“FREEBIES?” - Ty Unwin

The last time I wrote a note of music that was simply for the sake of writing… left to my own devices… not a commission…. was 24 years ago!!

1997!!! That’s depressing…..

And so when Sonicstate asked me if I wanted to contribute something to this project, what I SHOULD have done is come out all guns blazing, 24 years of angst, writing something huge and epic (my usual shit) and showing what I’ve learnt over the interim period and how the studio has grown out of recognition over the last 20 years.…

Except I didn’t have a studio… it was stripped 6 months for a complete redesign and is still not finished…

So…. out came my laptop setup…. one computer, an interface and a controller. Still… I’ve always said that limitation is good..… makes you more creative. Forget all of my fancy synths and hardware heaven… this will be liberating. This will be fun. This will be a challenge….

But it was soon pointed out to me by a synthnut friend that my “limited setup” was a fully specced Macbook Pro with 8Tb full of the same stupidly expensive sample libraries and softsynths galore as my main system, so any genuine sense of “It’s fine, I’ll manage” was soon put into context by my friends screaming “Don’t be a dick, just get on with it” in unison.

And then it struck me….

If I was going to be working with a limited setup, why don’t I make it a REALLY limited setup… and for me, here, that’s my soundsources: sample libraries, softsynths, plug ins…. ALL the things that I use daily and make me sound like “me”.

Could I write a produce a track using ONLY free plug ins… zero monetary output? Realistically the only thing I absolutely couldn’t shift from is my DAW… simply because Nuendo/Cubase has been my choice for years and I wasn’t going to move away from that JUST to make my life impossible rather than difficult… but how about I used NON of my paid for libraries, softsynths and plugins… No Kontakt, Omnipshere, Arturia, UAD, Eventide… NOTHING….

… Only FREEBIES

So these were the self inflicted rules:

Samples: No loops of any sort… even if they were free… only proper playable instruments… and the perfect source for these was the amazing Spitfire LABS series… loads of interesting stuff, free and most importantly they have their own player so I didn’t have to use Kontakt.

Softsynths: I didn’t anticipate on using many but they had to be gratis! I’m not particularly proud to say this but I don’t actually use any of the plugins that come with Cubase… I’ve always better alternatives.. but these would now possibly become my friends! In the end it was Cherry Audio’s MG-1 Plus and u-he Podolski that saved the day.

Plugins: Again, only the ones you get included with Cubase… and I grabbed a Valhalla free reverb.. but that was it.


This basically meant that my “comfort blanket”, my “fluffy slippers” consisting of “go to” instruments, samples and my well talked about “box of tricks” were nowhere to be seen.
“All things Ty” were gone and instead I had a completely new and foreign template to work with.

And I stuck to it.

I have to admit there were times where I thought “Why on EARTH am I doing this” when I knew that there was that Diva patch or Kontakt library just sitting on my drive whispering “use me… use me”…. but I didn’t… EVERYTHING on this track is a freebie.

And the result?

I wanted to prove a point to myself that I could still write using limited means, which I’ve done… and YES there are LOADS of things that I know I could make sound better if I used “THAT” sound with “THOSE” FX but in some cases THOSE plugins cost as much as the laptop itself…. and are they really necessary? No… No they’re not.

It is what it is. There’s some clever shit going on in there in places but I’ll be honest, THEY are my favourite elements…. the fact that here they took me HOURS to create those two notes, with processing upon processing, whereas in my normal setup it would be “kontakt/load/play note/done”…. THAT is why I enjoyed the process of writing this track.

It was liberating. It was fun. It WAS a challenge