Free Plugins That Write the Part for You
Six free generative plugins — sequencers, a granular instrument, a drum machine and a speech synth — and what each one actually does, from its maker's own page.
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There is a particular kind of stuck where the problem is not the sound. The sound is fine. The problem is that you have played the same four bars eleven times and the twelfth is going to be the same as the eleventh. What you want is not a better piano. What you want is something in the room that does not know what you were about to do.
That is the job this small category of plugin does, and an unusual number of the best ones are free. Not demo free. Not email-for-the-download free. Free because the person who wrote it was scratching their own itch and saw no reason to charge for the result. Everything below costs nothing, and every number in it is the maker's own, taken off their own page.
Snake, by Maxime Dangles
Three custom sequencers in one device, and the part that matters is the word custom: its page says you choose the precise notes the sequencers are allowed to randomise. That is the difference between a randomiser and an instrument. A random note generator gives you twelve semitones and a headache. One that randomises only inside the notes you picked gives you a part you did not write but could have.
Twenty-nine people have rated it, all of them at five stars. Get Snake
Frankenstein, by Remo De Vico
A sample fragment generator, and the name is doing honest work. Its page says it loads up to thirty samples and builds waves out of them cut into anywhere from twelve to sixty-four slices, then plays the resulting waveform back as a MIDI instrument. So the thing you end up playing is a single waveform assembled from bits of thirty things you already had.
It needs Ableton Live. Thirteen ratings, all five stars. Get Frankenstein
Loom, by Remo De Vico
The same maker's time-stretch texture instrument, and the two controls tell you the whole story. Weave sets how many grains overlap at each moment, from one to sixteen. Scatter sets how much of the phase is invented, from nothing to a hundred percent. Invented is the maker's own word, and it is the right one: past a certain point the plugin is no longer stretching your sample, it is making up the parts of it that were never recorded.
Its page also notes that from a mono sample it builds a wide stereo texture using two independent phase passes, which is a more interesting answer to the mono problem than a chorus. Sixty-two ratings at 4.9, which is the highest count on this page by a distance. Get Loom
Two legs, Five arms, by François Pé
A generative drum machine with six lines — kick, snare, clap, hi-hat, toms, percussion — and a continuous style axis its page describes as running between house, rock, afro-cuban and hip-hop, "and every blend between." A continuous axis rather than a genre menu is a small design decision with a large consequence: the interesting patterns are the ones two thirds of the way from one thing to another, and a menu cannot give you those.
Twelve presets, saved inside your Logic project according to its page, with copy, paste and clear. AU and VST3. Four ratings at 4.5. Get Two legs, Five arms
Danaides, by Inear Display
A sequenced sound-mangling effect: you feed it audio and it applies a sequence of damage to it. Inear Display has been making this kind of thing for long enough that the free ones are not throwaways.
VST3 and AU, macOS on Intel or ARM, and — read this part before you download — Windows 64-bit only. Four ratings, all five stars. Get Danaides
klattsch, by Crash United
Not a sequencer at all, but it belongs here, because it generates the one thing nobody wants to record themselves doing. It is a retro vocal synthesiser built on the formant speech synthesis of the 1980s, and its page says you can feed it plain English, Japanese kana or romaji, or raw ARPABET phoneme codes if you want to spell a sound that is not a word.
Six built-in voices — default, soprano, baritone, whisper, robot and choir — a piano roll with a pitch editor, and lossless WAV export, so what it makes leaves with you. It is on itch.io rather than Gumroad. Get klattsch — and follow @me_irl, who made it.
What to do with six of them
Do not install six of them. Install one, and use it until you find the thing it does that you would not have done. The value in this category is not coverage, it is surprise, and surprise does not survive being spread across a folder of plugins you half know.
If you want the rest of the free shelf, it is here, rebuilt as we find things.