Although the Labs series has been available for a while now, new library keeps turning up and continues to bring us a host of new, creative, and esoteric sounds.

Currently in the collection, we have instruments like the Chinese Moon Guitar, Hand Bells, and a Music Box. There are atmospheric sounds in the London Atmos and creative collaborations in the Opia instrument of unconventional sounds. There are dulcimers, strings, pianos, choirs, and all sorts of experimental and yet completely useable possibilities like atmospheres from the Tundra and Granulated Whalesong.

Everyone should have this range of instruments in their plug-in folders. There are no excuses — even the GUI only has 3 controls so you can’t possibly get lost or bewildered.

spitfireaudio.com

An interesting take on West Coast-style synthesis comes to us via Pendulate from Newfangled Audio and Eventide. It revels in chaos and plays with you as much as you play with it.

Pendulate uses a double pendulum oscillator to spew anarchy into a wavefolder which mixes and drives tones through a low pass gate while being modulated and messed about with. It initially feels a bit random but you’ll soon have it pulsing on the edge of chaos or maybe just a little bit too far the wrong way. But you can pull out sweetness as well if you like.

It changes, moves, and excites, evolving from pandemonium to order, feedback to fractals, self-oscillation, and self-abuse. It is far too much fun and explodes in a very unexpected interface that really grows on you once you’ve got over being startled.

Pendulate would be great as a premium instrument but it’s awesome for free. And if you really like it then you can upgrade to Generate which unleashes 5 times the madness.

NewFangledAudio.com

The Komplete bundle from Native Instruments contains an extraordinary amount of sounds and sonic possibilities. It comes in a number of versions for real money but Komplete Start is completely free and has over 2,000 studio-quality sounds.

Komplete Start comes with 7 pro-grade synths and 9 sampled instruments plus effects, loops, and samples and it’s all the same stuff that comes in the premium versions. For synths, you get the TRK 01 bassline, Reaktor Blocks modular, Mikro Prism, Carbon, weird generative Newscool, and the deep Space Drone. For sampled instruments, you’re looking at a small band and orchestra, playful noises, electric pianos, and thousands of loops and beats.

For effects, you get to play with the all-new Guitar Rig 6 Player and the massive Supercharger high-octane tube compressor.

That’s plenty to get you started, and you can buy more and expand your possibilities if you wish.

native-instruments.com

Don’t forget to check out the Best Guitar VSTs to use these simulations on records!

SampleTank is a vast workhorse synthesizer that can tap into every genre and style of music with an enormous level of motion and excitement. The Custom Shop version kicks off your journey with 50 sampled instruments and 200 MIDI loops for grooves and beat-making.

The 50 instruments draw from over 4GB of sound content, making them high-quality, professionally sampled and nuanced instruments to play. The interface lets you tweak the sounds and there are 4 groove engines that you can apply to break your sounds down into rhythmic adventures.

SampleTank 4 features an all-new mixer with 70 effects for processing your sounds and grooves. As with some of the other instruments here, you can use the Custom Shop function to add more sounds, more library, and build your perfect selection of sounds.

ikmultimedia.com

It’s the little sports car of synth-based hardware synthesizers and ready to give you a virtual analog experience that’s all about the power of the sound.

Built like a trusty analog subtractive synth, you get 2 oscillators, noise, and a ring modulator with 2 LFOs with multiple waveforms and a screamingly good dual filter. Separate envelopes for the amp and filter give a load of dynamic control and a nice vintage Chorus at the end of the chain keeps things fat.

TyrellN6 comes with over 580 presets which takes all the guesswork out of it while the very cool GUI gives you all the control you could ever need. This is a seriously awesome synth.

u-he.com

Vital is an alarmingly good spectral warping wavetable synth. It can warp waveforms in all sorts of ways and gives new life to wavetables. There’s nothing about this synth that looks or feels “free” Vital is a premium product that they’re just giving away.

Ok, they’re not giving everything away. The free version comes with 75 presets and 25 wavetables with no ability to add new ones or edit the ones inside. But as a wavetable synthesizer with filters, waveforms, modulations and effects you get the whole deal.

The spectral warping means that you can reshape waveforms generating harmonics and different sounds through simple modulations. And all the modulations are visualized brilliantly in the interface. Everything moves all over the place in response to your sound design and the decisions you make.

Vital looks and sounds amazing, it’s intuitive and fun to use and you’ll never feel like it’s a cut down or limited version.

vital.audio

At the beginning of the 1980s Moog visited Radio Shack and came up with the remarkable Realistic MG-1 synthesizer. It had two oscillators, a Moog filter, mixer, modulation and a fully polyphonic organ section. It sounded great but was a complete commercial disaster and radio Shack couldn’t give them away.

Today the MG-1 is regarded as a rare classic. It’s almost identical to the Moog Rogue and is somehow more characterful. Anyway, Cherry Audio decided to make a detailed emulation and then gave it away for free. It’s surprisingly good, with a fun tone, and is dripping in vintage quality. It’s a slice of synthesizer history.

Cherry Audio

Dexed is modelled on the classic Yamaha DX7 FM synthesizer. It’s modelled so closely that you can load DX7 patches and cartridges directly into it. It’s Open Source and maintained by an enthusiastic community of FM synthesis fans and is largely regarded as the best emulation out there.

The interface pulls out 144 parameters to explore in an intuitively graphical way. No more do you have the delve into the menu structure of the Yamaha synthesizer, you have everything you need on the front panel. It has 6 operators that can be configured in all the DX7 algorithms and comes with many of the familiar presets from the original.

There’s really no excuse not to have this amazing emulation on your system and it can be given a whole new lease of life through DAW automation and running it through numerous effects plugins.

It will run on MacOS, Windows and Linux and will often find itself embedded in some piece of hardware running a Linux distribution.

Dexed

Make sure to check out our lists of the best drum VST plug-ins and free drum VSTs to get that perfect rhythm track!