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

You can’t get simpler than the single-knob interface. Just turn it up if you want some more and you’re going to want more of the Softube Saturation Knob.

To make it slightly harder they’ve given you three types of saturation to choose from. Keep High focuses on the top end, Keep Low messes with the bass and Natural gives a good sense of character all over. The idea is to warm up your sound by dialling in distortion. You can feel your audio start to fall apart but between the extremes are some very pleasing sounds that’ll transform your mix.

It’s perfect for bring a sense of the analog to your vocals, drums or any instrument that needs a boost. Just put it on your mix and you’ll know exactly what it has to offer.

Softube.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

RoughRider is a very modern looking compressor and over 10 years old. While everyone else is looking for that vintage sound wrapped up in something that looks old and falling apart Audio Damage go futuristic with this one.

As a compressor it’s incredibly warm and introduces a lot of character to the signal while operating as a great piece of dynamic processing. The main controls of ratio, sensitivity (or threshold) and makeup gain are in the middle with attack and release to the side. The display in the middle is really useful to show you what’s going on

The latest version brings in an external side-chain input, the ability to turn off the built-in “warming” filter and much more accurate metering.

AudioDamage.com