Sound Design with Plugins: 3 Tools for New Sounds + Free Alternatives – Perfect Match!
Turning Everyday Tracks Into Something Completely New
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Sound Design with Plugins: 3 Tools for New Sounds + Free Alternatives – Perfect Match! · Source: Soundtoys
Sound Design with Plugins: Effects are the real key to genuinely new sounds these days, since exciting tones rarely come straight out of instruments or sound sources anymore. Instead, they show up through additional tools, sometimes used live during tracking, but far more often applied during post-production. We’re showing you three plugins that pack a ton of creative potential for sound design and can turn a plain track into something entirely new. And as a bonus, we’re throwing in a strong free alternative for each pick too.
Sound Design with Plugins: Everything on Building New Sounds With Effects
Sound Design with Plugins
“Sound design with plugins” might sound a bit abstract and technical, but the core idea is pretty simple: transforming the sound of instruments or individual track recordings into something new using effect plugins. That’s how a plain, not-particularly-exciting part turns into a textured, characterful pad, an epic atmosphere, a nasty bassline, or even an entire hook.
Once you start digging into what effects can actually do, you develop a real feel for the possibilities. At the same time, effects always invite experimentation, honestly, half the fun here is just the process itself.
In this Perfect Match, we’re showing you three plugins that we think work great for creating genuinely exciting new sounds. And for each one, you’ll also get a solid free alternative. As always with our Perfect Match series: these are just suggestions, there are obviously plenty of other interesting plugins out there too. We cover new ones regularly here at Gearnews.
Multi-Effects Like Soundtoys Effect Rack Bring Serious Creative Potential
Today we’re focused on tools that really shine during post-processing, meaning the editing you do afterward in the DAW. And that brings us straight to our first point: your DAW almost certainly already ships with a handful of usable effects for sound design with plugins.
But sometimes you want to look beyond the stock stuff and try something new. And when it comes to creatively reworking a recording, a multi-effect is the perfect tool for the job. What’s better than one effect? A whole stack of them working together, obviously.
Soundtoys Effect Rack packs 14 effects from the renowned manufacturer into a single plugin, plus a solid stack of presets on top. That gives you a genuinely great starting point, and you’ll land on surprising results pretty fast in a lot of cases.
Effect Rack includes Crystallizer, Decapitator, Devil-Loc, EchoBoy, EchoBoy Jr., FilterFreak, FilterFreak 2, MicroShift, PanMan, PhaseMistress, PrimalTap, Radiator, Sie-Q, and Tremolator, all excellent-sounding FX from the company. Worth noting: these aren’t available individually here, only combined up to six effects at once. SuperPlate and the still fairly new SpaceBlender effect are included too, though you can’t tweak their parameters unless you also own a full license for those plugins.
If you want to use every included effect individually (plus a few extras) and get full access to SuperPlate and SpaceBlender inside Effect Rack too, the complete Soundtoys Bundle is the better option for you. Effect Rack is included in that bundle too, naturally.
Soundtoys plugins aren’t cheap, but they’re worth every cent. Still, it’s worth waiting for one of their regular sales! Either way, the individual effects and Effect Rack itself are genuinely strong tools for sound design with plugins. Get Effect Rack and the Soundtoys Bundle here at Thomann*.
There’s no direct free equivalent for this one, but the free Kilohearts Essentials Pack includes 35 effects that combine with the company’s paid Snapin host plugins, or you can handle chaining in your DAW itself (in Ableton Live, that’s Racks, for instance). And MegaMod is a genuinely exciting free plugin that lets you build entire effect containers out of your own plugins and then modulate them extensively. A real hidden gem for sound design with plugins.
Reverbs Like Eventide Blackhole Do a Lot More Than Just Add Space
Reverb effects hold an incredible amount of potential for cool sounds that go way beyond a typical wet signal. A popular trick, for instance, is dialing in a huge reverb space with an extremely long tail, recording that, and then repurposing it as the foundation for pads or ambient textures.
Not every reverb effect handles this equally well, though, which is exactly why specialists matter here, ones that already deliver a distinctive sound on their own and offer practical features like freezing the effect.
