Best Free AU Plug-ins
Recently, I’ve been teaching some composition lessons and one of my students, who uses Logic Express, has been discovering a bunch of pretty nifty FREE AU plug-ins that work great in Logic. I had never used a free plug-in before, preferring to stay with the “commercial quality” set from Apple/Logic/Emagic and Universal Audio. However, after checking a few of these out, some are quite good and you really can’t beat the price!
So far, the best ones that are free tend to be most useful for sound design or synthesis. Others that are decent (delays, bitcrushers, distortion) are duplicating (often less well) by something that exists in Logic, so I haven’t bothered with them too much.
One of the more interesting plugs is one called Crystal, which is a synth plug featuring both subtractive and FM synthesis. There are some really cool sonic possibilities available in Crystal.
Another fun one is Izotope’s Vinyl, which gives that signature “vinyl crackle” to your track. There are quite a few parameters you can tweak on this one as well to achieve a variety of fun effects.
Last, but not least, is C3, which is a multiband compressor. This is handy for Logic Express users who don’t have the multiband included in Logic Pro (or that they bought from a third-party vendor.
Two sites that I have located that nicely list out many other free AU plug-ins can be found here and here. Hopefully you’ll find something useful there to spur your creativity!
