Metal Guitar Distortion Vst Free
Distortion is one of those effects that can have a use in any recording or music production setting. Even if you aren’t particularly into brash and dirty sounds, distortion plugins will have value for warming up sounds and introducing a bit of analog-style tone and response to your productions.
- BIAS FX 2 is an updated complete guitar tone studio VST plugin equipped for complete tonal customization. The original BIAS FX was a popular amp sim within the metal recording community for an endless selection of options for creating any players virtual dream metal rig. Genuine sounding emulated amps and effects; A grand total of 200.
- Although technically discontinued, Steinberg still makes its classic VB-1 available for download. It has made it free, too. It was a staple of early Cubase VST systems, and although a little basic it’s fun and can bring a proper electric bass sound to your tracks.
Metal Guitar Distortion Vst Free Plugins
Here we rundown some of the best free distortion VST plugins available. Whether you are looking to give your tracks a slight edge or you are after total industrial mayhem, these plug-ins will deliver at a price that your wallet will love.
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Introduction: About Distortion Plugins
Distortion plug-ins replicate the sound of analog circuitry being pushed to the limit.
With tube amps or op-amp circuits, feeding excessively high levels early on in the chain results in a warm, gritty, and present sound that sounds bigger, louder, and more exciting.
Distortion is used to marvelous, effect by guitarists, but it can also add life to synth parts, drums, and even vocals. In fact, if you work in a studio long enough, you would be hard pressed to think of a sound source that wouldn’t benefit from varying degrees of distortion in some way.
Free Distortion Plugins
The List
Distortion Plug-in Roundup
Creative Intent’s Temper Distortion is a distortion plug-in that has a rich saturation stage.
The variable saturation curve helps produce a warmer and edgier sound than most distortion plug-ins are capable of.
It also employs phase distortion that helps enhance clarity and produces a more characterful drive. A resonant lowpass filter and a feedback control further aids in tone shaping.
One of the best qualities of Temper is how it can be pushed to extreme levels of distortion while still retaining clarity.
As far as digital distortions go, this is one of the few that manages to be pleasant sounding even as it mangles your sound.
TNT by Ourafilmes was originally intended as a drum and distortion plug-in that is also useful for creating special effects.
It is actually a suite of distortion plug-ins consisting of a single band and a multi-band unit, each of which come in mono and stereo versions. The single band version is further enhanced with the addition of a tone knob.
Later versions of the plug-in come with a 6dB crossover filter that enables the separation of the low and high bands.
With the ability to set different saturation algorithms for each band, TNT is quite a bit more versatile than your typical distortion plug-in.
Free Heavy Metal Guitar Vst
Audio Damage is well known for its quality plug-ins, and FuzzPlus 3 holds up the company’s reputation admirably.
An updated version of the company’s original FuzzPlus pedal emulation, the FuzzPlus delivers the same great-sounding fuzzy distortion and enhances it with a filter modeled after the filter on Korg’s classic Microsoft-20 analog synthesizer.
Along with the ability to feed the processed signal back to the distortion circuitry, this results in increased sound-shaping possibilities.
The FuzzPlus 3 works amazingly well for processing drum loops and synths, transforming them into weird and wonderfully bizarre rhythms and textures.
But it is also quite capable of restraint, producing subtle saturations and tonal coloration when adjusted to moderate settings.
Distorque’s Plusdistortion is a plug-in emulation of the MXR Distortion+ pedal, which is favored by guitarists for its wide range of tones.
From light grit to all-out fuzz, the Distortion+ pretty much covers all the bases, and Plusdistortion is every bit as versatile.
The secret to the Distortion+ is the germanium diode clipping circuitry and the lo-fi op amp that produce the pedal’s distinctly characterful tone. The Plusdistortion somehow manages to capture the spirit of the pedal, with the added tweakability afforded by software.
Also from Distorque is Rangebastard, which is an emulation of another classic guitarists’ tool, the Dallas Rangemaster.
Like the Plusdistortion, the Rangebastard builds on the tone-shaping capabilities of the original with added features and tweakability.
With 2x oversampling, stereo and mono modes, and controls for input filtering, transistor, and even grid current, the Rangebastard is pretty much the Dallas Rangemaster on steroids.
More mangled textures are in the offing from Distorque, by way of the Face Bender.
Fans of classic fuzz pedal circuits will recognize the name as a combination of the Fuzz Face and Tone Bender MKII, both of which are still highly regarded in the guitar world.
Like those two pedals, the Face Bender delivers nasty, spitting distortion that walks the fine line between musicality and all-out sonic mayhem.
Full-on, retro-style fuzz is the primary domain of this plug-in, but it can also be dialed back for more tasteful saturation.
Finally, DistoCore’s Disto::FX is every bit the “Dirty Sound Destructor” as the marketing copy so proudly boasts.
