Cool VST Plugins: Creative Effects and Synths That Change How You Write

The coolest VST plugins are the ones that give you a sound you wouldn't have reached by turning knobs on a stock effect: a reverb you can freeze and play over, a tape echo that runs backwards, a voice that becomes a choir. Below are the creative plugins we'd reach for first, ours and other developers', with what each one is actually good for and a preset or setting to start from.

Cool VST plugins at a glance

Reverbs and delays you can play

Most reverbs and delays sit on a send and stay there. The cool ones become instruments. Lumen's Freeze button captures the current tail and holds it forever, so a single chord or vocal syllable turns into a pad you can play over. Start from Freeze Canvas, a 12-second, fully diffused hall, play a chord and press Freeze. Bloom works the other way: it ducks the reverb while the vocal sings and lets it swell in the gaps, which gives you a big space without mud.

Drift puts performance pads on a tape echo. Reverse plays the echoes backwards in crossfaded slices, Half Speed drops them an octave like tape running slow, Tape Stop brakes the tape to a halt, and Freeze loops whatever is on the tape. Ride them during a transition and you get a fill without editing audio. Backward Dub below combines Reverse with 60% feedback and worn, saturated tape.

From other developers, Valhalla Supermassive is the free classic for huge, washy delays and reverbs that take a single note and stretch it into a texture. For more on the basics, see our guides to what reverb is and tape delay.

Vocal plugins that do something unexpected

Choir is a vocoder with its own carrier synth, so it works without routing a separate synth. Pick a key and chord, or play chords over MIDI, and sing. The Choir macro adds octave doubling, ensemble width, gentle vibrato and a soft formant lift, turning one voice into a section. Turn it off and the same engine makes robots: Robot Monotone uses 16 bands, a single saw voice and no width or reverb, for the flat, classic machine voice.

Tune has a Harmony mode that adds a 3rd, 5th or octave above or below your melody, always in key, with Harmony Humanize loosening the timing so it sounds like real singers rather than a pitch-shifted copy. Formant changes the voice's character without changing the pitch, so a voice can sound bigger or smaller while singing the same notes. Read what a vocoder is and the vocoder vs talkbox comparison for more on robot voices.

Lo-fi and saturation with character

Dust has one control that does the work of a dozen: Era. Pick '40s Radio, '70s Tape, '90s Sampler or VHS and Dust dials in that medium's character, with the wow, flutter, tape, age, hiss, vinyl and bitcrush knobs still working on top as offsets. Nineties Sampler is a good way in for drums and loops. Its Tape Stop gives you the classic slowdown for the end of a section.

Heat turns saturation into something you can paint. With XY Mode on, the pad blends between tape, tube, transistor and fuzz: even versus odd harmonics left to right, soft versus hard bottom to top. Output stays level-matched, so you hear the tone change rather than a volume jump. XY Fuzz Sweep sits in the hard corner; automate the pad from Even Glow toward it across a build.

For a free alternative, Krush is a well-known bitcrusher and distortion with built-in modulation. See the best saturation plugins for more.

Synths that reward experimenting

Nova's Morph pad turns one preset into a family of sounds: left to right opens the filter and adds movement, bottom to top grows unison, chorus and space. Dice generates a fresh musical variation, which is a fast way out of a creative rut. Start from Evolving Texture and drag the pad slowly while holding a chord.

• Surge XT is free and open source, with a large set of oscillator and filter types and a lot of modulation. It's deep enough to keep you busy for years.
• Dexed models a classic six-operator FM synth and loads the original patch format, which makes it the go-to free DX7-style synth VST for electric pianos, bells and glassy basses.
• TAL-NoiseMaker is a straightforward virtual analog synth with a good preset library. Simple, light on CPU and easy to learn on.

Our synth VST roundup covers more options in detail, and the free VST instruments guide lists free synths, drums and keys.

Free rhythmic and width effects

Pump is our free sidechain-style volume shaper. Beyond its classic curve, you can draw your own 8-point shape, which turns it into a rhythmic gate, a swell or a stutter effect locked to the tempo. Switch Trigger to Audio and it restarts on every kick or low hit in the input instead of the grid. Spread, also free, widens synths and vocals while Auto-width backs off whenever the mix would fall apart in mono.

We also make a transient shaper (Snap), a vocal rider (Rider) and a guitar amp (Stack). Find all our free tools on the free plugins page and in-browser tools at /tools.

How to get the most from creative plugins

1. Print the happy accidents. Freeze, reverse and tape-stop moves are performances. Record them to audio so you can edit and keep them.
2. Automate instead of setting and forgetting. A Morph pad or XY pad moving across eight bars is more interesting than any static setting.
3. Use them on sends and duplicates. Keep the dry part clean and put the wild version on a parallel track you can bring up for the chorus.
4. Limit the palette per song. Two or three signature effects make a track recognisable. Ten make it noisy.