There has been a thread like this for freeware plugins for ages, but i think it’s about time we get one for recommended commercial plugins.
Recommend your favorite plugins and tell us a bit about them, pros and cons, is it worth the price and how well does it perform in Renoise?
I think this thread also has room for sharing special offers on plugins.
I don’t own a whole lot of VST plugins, so my recommendations are limited, but here are a few:
Waves: OVox
This is a vocoder with sequencers envelopes and LFOs, you can even use the amplitude/pitch/pan spectrum curves to modulate just about anything. It’s got note mapping, pitch correction, voice pitch recognition, a powerful EQ effects like delay, reverb, chorus, compressor and distortion. You can choose pitch following or you can control it with MIDI. You can choose between lots of different chords setups or you can program your own. If you sing a specific note you can easily program it to sound like any chord or note you want’ just select the note you want to change and then click on the keys you want it to sound like.
You can do a whole lot of sound design with this, not only limited to vocals. You can for instance turn a drum loop into a nice melody or an alien breakbeat.
Works in Renoise, it’s GUI slows down the Renoise GUI, but that seems to happen with most Waves plugins. It has crashed a couple of times, but usually it works fine.
It might not be the best vocoder on the market, but this is so much more than just vocoding, so if you specifically want the best and most ‘authentic’ vocoder sounds this might not be for you.
Waves: Abbey Road TG Mastering Chain
I won a copy of UltraChannel a few years back and i thought this plugin was something similar, just 5 times cheaper or so, thought i could give it a shot as i got a special offer.
The difference between these plugins is that UltraChannel sounds like native Renoise effects in comparison. This plugin just works and it sounds great. It comes with a lot of presets which is easy to tweak to you preference.
After collabing with TNT we mostly only used internal plugins as we don’t share that many commercial plugins, so I can say that of all my commercial plugins the one I miss the most was Fabfilter Q-2, it’s so much faster to dial in the EQ due to it’s large window size and spectrum visualization overlay, I actually inserted Q-2 to make the EQ and then copy over the settings to Renoise internal EQ, you can’t really hear the difference it’s just pure convenience but since you use an EQ all the time it’s worth it. (MEqualizer is good free alternative)
Another favorite is Decapitator to beefen up sounds.
If you’re a sound designer, which I’m not, Sidizer (42 €) is also recommended if you like C64 sound. You can create everything with it and next to inSIDious it’s the best SID synth. Every VST shown here works good in Renoise, even though I’ve heard that some guys have got some troubles running Omnisphere with Renoise properly. Personally I can’t confirm that.
Reaktor , zebra , tranzistow
While tranzistow is not commercial , it is the deepest and most spectculair vst out there ( except reaktor ) .
Mind you, it needs some serious dedication but it is totally woth it in the end .
TRanzistow is not for those seeking instant gratification , but it’s absolutly brilliant , once you know your way aroud the gui , it’s pretty fast but you do need few braincells to operate it ( like every piece of complex software )
Not sure what you try to prove with the silly simpson picture
And no , reaktor is not complicated ( this depends how deep you wan’t to go down the rabbit hole ) , you want complicated try supercollider
The Kush Clariphonic EQ is one of my favorites on the master for brightening up the mix in a great way. Try it in M/S mode. Free alternative (but imo not nearly as good) is luftikus EQ. Get it if you don’t have an EQ like that.
Eventide Black Hole. Take its default patch and put ANY woodwind like sound through it. Instant gorgeous vibes. I don’t know a good free alternative here though, sorry!
It can do (almost ) everyhting
-wavetable , phase modulation with skirt ( yamah fs1 r ) morphable filterbanks , tranzistor diode zero delay feedback filters , waldorf q modelled filters etc… , audio rate modulation matrix and an open routing matrix , ultra flexible oscillators/engines etc…
Now all of this wouldn’t mean a thing if it doesn’t sound good , but it sounds absolutely stellar
It’s amonster once you know how to use ,lot’s of users give up on it because the gui is pretty daunting
The developer is a genius , head over to the gearslutz tranzistow thread for more info etcc…
Here’s an appetitizer ( not my demo ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=397SW6SJOwA&t=267s
