Inside The DAW

Spitfire Audio added a new piano VST to their Labs catalogue. Labs is a series of completely free VST instruments. The Labs Soft Piano has long been a favorite of many composers for its beautiful, delicate tone. This time it's not a felt piano, but it's equally suited for softer music. Glass Piano is a VST version of famous composer Philip Glass's own piano that he used for over 30 years. All of his incredible music has been written on this piano. Spitfire visited him at his home in New York City to record the samples. It's a baby grand with lots of character and a sound that ranges from classic and beautiful to soft and atmospheric. I was really surprised that Spitfire decided to give this piano away for free, since it would be easy to market something with a name like Philip Glass attached to it. Glass Piano includes 6 articulations: Anthem, Floe, Glass Grand, Glass Grand Soft, Metamorphosis and North Star. Glass Grand and Glass Grand Soft are the most straightforward...

Spitfire Audio just added a new free VST instrument to their Labs collection called Ondes Musicales. Ondes Musicales is a very rare and expressive electronic instrument that has been used in many sci-fi scores, indie music and classical works. Nowadays it is not used that frequently but especially Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead has shown the beauty of this unique instrument to a lot of people and brought it back to attention. The Labs version was made in collaboration with professional ondist and composer Josh Semans and all of the samples were recorded with a custom-built Ondes Musicales. The sounds were then further processed with all kinds of effects like modular, granular synthesis and guitar pedals. There are 8 different patches available. Fragile Air, Granules, Metallique, Metallique Cries, Mobius Blips, Octave Echoes, Ribbon and Tape Swells. All of the presets sound very beautiful and ethereal and are perfect for creating interesting pads and textures. With the expression and dy...

Spitfire Labs is my favorite source of free VST instruments. Even though I'm using a lot of the bigger paid libraries now, there are a lot of sounds in Labs that I still regularly come back to because they're just that good and add a nice unique flavor to my compositions. Today I would like to share with you my personal top 5 Spitfire Labs instruments. These are the ones that I tend to use the most, but there are much more awesome sounds in this collection and new ones are added all the time.  The main reason I love Labs so much is because of all of the interesting sounds you can't really get from standard orchestral libraries. But there are a lot of great more straight forward instruments as well. For example, I'm not going to include the Labs Ensemble Strings here because I already use Chamber Strings as my main string library. It is a fantastic free set of strings though and might be really useful to you, so make sure to check out the full Labs collection too and see...

Orchestral Tools just released a new instrument in their awesome Sine Factory series of free VST instruments. This time it's a free acoustic guitar called Strand. As you would expect with Orchestral Tools, the quality is great as always. Playing around with the guitar is really fun and it is easy to combine single plucks and strummed chords. The sound is very clear and close and makes you feel like someone is really playing a guitar right in front of you. Steel and Nylon  One nice surprise is that there are actually two Guitars. A steel string guitar and a nylon string guitar. The nylon guitar comes in very handy when you need something a bit softer and sounds very lovely as well.  Both of these come with 4 different articulations and 3 variations for playing with both hands. These are in detail: 1. Single Notes 2. Strummed Chords Combined 3. Strummed Chords Longs 4. Strummed Chords Shorts 5. Strummed Chords Combined Two-Handed 6. Strummed Chords Longs Two-Handed 7. Strummed C...

Let's take a look at the three newest Spitfire Labs Instruments called Synth Strings, Organic Textures and Bass Guitar. I can't express how much I love Labs and it has always been a fantastic collection of high quality sounds and a great source of inspiration. As expected the three newest entries don't disappoint.  Synth Strings Labs has a really nice real string ensemble patch, but this time we get some cool synth sounds made from a popular 70s string synthesizer called Solina String Ensemble.  Synth Strings is split up into 6 different patches: Classic Strings, Classic Brass, Classic Strings & Brass, Strings Pad, Brass Pad and finally Strings & Brass Pad. I think it sounds really lush and lively and is going to be very useful for all kinds of genres. Like it states on the website, it's going to fit equally well in pop songs as well as Blade Runner style soundtracks. Organic Textures One more set of awesome pads in the Labs collection! These ones are very usefu...

Music Production can be really expensive and the prices for many of the big sample libraries out there can be really discouraging for passionate musicians on a tight budget. Luckily these days there are a lot of really awesome plugins you can get completely for free and with all of the companies competing with each other in the market today, we as customers are enjoying more high quality free products than ever before. So without further ado here are the best free VST instruments in 2021 in no particular order. I only included the best ones that are actually useful. 1. Spitfire Audio Labs This one is my absolute favorite free plugin ever, hands down! Basically it is a big collection of all kinds of sampled and synth based instruments. Getting so many free instruments by itself is already fantastic, but the reason I love this library so much is the quality and diversity of the instruments you can find here. Besides more common instruments like a bass guitar, a drum set and a string ense...