5 Best Guitar VST Plugins 2024! (FREE + Paid) transcript

- Hey, it's Onesto and today I wanna show you the five guitar vsts that I'm using day in and day out. I'll show off some fun demos and give you a few reasons why each guitar plugin is worth considering. Let's start with the best free guitar that I can find is Heavyocity Foundations nylon guitar. This nylon guitar is part of Heavyocity's suite of free NKS compatible instrument plugins that's starting to rival Labs from Spitfire Audio.

Yeah, crazy. I know. In this plugin you have two layers, a lush and soft nylon string acoustic guitar, and there's also a beautiful sound design layer that's labeled texture. When you combine them, you get something like this. It's an expensive sound inside a free plugin, which is all good by me. If you dive through the settings, you'll find a simple ADSR, A sample start point, a sequencer that controls a gate or an arpeggiator, and an effects panel with punch, delay, and reverb.

Whenever I use this guitar, I'm still surprised. If you wanna score yourself as free plugin, you can click the link below, and if you're new here, Hey, welcome. On this channel, we check out the latest gear plugins and practices. that help keep our lives musical and creative, and thanks for allowing me to blab about my favorite guitars with you today. Let's keep going and talk about my favorite electric guitar. I use this one all the time.

I think everyone else should too, it's electric Mint from Native Instruments. Electric Mint is a sample sixties Fender Stratocaster, so you're gonna find a versatile tone that works across a lot of genres. There is so much you can do with this guitar that is almost overwhelming, but honestly, it's really fun and easy to use. You have two type of presets, melody, and pattern melody, presets. They're straightforward. Just use MIDI to play the guitar.

Yep. I really love how that sounds. And what's even better is that you have four different articulations. You have open, muted and tremolo. You can also choose whether you're playing with a pick in plectrum mode or with a finger to give a softer attack. I hope you're seeing already how much versatility this plugin can offer you. And one of my favorite things about this plugin is that you can use an aftertouch compatible MIDI keyboard, like the Komplete Kontrol MK3 or the Komplete Kontrol M 2 to add in vibrato by holding a key and pressing into it.

This makes it so fun to play, but maybe you want something you know more ready made than check out the pattern presets. There are over 200 strum and pick patterns, and once you select one, you'll instantly get an inspiring pattern all by just holding out a single MIDI key or by holding out some chords. We can also customize these patterns with the MIDI export feature. And when it comes to the shape of the tone, you have a lot of options.

You can dive into the settings and you'll find three combinable pickups, and if you're looking for guitar amps and effects while you're in luck, because Electric Mint comes with a ton of effects and amps to choose from. And even better, there are a lot of effect presets in here to give you a creative jumpstart. If you wanna learn more about it, just click the link below. And as a heads up, there's some affiliate links down there.

All this means is that I receive a small percentage if you purchase a product after clicking one of these links, these affiliate sales really keep this small channel afloat, so thanks for letting me get a little salesy from time to time. Now, a lot of you probably haven't heard about this one. It's my pick for best acoustic guitar. I'm really excited about this one. It's the MG soft acoustic guitar from Spitfire Audio. - This Guitar plugin is one of the most thoughtful plugins I've encountered.

It's a recorded Martin J 40, steel string acoustic guitar, and this plugin really aims to demystify the workings of the guitar for the non guitarist. So someone like me, and I really think they achieved that goal. I'm barely gonna scratch the surface on this one, but here goes nothing. The soft acoustic guitar has three modes, note chord and sequencer. Note mode is a default mode, and it's your straightforward play it mode.

And there's three articulations in here. You have normal muted and harmonic. And besides the amazing sound quality, you'll notice a couple of things and I wish all guitar plugins did this, but as you play, you can see where the finger positioning is, which is really helpful to make sure that what's being played is in the realm of possibility for a real life guitarist. - Another thing that's happening is that the positions they sometimes change, and this is controlled by the modes here, you have manual auto and free.

