These are some of my Favourite Free Audio Plugins that I use daily for As A Freelance Sound Designer for Video Games.
Melda Free FX Bundle
Melda’s Free Bundle is a massive collection of high quality bread and butter sound effects. Including everything from: Reverbs, Eq, Compressors, Saturation, Ring Modulation and many more. This is a great collection to grab, especially if you’re just starting out and don’t have many plugins at the moment. Melda plugins are very high quality and can take you a long way when it comes to sound design.
Kilohearts Essentials
Kilohearts Essentials is another huge free bundle of effects. There’s some overlap with the Melda Bundle, but there’s enough uniquness in each bundle to make them both well worth getting. Kilohearst plugins have a clean user interface that makes them really easy to use. They sound fantastic as well. I use these all the time; there’s almost always at least one Kilohearts plugin in my plugin chains. Between this and the Melda bundle, that’s a great collection of sound effects to get started with.
All Pass Phase
All Pass Phase. Disperser became an extremely popular plugin for sound design over the past few years. This does the same thing. And it's free. Use sparingly for modern, liquidy transients. Great for SciFi sound design. Although I wouldn’t use if for more grounded, realistic sound design though. It can give sounds a synthetic quailty when oversused or pushed too hard. Which is sometimes what you need and sometimes isn’t.
Doppler Dome
Doppler Dome. As sound designers, we frequently have to make lots of whooshes and pass-by sounds. A doppler plugin can greatly speed up this process. Doppler Dome is easy to use and can yield great results within seconds. Grab it.
Valhalla Supermassive
Valhalla Super Massive. Great for huge reverbs. It can also be used more creativley. I like to modulate its parameters to generate whooshes and creative delay effects. A very versatile and powerful plugin that can take a while to explore the limits of. It’s amazing that it’s free.
Valhalla Space Modulator
Another great freebie from Valhalla, Space Modulator is a deceptively simple, but very powerful plugin. It’s essentially a flanger. But things can get weird pretty quickly by driving and modulating it’s controls. I like to use a few of these in serial for tonal, magic sound design or to push it further for warbly SciFi sound design.
Vital
Looking for a free alternative to Serum? Look no further because Vital is just as powerful. Clearly laid out and easy to use it’s fantastic for SciFi sound design. There are also lots of free wavetables avalaible for it if you do some searching. A power house synth.
Paul Stretch
Need to stretch your sounds a few hundred times? Great, because Paul Stretch has a VST plugin version. Great for making long ambiences out of unusual source material. Try running random sounds through it for unexpected results.
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The Author
This article was written by Oliver Smith. A long-time remote working freelance sound designer dedicated to making gameplay enhancing sound for games.