Top Free Plugins For Mixing And Mastering | Lost Stories Academy

Top Free Plugins For Mixing And Mastering

Mixing and Mastering are the core essential for a good sounding record and we always look for some better tools to achieve that professional sound.

But some of the plugins are out of the budget for many upcoming producers. Take a look at these top 10 free plugins which you can use and make the next hit curated by Lost Stories Academy.

Nova Eq by TDR

Top Free Plugins For Mixing And Mastering

Eq is the most important tool when it comes to mixing and mastering. It helps shape the dull sound into something lively or cut some harsh frequencies to make it a more pleasurable listening experience.

Nova Eq by Tokyo Dawn Records is a great pick as it offers a variety of tasks you can perform. It has a user-friendly interface and also provides dynamic processing.

It has four dynamic eq bands and a high pass and low pass filter as well. With these features, you can achieve a lot. Its equal loudness functions help find the optimal setting without getting distracted by loudness differences.

It is unusual for a free plugin to be this powerful. I have no hesitation recommending Nova to anyone looking for a dynamic eq.

Dcam Compressor

Compressors are the best friends of music producers. It helps from taming down transients to add sonic body, fullness, and punch to the mix.

Dcam Compressor is a free plugin by Fxpansion which is based on circuit modeled compressor and has a design of classic console bus compressor.

Its main use is to glue together groups or the entire mix and enhance punch and clarity. The VU meter is a great feature that helps in informing us how much work the plugin is actually doing.

Melda free fx Bundle

Melda production has dominated the free plugin market for a while now. In this bundle, they are giving 37 top-class plugins for absolutely no cost.

From analyzer to the compressor to stereo expander, this bundle has everything you need.

I strongly suggest these tools from the bundle for mixing and mastering purposes:

  • MEqualizer
  • MCompressor
  • MSaturator
  • MStereoExpander
  • MLoudnessAnalyzer

OTT

If you are an electronic music producer and looking for that on-the-face sound you hear in most of the tracks then OTT is your buddy.

OTT is a free multiband compressor based on Ableton’s OTT preset in the multiband compression section. It is mostly used as an aggressive upward/downward compressor by many dubstep and electro producers.

It has a lot of features include

  • Depth Control
  • Time Control
  • I/O gain controls
  • Visual display of input and gain reduction over the low/mid/high bands.

Stereo Buss Compressor by Minimal System Group

Analog bus compressors are the secret behind many classic records.

Bus compressors help glue all elements of a track together and make mixes sound larger and add punch and character.

This free stereo bus compressor is an analog-based bus compressor that has a professional GUI design and uses less CPU and generates great sound.

Try grouping all elements of your song together. Add the MSI Stereo Buss Compressor to this group and listen to the magic.

Wider by Polyverse

Looking to add stereo width to your sound? Here is the free plugin Wider by Polyverse in collaboration with the Mighty Infected Mushroom.

Wider is a mono-compatible stereo widening plugin that gives an illusion of expanded stereo image with a great amount of width to a mono signal.

The best thing is that every widened sound will remain in phase even when it is summed back to mono.

Wider can be used to increase the stereo image of any mono signal up to 200% of full stereo for an extra-wide, exaggerated effect.

A great tool indeed.

Span By Voxengo

SPAN is a real-time Fast Fourier Transform audio spectrum analyzer plug-in for professional music and audio production applications.

For the most part, it was derived from Voxengo GlissEQ dynamic parametric equalizer and reproduces its spectrum analysis functionality.

SPAN supports multi-channel analysis and can be set to display spectrums from two different channels or channel groups at the same time.

Izotope Ozone Imager

Izotope ozone imager offers a wider range of possibilities for imaging your music.

Stereoize mode can turn mono into stereo, with no need for reverb or doubling. There are two modes of Stereorizing, Stereoize II mode for subtle enhancement, or Stereoize I for a colorful phasing effect.

You can easily widen or narrow your sounds to fit them in any mix. It’s the easiest way to spread out a narrow-sounding synth or nestle your bass in the center.

D16 Frontier Limiter

A limiter is basically a compressor but with a very high ratio, which often gets used for mastering purposes.

D16 is an aggressive limiter where the threshold goes to -48dB.

It has adjustable release time, automatic gain makeup functionality, and optional soft clipping on the output.

It features a large gain reduction meter, a built-in preset manager, selectable input channel control, and an advanced options menu for adjusting the processing quality when used in real-time and while rendering the song.

This allows the user to save some CPU power while mixing or mastering and then render the project at the highest quality possible.

Youlean Loudness Meter 

In this digital era, there is a loudness war going on as we all know. Different streaming platforms have different loudness thresholds.

Measuring your loudness level after the mastering is crucial if you do not want your song to turn down by several dBs.

For example, Spotify has a loudness threshold of -14LUFS and your track is at -9LUFS then Spotify will turn down the volume of your track by 5dBs.

To avoid that, using the Loudness meter by Youlean is the best option. Youlean Loudness Meter helps you find the true perceived loudness of your audio and prepares it for streaming services release.

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Top 9 Free Mastering Plugins

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