And each mode, they can set guitar rules in place to ensure that whatever you're playing is possible to play on a guitar chord mode is super interesting. It's a chord strumming engine. Pretty much get your right hand to hold out the root note and a second or fourth, and then you use your left hand to play. These two teal color keys, G1 and A1 G1 will play you a Down strum while a one will play you an up strum. There are also a bunch of controls to customize how the chord is played.

I'm not gonna lie, this is an easy but unusual way to play chords. So there is a little bit getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it starts to feel right. And I find that chord mode, it works really well with chords that are spaced out. But if you wanna play quick drums and you want to check out the sequencer, the sequencer in here is super useful. Sequencer mode gives you four fully customizable blanks with up to 32 steps.

The way it works is that these yellow keys here activate which bank you're gonna play. So hold out a yellow key with your left hand while holding out a root note or an optional second or fourth with your right hand, you can tell which chord is being played by. Looking at the guitar here, it's really impressive how you can customize each step too, you can alter the played string, the articulation, the pick or strum direction and volume.

You can use one of the many presets in here to get you started or just sequence it yourself. And if there's a sequence you wanna try with a different instrument, you can utilize a record midi and drag and drop feature here. And the last thing to mention is that there's even deeper controls on the calibrate page where you can set different tuning presets to capo placement and adjust the fret noise. And the effects page has two reverbs, chorus, delay and eq, your bread and butter effects.

So you pretty much have everything you need in the plugin itself. I said a lot about this one because I love it that much, but the last thing I'll say that says Plugin is best experience with the Komplete Kontrol S series keyboard. The light guide here really, really helps, but if you don't have it, that's all good because the Kontact interface does a good job letting you know what each key triggers. And if you wanna learn more about this one, just click the link below.

If you're looking for a plugin that can do guitars and a little bit of everything else, then check out Arcade from Output. I included Arcade in my last Best Guitars video, and I was trying not to feature it again, but Arcade, they're just always adding new features and sound libraries, so it's just bumped this way back into the list and here's why. And here you're gonna find all kinds of guitar loops across all kinds of genres.

With Arcade Samplers, for example, if you browse the downtime line, you'll find Cozy lo-fi guitars. Or if you check out Future Perfect, you're gonna find grungy melodic guitars. Pretty much the way it works is that the white keys will trigger a different loop while the black keys let you get some crazy results with time stretching or reversing and slicing, and it's all pre-assigned so you can just jump in and play. There are also effect macros and all the controls you can ever ask for.

If you dive underneath the hood, or let's say you wanna explore a bunch of guitar presets, well, you can check out one of their many instrument engines. And if you don't want to use a guitar at all, it's all good because there's so much more that you can play with. Arcade has saved my butt so many times, especially when I'm short on time, which is usually always when you're raising a 13 month old. The combination of samplers and instruments allow me to quickly find and assemble a set of great sounds.

You can try it for free. You know what to do. Just click the link below. This next VST is a deep cut. If you want an electric guitar that specializes in cinematic and ambient sounds, then I recommend Quartarone Guitar Reveries from Valiant Samples. This is another easy and straightforward instrument. The main parts are the sound sources, macros and effects. You're given up to two sound sources where you can choose from 25 different articulations.

Some of my favorites are definitely the sustains, muted guitar pads and granular sustains, and you can run them through 10 onboard effects. Some of my favorite effects in here are the Amp and Lo-Fi. Love them. I'm not gonna lie, the interface, I think it's kind of clunky. I think it's ugly, but unfortunately the presets in here are beautiful. They're so dialed in that I usually just need to tweak the EQ and I'm good to go.

And here are a few of my favorites. Once again, if you wanna learn more about this one, you know what to do. Click the link below. And those are my five favorite guitar plugins right now. If you want a deeper look into Electric Mint, I have a video here that you can check out. Thanks for watching. Later.