The Best VST Plugins (2021) to Have in Your Toolbox

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

The Black Hole reverb has been around a long time now but it still remains a unique and wonderful plugin that refines what reverb is about and takes you on adventures into space.

Reverbs are usually designed to emulate actual spaces, rooms, halls, cathedrals and bathrooms to give a recording that was recorded in a studio the sense that it was recorded elsewhere. It brings a reality and the feeling of space to vocals and other instruments. While Black Hole can do that it would rather be creating space-warping effects into limitless environments of impossibility. Drop it onto anything and you are transported to other-worldly places – this thing is far too much fun.

It’s not difficult to use, comes with a load of helpful presets and once you start to play with the parameters it becomes obvious what they do. It has fascinating controls like Gravity which inverts and reverses, or get hold of the ribbon control to morph numerous settings or the Hot Switch which plunges you into another world.

Plug in a guitar or a synth, piano, flute, whatever you want and lose yourself in a Black Hole.

The Video shows me using it with the Native Instruments NKS system which offers some great hardware control. It’s also been recently released on iOS.

Street Price: $199 or $19.99 on iOS
EventideAudio.com

Movement is a futuristic rhythm machine of cascading delays and modulating mixtures. It can morph smoothly from nominal to insane, it can introduce unexpected voices or completely revolutionise a track. You might call it a delay effect but you’d be wrong.

Movement contains four synchronised rhythm engines that work with and against each other to push your audio into unusual places again and again and again. Each engine can modulate with LFOs, Sequencers and Side Chains, they can hold simple delays but also filters, eq, distortions and reverbs.

Then, with the XY Macro pad in the middle you can take a mouse or a finger and control up to 152 parameters with a single swipe. This thing is crazy in all the best possible ways! It feels a lot like a synth and you’re designing sounds but the you’re the source of all the action.

Street Price: $104
Output.com

EQ is one of the most important tools a sound engineer has in her toolbox. It’s in the crafting of those frequencies that brings instruments together and lets them sit right in a mix. Working with EQ is a skill and it takes time to acquire it.

The FabFilter Pro-Q3 is a phenominal EQ and it comes with a brilliantly designed interface that makes it easy to grasp and actually teaches you how to use it while you’re using it.

It has all the features professionals need when working with frequencies. It has up to 24 bands, dynamic modes, brickwall slopes and multiple shapes, mid/side processing and fine editing precision and the highest possible sounds quality. It also has a hugely helpful front end with a built-in spectrum analyser that will visualise what needs to be done, where collisions occur and you can even match it up to another track that you like the sound of.

Pro-Q3 is a gift to both sound engineers and beginners looking to pull the muddiness out of their music and start finding their sparkle.

Street Price: $179
FabFilter.com

Waves are the producer of hundreds of serious plugins for mixing and sound engineering. Some of their best work can be found the Abbey Road range of effects based on vintage gear found at the legendary London studio that was used on albums from the Beatles onwards. While they all deserve your time the RS124 takes the cake in terms of silky-smooth compression and “that” sound.

The RS124 is based on an ultra-rare tube compressor that was used on every Beatles recording made at Abbey Road. It has two distinct flavors of “Studio” and “Cutter” which reflect the sound of the original unit plus the modifications made over the years. You can hear it on the bass in Come Together and you can hear it on the vocals of Beyoncé and Alicia Keys. This is one special compressor.

If it gets a bit too smooth then the Super Fuse mode brings in some brutal character by matching release to attack time and getting it to fight with itself.

The interface is brilliantly rendered and nicely animated and is a satisfying place to work.

Street Price: $38.99
Waves.com

Filtering shouldn’t be this fun but the MOK Filtryg you just can’t help yourself. Coming at you like something out of a Sci-Fi movie you’ll be controlling your own spaceship with this plugin.

Filtryg comes with 3 different types of filter and lets you put up any two for superb sonic manipulation. There’s a multimode 12dB State Variable Filter, 24dB ladder filter and a Biquad filter. Each give you a quite unique sound and approach. The State Variable filter lets you morph between modes whereas the Ladder and Biquad have drive for a good bit of saturation.

The filters can run in series, parallel or mixed combinations and are capable of generating FM tones and harmonics. There’s lots of modulation with envelope following, sidechains and synced or not rhythms and chaotic motions.

It’s a load of fun and you’ll find yourself using it all over the place.

Street Price: $49
MOK.com

Arturia are better known for their VST Instruments and synthesizers but when they released a bundle of effects called “3 Delays You’ll Actually use” they really nailed the concept. All 3 delays were totally spellbinding but it’s the Delay Tape-201 that stands out for me.

The Delay Tape-201 is based on famous Tape Delays such as the legendary Roland RE-201 Space Delay. It uses a continuous loop of tape to capture and playback sound across a number of heads. It combines fabulous rhythms and grooves with tape saturation and sound deterioration and grunginess that you won’t find on good clean digital delays. Arturia emulates all this brilliantly with their TAE modelling technology.

You’ve got 3 delay tape heads and a reverb tank that can be combined in 12 different ways, stereo and ping/pong delays, spatial tools, EQ, filters and all sorts of modulation to push the machine in mechanical failure – it’s brilliant!

Street Price: $99
Arturia.com

They call it Elegant Tonal Destruction and this bundle of 3 plugins have the character to ruin anything you want to drop them on.

Bite has the authentic organic crunch of an 80s digital sampler. Winding down the sample rate and bit depth to squeeze the life out of the sound as it chomps its way to oblivion. It will boom out in artifacts and all apart in wonderfully nasty ways.

Dirt gives a wide range of utter distortion designed to decimate. It folds timbres into complex sounds of tone-shaped blissful noise.

Freak brings the bizarre world of ring modulation and ancient radio effects through deconfiguration and demodulation. It’s nuts!

This pack of 3 are all you need to bring danger to your music.

Street Price: $69
Native-Instruments.com

This is a ridiculous collection of workhorse effects that will turn your DAW into a versatile mixing system.

MixBox comes with over 70 effects from their mastering software T-Racks, guitar amp modeller AmpliTube and synthesizer workstation SampleTank. It packs them into a fantastic Series-500 style interface where everything fits neatly into a module for lightning fast ease-of-use. You can design entire channel strips and signal chains running through emulations of classic gear, new ideas and creative sonic effects.

This thing is immense and yet with over 600 presets for every situation you’re never left scratching your head at the enormity of the task. You can load something up, tweak and start working on your sound and your tracks with some of the best tools around.

Street Price: $299
IKMultimedia.com