Looking for free volume shapers plugins ?
In one of our weekly Instagram posts, we’re focusing on Volume Shapers:
Making sure every sound has its own place to breathe and stand out is key in mixing a track, and that’s exactly what Volume Shapers (also called Enveloppe Shapers or Enveloppers) are about.
We’re all familiar with with the concept of sidechain compression, ducking the amplitude of a signal when another is playing to get more cohesive, cleaner and punchier mixes.
But there are now plenty other ways and solutions to ‘sidechain’ with each having it’s own characteristics: Multiband-processing, tempo sync, custom drawable curves and shapes…
We have compiled a list of some of the best sidechain plugins you can use for both production & mixing process.
And since we all love free plugins, we also included what we think are the best free plugins for that purpose.
Hopefully you will discover new helpful tools 🎛️
Volume Shaper 6
With multiband processing, drawable LFOs, dry/wet knob, midi or tempo-synced trigger, accurate spectrum view and more, this is one of the most advanced volume envelopers out there and it can do much more than sidechain !
LFO Tool
An all-time classic for sidechaining, XFer’s LFO Tool also allows much more than your standard pumping effect with its customizable LFOs, advanced filters, pan or volume modulations.
Duck
‘Duck’ makes it easy to design custom volume shapes to create any volume-based modulation with its dual-band (low/high), the ability to be triggered via midi and a clean visual interface. Plus it’s fairly cheap !
Gatekeeper
If you want to go deeper into complex volume modulation sequences, Gatekeeper can act as an LFO, envelope, step sequencer and is completely midi programmable.
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Kickstart
If you’re after a quick and steamlined tool for sidechaining, Kickstart might be your cheapest best choice: Very affordable and very easy to use !
MRythmizer
MRhythmizer uses an integrated sequencer to control time, volume and filters allowing you to create custom complex modulations.
Flux Mini
Freshly released few days ago, Flux Mini provides a customizable graph to create shapes that will affect volume, low or high-pass filter, and is completely free to download !
Simple Side
SimpleSide is a tempo-synced volume automation plugin that includes graph and curve editing: It offers less features than other big commercial plugins, but it’s completely free !