Eventide Blackhole ranks among the best-known and most beloved plugins in this space. It’s built on algorithms pulled from the pricey DSP4000 and H8000 (or the newer H9000) hardware units, with extremely long time settings available plus a set of modulation parameters.
The special Gravity parameter essentially reverses the direction of the reverb tail’s timeline, and the Freeze function generates endless reverbs at the push of a button. You can assign multiple parameters to the virtual ribbon macro controller and tweak them live in real time. All in all, a genuinely rich tool for sound design with plugins.
The same advice applies here: it’s worth waiting for one of the regular sales. Grab Eventide Blackhole here at Thomann*, and there’s now even a version built for Dolby Atmos and surround environments called Blackhole Immersive*.
There are more and more genuinely great-sounding free reverb plugins out there these days, and Valhalla’s Supermassive is easily one of the best. This plugin is strong enough that it deserves a permanent spot in your arsenal. You can read more about Supermassive here.
Sound Design with Plugins: A Granular Effect for That Special Something
There are plenty of tools worth mentioning for sound design with plugins, so this Perfect Match can really only scratch the surface. What else could sit alongside a flexible multi-effect and a specialized reverb? A saturator? A compressor? A filter plugin? A bitcrusher? Sure, all valid picks, but we want to suggest something else instead. How about a granular effect?
Granular synthesis is genuinely effective at turning audio material into something completely different. Compared to a lot of other FX, granular effects feel noticeably more experimental, and that’s exactly what makes them such a great addition. There’s a bit of a learning curve here too, though, to get comfortable with everything they can do.
Portal from Output offers a genuinely simple, direct way in. The plugin is built around a large X/Y pad that basically invites you to start playing with it right away. Advanced mode also unlocks access to a lot more parameters, turning the plugin into a genuinely deep tool for sound manipulation.
What’s especially interesting here is the tempo-syncable grain delay and the built-in pitch modulation based on musical scales. That means you can land on genuinely musical results without much effort, but you can just as easily create some seriously off-the-wall sounds too. Seven effects round out the plugin. Output Portal really is a door into new sonic territory. Grab the plugin here at Thomann*.
While there are plenty of exciting commercial granular plugins out there, the free alternatives are a bit thinner on the ground. The original hidden gem, Emergence, has since gone paid, and the best current tip is probably Lagrange from UrsaDSP. It’s a granular delay with a pretty stripped-down design that’s still genuinely capable of producing some interesting results. If you’re on Ableton Live (with Max for Live), Granulator is definitely worth a look too.
Conclusion: Sound Design with Plugins
Let’s wrap this up. Sound design with plugins genuinely pays off, since you can pull surprisingly interesting sounds out of otherwise plain, unremarkable recordings. The truly exciting sounds don’t necessarily come from the instruments themselves, they show up later, during post-production. And this goes well beyond your typical mixing process. Getting there, though, takes the right tools.
A multi-effect like Soundtoys Effect Rack bundles a stack of high-quality audio processors together, giving signals a fresh sound or transforming them into something barely recognizable from the original. Combining multiple effects already unlocks a huge amount of potential on its own, and with the included presets, you might land on genuinely convincing results after just a few clicks.
A reverb can absolutely do more than deliver typical (and often subtle) ambience. Push the settings into more extreme territory, and you get sounds that work great as a foundation for resampling, pulling entirely new textures out of existing material. Plugins that deliver their own distinctive character, offer extremely long tails, and include features like freezing tend to be the most useful here. Eventide Blackhole remains a proven tool in this department.
When it comes to sound design with plugins, granular effects definitely shouldn’t get overlooked. Compared to a lot of common (mixing) tools, these effects put a much stronger focus on sonic experimentation and often produce genuinely unusual results. A plugin like Output Portal takes an intuitive approach here, while still offering enough depth for experienced users.
Together, this makes for a genuine Perfect Match for exploring new sounds. And this is really just the beginning, there’s plenty more useful gear out there beyond these three picks. We’ve also thrown in three free alternatives to get you started without spending a cent.
More Perfect Match
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