis. The delay axes are time and repeat, and changing them on the fly results in the same note-bending effects you'd get adjusting a tape delay. But the warp panel is the true gem of this synth—moving its cursor adds and subtracts all kinds of weird harmonics and digital distortion. You can get it to sound like everything from bowed cello to radio static. And if you have a couple of joysticks or KAOSS pads, you can map each panel to a separate set of MIDI parameters through Minihost, and use your hardware controllers. I have mapped each axis to a slider on my little Edirol controller, and it works great. Most Tweakbench synths have a common feature: a button marked “random.” Random patch generators are of limited utility in most synths, but Tweakbench products are limited enough to make this feature incredibly useful. Click it, the parameters and wave frequencies scramble. The result is almost always interesting. This program is freeware, but I liked it enough to donate money to the site—actually, I bought a t-shirt from the Tweakbench page at Cafe Press. I also recommend Pippo, a plucked-string synth; Toad, a drum machine based on Nintendo video game sounds; and Dropout, a really cool sequenced-filter effect. (www.tweakbench.com) Oli Larkin—SE64 Speaking of video game sounds, I have long lusted after the Elektron SIDStation, a synthsizer based around the SID synthesizer chip, most popularly used in the old Commodore 64 computer. As it happens, the chip is much more versatile than anyone suspected, and Elektron made a great machine out of it. Unfortunately it costs a thousand dollars. Oli Larkin has put an end to my longing, and done it for free. His SE64 monosynth emulates the sound of the SID, and adds a number of useful, well-chosen features that set this synth apart from other SID copycats. The synth has two oscillators, one with a selectable waveform, the other a triangle wave. You can adjust the amount of each, and cross-modulate them for weird, harsh sounds. There's a highly effective multimode filter (including bandpass!) and a “bit crusher” effects section, with one bit crusher per oscillator, and something called “SR,” which I assume is sample rate reduction. These are lo-fi effects that Larkin says makes your sound “more retro.” But the most distinctive feature of this synth is the sequencer. You can create eight-note sequences, with each note detuned or panned however you like, and it is blisteringly fast, fast enough to create the illusion of chords. Within minutes you'll be creating insane loops of blips, scrapes, and beeps. If you like it, check out Larkin's VST effects as well; he sells an excellent series of “endless” plugins, based on the barberpole effect. (www.oli.adbe.org) Elogoxa—Sun Ra Inspired by the avant-jazz legend whose name it bears, this VST is sort of an instrument and sort of an effect. It is labeled an “Ambient Texture Generator,” and this is an excellent description. It takes a sound file and allows the user to pan it and adjust its pitch, then overlay it with a subtractive oscillator, LFO's, percussion, effects, and inscrutable randomization algorithms. You can create plenty of great sounds using the provided sound files (they are in WAV format), but it gets much more interesting when you direct it towards your own. The spoken word makes an excellent base, as do ambient sound effects or noise. And after you've played a few chords, you can just remove your hands from the keyboard and let the thing groove on its own for a while. This VST also has an amazing graphic interface—it fills most of my screen and looks like a futuristic electronic frisbee. Elogoxa's other plugins are equally interesting—they include a tape-saturation emulator, an exciter, a delay based on Robert Fripp's famous “Frippertronics” effect, and a feedback synth called “The Devil Inside.” All of them look amazing. (www.uv.es/~ruizcan/p_vst.htm) SyncerSoft—Polyvoks Station In the seventies and eighties, while Americans and Europeans were enjoying the analog fruits of Roland, Korg, Arp, and Moog, a parallel universe was unfolding in the Soviet Union, where government-owned factories were churning out cool synths by the boatload. These are starting to become available on eBay, at rather appalling prices, and a few people sell samples of them—but SyncerSoft has been quietly making really terrific software emulations of them for a few years. Versions of the classic Alisa, Ritm-2, and Estradin-230 are available on their site, but my favorite is the Polyvoks Station, an emulation of the Polivoks, perhaps the most famous of all Russian synths. I've never played a real Polivoks, but this VST is a killer even if it's nothing like the original. The Polyvoks Station has two oscillators, plus noise, and a variety of weird modulations are possible on both oscs. Each also has PWM. The filter self-oscillates, there's a delay and a phaser, and unlike on the Polivoks, this synth is in stereo and is polyphonic! All in all, this is one of my favorite VA synths—its sound is powerful and out-of-the-ordinary in a market crowded with two-oscillator analog-style machines. Be warned: SyncerSoft's server is slow, making download time rather long, especially on dialup. But it's worth it. (http://vst.smtp.ru) Insert Piz Here—Mr. Alias “The Piz” makes weird, ironic VST's with names like “Blood Bucket” and “JunkMaster.” The graphic interfaces are intentionally crappy-looking and the description for Mr. Alias actually reads, “Note: Don't use this. It's bad.” Needless to say, any self-respecting musician would take this as a challenge. And it's true, Mr. Alias sounds horrible. That's the point, of course. It's a monosynth that employs pure mathematical waveforms for maximum digital aliasing. You know aliasing—that annoying background noise that cheap digital gear makes. Mr. Alias makes that sound on purpose. The synth looks terrible, too—what software would be like if it was designed by four-year-olds. None of the controls are marked, and none of keys you press ever seem to correspond to actual notes of any kind. Which is to say that Mr. Alias is awesome. The noise that comes out of it is very evocative—it can sound like the ambient soundtrack of a science fiction TV show, or a modem, or cell phone interference, or a child's toy with dying batteries in it. Sometimes it will suddenly, surprisingly, sound musical. While you're downloading it, check out the free Piz fonts, skins, and desktop icons, too. (www.thepiz.org/vst.html) Simple-Media—Spook Keys Spook Keys is a virtual theremin. This might seem rather counter-intuitive, as the whole point of a theremin is getting to wave your hands in the air—but, surprisingly, this emulation is extremely playable. The largest part of the Spook Keys display is taken up by a square graph, inhabited by a point of light. “Pick up” the light and move it around—there's your theremin! It's controllable with a mouse or the touchpad on your laptop, and as with Rebar, it can be mapped to MIDI controllers. Unlike most theremins, this one has four different waveforms, a pulse width control, stereo panning, glide speed control, and an elaborate delay complete with feedback and resonance. It's also controllable from a keyboard, in case you want to riff Good-Vibrations-style. How's it sound? It sounds great. It's a cinch to get those vintage RCA-theremin sounds everyone loves, and the non-standard options make it more versatile than any real theremin I've played. As a bonus, Simple-Media also makes an outrageously simple but very satisfying little instrument called The Shepherd. It was made to do one thing only: reproduce that whistling sound from Enrico Morricone's movie soundtracks. This it does with great precision. Download them both while you're there: (www.simple-media.co.uk/music/vsti/vsti.htm) c2006 by J. Robert Lennon.