Read on for our picks for the year’s best free VST effects.

Super Massive is a ridiculous reverb capable of generating vast spaces and never ending delays. It’s the sort of thing that blows your mind. You can lose hours simply playing with it, running sounds through it, trying it with synths, with guitar, with drums and whole mixes just to see what will happen.

You’ll find clouds of reverb and delays for other worlds all wrapped up in a simple interface that’s deeper than you think it is. Super Massive has many different algorithms that change and warp it into other dimensions so just whn you think you’ve got the hang of it you find yourself upside down and reversing through a universe of sonic reflux.

It’s lush, it’s brilliant and it’s free.

ValhallaDSP.com

Kilohearts have built up quite a collection and a great reputation for top quality effects and instruments. From the award winning Phaseplant synth to the stunning Snapheap effects playground the artistry, build and interaction is superb. While some developers give you a tiny taste of the good stuff with a freebie plugin Kilohearts Essentials gives you a whole meal.

Kilohearst Essentials offers 33 individual effects that can be plugged into their modular effects system. Plugins include 3-band EQ, compression, delay, filters, chorus, frequency shifters, distortion, phasing, shaping and ring modulation. There are even cool performance effects like tape stop, trance gate and a really decent reverb.

It’s a selection of effects that you can use on every project and you can build up preset arrangements for your next one. And if you choose to upgrade to something like Snapheap then you’ll find these effects appear directly within that environment. Kilohearts says that they will continue to add plugins to the Essentials collection as time goes on, so I can’t think of any reason why you wouldn’t want to snap these up.

Kilohearts.com

The Dirty Filter is all about driving, filtering, distortion and sonic layering. It has both a high-pass and low-pass filter and in the middle is a big fat Drive knob that’ll push up the resonance for both filters while adding analog style saturation.

While it’s awesome at the whole filtering thing, doing sweeps and pulling in drops and cuts the drive aspect gives it the flavour of a multi-band distortion. You can be quite specific about the frequencies you want to boost and corrupt making it scream and bite or just add a little bit of grit.

Dirty Filter is a lot of fun, versatile and very easy to use.

BedroomProducersBlog.com

It’s an oldy but a goody, Izotope Vinyl has been around a long time but a recent update has made its authentic lo-fi vibes even groovier.

It has that instant satisfaction factor. Drop the needle on the record and you’re already loving the sound. You can choose an decade of music as a reference and then explore the amount of mechanical and electrical distortion you want to add to your mix.

Vunyl is delicious, it’s intoxicating and makes anything sound vintage and on fire.

izotope.com

A strange name for a plugin that brings you the power of Auto-Tune for free. They call it a Live Voice Changer and although the free version doesn’t include the more complex pitch-tracking modulations and vocal enrichments it does have the important stuff – pitch correction.

Through its advanced pitch detection it can analyse the incoming audio and push it to a predefined scale. Just set the notes and you’re good to go.

If you want to turn your vocals into something else entirely then Graillon 2 will happy oblige with robotic pitch shifting and weird effects ready to go at the tap of a mouse. It has a lot of scope of vocal based sound design and creating crazy effects.

AuburnSounds.com

Sometimes you just need a good chorus to thicken and add movement to a sound. The chorus on the Roland Juno-60 synthesizer is the one that people talk about for its ability to transform a simple synth sound into something altogether more interesting. The TAL-Chorus-LX is a model of the Juno-60 Chorus.

It’s very simple, has two modes, just hit the button and then decide how much of your sound you want to bathe in it and how wide you want the stereo to go.

TAL-Chorus-LX is just lovely and feels good in any groovy situation particularly on keys and synths.

Tal-Software.com

Baby Audio excels at modern interfaces and creative effect plugins. Startling and smooth to look at while adding gorgeous elements to your audio. In this little collection of freebie plugins we get the Magic Dice multi-effect, Magic Switch Chorus and Baby Come Back Delay.

Magic Dice is the weird idea of randomly generating reverb, modulation and delay effects to create inspiring textures at the touch of a button – or the roll of a dice. There’s no control or possibility of bending it to your will, you just hit the button and go with what it produces. It’s based on the same engine as the Spaced Out plugin and contains 50 individual effects for an endless creation of possibilities. Sounds fantastic but you’ll never come across the same result twice.

Magic Switch is inspired by the Roland Juno Chorus but Baby Audio makes this their own take on the one-button chorus. It’s going for detuned, lush and moody sounds and is based on their Super-VHS sound engine with nothing but a wet/dry mix slider.

Baby Come Back is a delay plugin based on their Comeback Kid engine. It has 4 modes of flavor; Wide, Analog, Saucey and Cheap. It also has an on-board ducker for cleaning up your delays while the dry signal plays.

BabyAud.io

Less of an effect and more of a workhorse processing tool, Tokyo Dawn’s TDR Nova is a parallel dynamic equalizer. Easily as good as many similar professional plugins for massaging your music’s frequency content.

It’s ability to dynamically react to incoming audio gives it wide range of applications. You can straightforwardly use it as a parametric EQ, to sculpt and rework your tracks in the mix. You can turn on the dynamics and let it compress and process the energy back into your track. You can compress ranges of frequencies very selectively to really nail down wayward signals. Or push it into a creative filter mode for interesting cuts and resonant boosts.

In terms of compression TDR Nova can handle multi-band and wide band compression for either settling individual tracks or applying to a whole mix at the mastering stage. Clever dynamic loudness functions ensure that things don’t get out of hand.

Tokyodawn.net