Designed for all-out sonic assault, this is a loud and proud distortion plug-in that specializes in a surprising variety of distortion flavors.
Top Pick
Creative Intent’s Temper Distortion is the clear winner in this roundup. With the ability to get as down and dirty as any of them, it also cleans up nicely for more sedate and sensible saturation.
This is not to say that the rest of the entrants are slouches. Ourafilmes’ TNT and Audio Damage’s FuzzPlus 3 are certainly quite capable of delivering everything from a slight touch of grit to end-of-the-world sonic devastation.
Distorque’s pedal emulations for their part are all potentially useful for more traditional, stomp box flavors. And you just gotta love Disto::FX’s ability to make a heaving, bristling mess out of anything.
So while Temper Distortion gets the nod as our “top pick”, we wholeheartedly suggest that you download them all and have all your distortion bases covered.
After all, you can’t beat the price!
While you’re recording your guitar during your home studio projects there’s something you want immediately right: your guitar tone. You want it aggressive, evil, distorted with great saturation and right EQ. What more? Nothing, the problem is that you have to render it as you’re actually thinking about it. That’s the hard part. Let’s start saying that this tutorial is for those guys who are starting their first studio project and who are trying to have more from their guitar sound. There’s no right or wrong way to do it, this is how I like to do it, keeping it the simpliest I can. Moreover I use free plugin, not bad for your wallet, isn’t it?
I’m not a guitar player, not at all, I play every now and then guitar just to remember some riffs and record them quickly, with my cheap SG guitar (I bought it some years ago for about 100€ on ebay), B drop tuned with some awesome strings: RotoSoundDarkZone. I recorded some chords and some palm muted parts for this tutorial and, I mean, remember I’m not a guitar player, so forgive me! I use Reaper but you can apply all the concepts to whatever DAW you like.
Let’s move forward: create a new track and insert these FREE plugins:
- TSE TS808(version 2.0)
- TSE X50 (version 1.0.2)
- ReaGate
Insert them following exactly this order in your VST chain. It turned out mandatory for me to add a gate at the end, Reaper’s ReaGate to be precise, because of the annoying noise coming from my SG cheap pickup, that was amplified by the VST chain. I just loaded the “rhythm guitar” preset tweaking a bit the threshold, the noise disappeared. Another really important point to stress is to remember to enable monitoring, otherwise you’re not gonna hearing anything from your speakers! On Reaper mixer find the little button on the right of the track volume fader and click it. Please remember to enable it, or it would be hard to hear you playing 🙂
Let’s have a more detailed look to the VST chain. The TSE TS808 is a good quality tube driver emulator, don’t think about it as a poor quality plugin just because it’s free, I found really few ones like this, moreover a brand new release has been recently released, and trust me, it sounds even better. This is exactly what we need to give to our tone the right amount of grit before sending the signal to the amp, on palm muting it will be a blast. For this tutorial I set it this way:
TSE X50 is a free VST clone of the famous and “evil” Peavey 5150, massively used in extreme metal. Even this plugin recently got a new release: a must. If your target is an aggressive distortion, it won’t let you down. If you remember my post on guitar amp simulators comparison, I used an old X50 version and it was already really good for me, then I modified the post with the new version and I realized how much better it sounded. My SG gets a badass tone with this settings:
Poulin LeCab 2 it’s a quite versatile cabinet simulator, if you already own some IR wav files it’s exactly what you need. What’s an IR? The Impulse ResponseSing vst plugins. is a signal that can be extracted (with a slightly complex procedure maybe someday we’ll talk about it in details) recording the signal of a real cabinet with a microphone. To keep it simple we can say that it’s the “fingerprint” of the cabinet and the related microphone. Why it’s important? Because you really can’t take just the output signal of the amplifier without the cabinet, try to think about it as if you had a real amp, would you record the direct output of your amplifier head without the cabinet? It would be awful and somehow dangerous for your recording system. Don’t do it. Neither with VSTs 😉 In this case I used God’s Cab IRs, they’re free and come with a detailed user manual, that explain the different techniques used to record the IRs. Load the WAVs files on LeCab, if you blend together more than one IR it would be like if you’re micing your cabinet from different point, experimenting different combination is quite interesting, this is how I like it with God’s Cab:
Here you are my final tone:
https://www.santoclemenzi.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/HeavyGuitarTone.mp3As you can notice the sound need to be enhanced: it would be nice to add an highpass filter to cut everything under about 100Hz, then, lowpass everything above the frequency you hear “frying” on the upper part of the spectrum, usually these frequencies give to your tone a very digital character, it’s better to reduce it.
To summarize you can reach every sound you need just using free plugins you can find on the web, this is how I record my ideas and riffs, quickly and for free, I couldn’t ask for more 😉
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