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

Love is about instant ambient gratification. It can take any source material and cook up a soulful interpretation of distant planes of existance. It has a way of bending your through processes into thinking about your music differently. You’re not just applying an effect you’re taking yourself off on a journey of discovery.

The key to Love is the simplicity of the granular engine. So often granular effects are hampered by tricky interfaces and baffling choices, but Love does all the heravy lifting for you and delivers wonderfully animated movements in sound and texture. Combine it with the deeply velvety Shimmer effect and you have an epic effect or cinematic proportions.

There are six effects to mix into your Love cauldron. You can pull through frequencies with the filter, push off into space with the Shimmer, find yourself coming back in time through the Delay, wobble and weave with the Chorus, disappear in the Clouds and push yourself inside out through the Phaser. It’s a whole universe of celestial effects falling into a shimmering sea of transcendence.

Street Price: $60
Dawesome Love

Fragments moves us firmly into the realms of granular processing. It will take your audio apart and give it back to you in a completely different form. It will divide, transform, rebuild and produce delightfully glitchy soundscapes and experimental textures.

Where Dawsome Love was all-encompassing, Fragments has a much more focused vision on exploding ideas and twisting you into places you hadn’t expected. It’s full of rhythms, with stutter, glitch and tempo variations. It can follow envelopes and crave out new patterns of trouble and texture. It will slice, it will shift in pitch and expectation while taking you into beautiful layers of chaos.

Particles bounce, movements flow, shimmers are born and die screaming in vast caves of sound. Fragments will turn you into a sonic explorer and intense sound designer.

Street Price: $99
Arturia.com

Moving away from granular into the more traditional depths of reverb but with a completely modern twist, we have the epic Spaced Out from Baby Audio. It’s achingly modern and feels like you’ve fallen into a cloud made of whipped cream.

Spaced out combines reverb, delay and modulation to give your audio space, depth and lots of movement. Each effect is represented by a third of the interface and really you could use them individually and have a really great time doing it. But it’s in combination that the magic really happens and in fact, behind the front end, there are 50 effects strung together in chains of creative processing.

There are no menus to cope with, all you have to do is explore the front panel, or if you are either more daring or out of ideas, hit the dice for a new roll of potential adventure. You have XY control over multiple parameters making it easy to discover new ideas. It has a mellow heart that glues and pulls together while sending thoughts out in 16-step delay dimensions. It’s a beautiful thing, baby.

Street Price: $39
BabyAudio

I found it really hard to decide between Klevgrand’s plugins, so I thought we should go with the complete Vintage bundle. It contains the sort of tools that will pour vintage warmth and coolness over your mixes like thick treacle. They have an irresistible character and will push your tracks away from digital cleanliness into the dumpster of delicious analogue vibes.

In the bundle, we have a tape deck emulation, a vinyl player simulation, a resampler/bitcrusher and an amp modeller. Each of these is brilliant but has its own use cases making this a very versatile little bundle of plugins.

The DAW Cassette and DAW LP plugins emulate the sound of those classic formats that are making a huge comeback. One emulates the sound of Cassette, and the other one is vinyl. They have individual characters, with wow and flutter compared to scratch and dust, but both are so simple that they just make everything sound lively and exciting.

Degrader will wind any audio track down tightly into bit crushing and sample rate destruction. It can add a bit of character or you can go for full-on digital distortion and ridiculous saturation.

Reamp is a complete simulator of analog gear combined with spectral saturation. You can work it like a guitar amp or bring in a rusty mic preamp, or use it to beef up weak synth lines.

Street Price: $129
Klevgrand

There comes a point at which your DAWs built in EQ no longer cuts it. For an altogether different experience the Pro Q3 is the best in the business. It’s visually arresting, sonically perfect and will teach you how to treat sound.

The front end is amazing. You will not find a more engrossing interface that does more than help you move parameters around. It describes the spectral space, and demonstrates exactly what is required to shape your sound into more pleasing frequency ranges. You can have up to 24 EQ bands with a fully dynamic mode that perfectly matches your intentions. It will detect sonic collisions and visualise the spectrum so you can carve out exactly what you need. And you thought EQ was just a handful of knobs!

Pro Q3 is the sort of plugin that makes you a better music production and a more solid sound engineer.

Street Price: $169
Fabfilter.com

Any of the Abbey Road plugins could be on this list but if we narrow down to the best compressor plugin then the RS124 gets my vote. It’s based on the original hardware units that keep Abbey Road studios hot and processed. It was used on everything from Paul McCartney’s bass lines to Beyoncé’s vocals.

The plugin is a thing of beauty. The front panels have been fully realised with every nuance and potential of the hardware. A number of restored RS124 units were used in the analysis and emulation of the compression enabling Waves to come up with a superbly vibrant plugin with different tube options and overdrive.

The RS124 will bring a unique tone to your productions that could be the secret sauce you’ve been looking for.

Street Price: $35
Waves.com

The Moogerfooger effects are a now legendary series of pedals that have brought character, excitement and crazy ideas to all sorts of synths and scenarios. Moog has released them all as a bundle of some of the most joyful plugins you will ever encounter.

The suite has seven plugins, including a Lowpass Filter, Ring Modulator, 12-Stage Phaser, Analog Delay, MuRF filter bank, FreqBox VCO, Cluster Flux modulation and Saturator. Some are pretty obvious, but others are very unusual and not often found in DAW environments.

Something else that’s special about this pack of effects is that they can affect one another. This was always a feature of the hardware where you could patch them together to take CV control from one pedal to control another. Somehow Moog has managed to make this happen in software. Each time you load another Moogerfooger plugin the internal modulations appear as inputs to any other loaded pedals. It makes for a superbly creative effect space.

They look fantastic and sound so full of character you’ll be straight on the internet looking to buy the original hardware.

Street Price: $279
Moogmusic.com

For filter sweeps and pumping frequency cuts with bags of attitude then the FilterFreak has you covered. It can follow envelopes, bash in uninvited vibes, sweep like a Sherman or introduce your tracks to some classic wah-wah. There’s far too much fun to be had inside this freakin’ plugin.

FilterFreak emulates the sound of the best vintage analog filters around. It captures the feel, the essence and the resonance of those gritty bits of circuitry and responds exactly how you imagine it should. There are seven saturation styles ranging from subtle warmth to extreme overloads all calmly implemented in an easy-to-use interface.

It includes modes of modulation for playful rhythmic effects. You can draw in the dips and twists, MIDI sync it all up and explore a library of possibilities. There are two filters to play with and you can stack them in any way you want. FilterFreak has been around for years now but you won’t find a more versatile filtering plugin.

Street Price: $149
Soundtoys.com

Looking for other software plugins? Check out our guides on the Best Drum VST and Guitar VSTs.