This week's featured free plug-in from our free plug-ins database is a bundle of free plug-ins from Blue Cat. These have been around in some form for a long time but they are still excellent and have just been updated, with native Apple Silicon (M1) support and many other improvements so if you haven’t checked them out recently perhaps you should?

What Is The Blue Cat Free Pack?

A bundle of free plugins including:

Blue Cat Chorus

From a light ensemble to a deep destructive modulation effect, Blue Cat's Chorus can just do anything, for free! 

The Chorus effect was originally designed to simulate several voices, just as if several persons were playing together with the same notes, but with a variable delay between them. This is one of the typical effects that you can get with Blue Cat's Chorus.

But this plug-in also enables you to drastically change the original sound and create deep pitch modulation or crazy 'bubbling' effects.

With the additional "Spread" control on the stereo version, the famous stereo widening and head-spinning chorus effects are a few clicks away.

Blue Cat Flanger

Very famous during the '70s and '80s, the Flanger effect can be used on almost any audio track: on drums, voices synths or guitars, from a subtle effect to a deep alien-like voice effect, enjoy it!

Despite its simple user interface, Blue Cat's Flanger is very versatile: harsh and metallic or smooth and soft filtering effects, it can do them all, for free!

The stereo version also lets you smoothly transform it into a stereo flanging effect with a single knob. Push the "Spread" slider and hear the difference: the effect is turning around your head, and the sound takes another dimension, spread into the stereo field.

Blue Cat Free Amps

Blue Cat's Free Amp is a free guitar amp simulation plug-in offering three amp models created with the acclaimed Blue Cat's Destructor amp simulation modeler.

Inspired by legendary guitar amplifiers from the real world, the included "classic clean", "classic drive" and "modern drive" amp models cover a wide range of guitar amp tones, from clean vintage sounds from the early days of electric guitar to modern high gain metal tones.

Operating the plug-in is extremely simple: load it in your favourite host application, choose a preset or an amp model, and play! Like with a real guitar amp, you can tweak the frequency response with the included EQ and adjust the amount of drive - but watch out, it goes to 11!

With version 1.1, you can also load your own impulse responses (IR): add your favourite cabinet, microphones & room setup and feel at home!

Blue Cat FreqAnalyst

Blue Cat's FreqAnalyst is a free spectrum analyser plug-in that lets you monitor the spectral content of your audio signal in real-time.

This plug-in has been designed to provide extreme smoothness and high resolution for both time and frequency: unlike most spectrum analysers, Blue Cat's FreqAnalyst is able to display continuous variations even with a very high-frequency resolution, thanks to its unique smooth interpolation algorithms.

Most aspects of the audio to frequency display conversion can be managed, which lets you total control over the monitoring. A special thresholding system has been developed to help you see the important parts of the spectrum easily. In case you need extra precision in a particular frequency range, you can zoom the display and check the part of the graph you are interested in.

This plug-in supports Blue Cat's skinning language so that you can customise the user interface to your personal needs.

Blue Cat's Gain Suite

This plug-in suite is a series of gain utilities which let you control the volume of one or several audio tracks in real-time. The interest of these plug-ins resides in their particular features: 

First, they include advanced automation MIDI control capabilities (all response curves can be fully customised). Used together with one of their analysis tools or a MIDI controller, these plug-ins let you remotely control and automate the gain of each channel of the audio signal, wherever they reside in the signal path.

Another interesting and exclusive feature is the ability to link several instances of the same plug-in: thanks to their unique data-sharing technology, you can control the gain of several tracks at the same time with a single slider.

The package provides a single channel (mono or stereo) as well as a dual-channel version with mid/side capabilities for independent control of the left and right or mid and side channels. It can be very useful for stereo widening/narrowing your stereo tracks.

Blue Cat Phaser

Modelled after vintage analogue phaser circuits, Blue Cat's Phaser reproduces this old vintage phasing effect that you can find on so many recordings, but with the precision of modern digital processing techniques.

You can choose to apply up to 32 phasing stages, pushing the model to its limits, or create a subtle phasing effect with wet and feedback parameters set to a few percents.

You can also control the phase of the signal in the wet and feedback paths, which extends the possibilities of the original model.

On the stereo version, the additional "spread" control lets you obtain deep stereo widening phasing effects as well.

Blue Cat Triple EQ

Blue Cat's Triple EQ is a 3 bands semi-parametric equaliser that can be controlled like a single filter with customisable shape.

It includes a low shelf filter, a high shelf filter and a boost/cut peak filter. Its wide range of gain (+/-40 dB per band) and bandwidth (.01 to 5 Octave) makes it very versatile to create any filter shape. The three filters are linked together so that when you change the centre frequency or the bandwidth, the parameters of the three filters are modified accordingly: you can control the entire equaliser characteristics with a single mouse click.

The graph shows the computed frequency response of the plug-in so that you can exactly know how your signal is processed. The controls are directly available on top of the filter graph, making the design of the filter shape even easier.

The plug-in also offers a dual channels version, with independent left/right or mid/side equalisation capabilities. Both channels can be linked together in many ways, letting you transform this plugin into a frequency-dependent panner and much more.

The plug-in can be controlled in real-time with MIDI or automation: it is capable of absolutely zipper-free clean and continuous time-varying equalisation with no latency. it is the ideal companion of their audio analysis tools for signal-dependent side chain filtering.

Blue Cat Audio Standards:

• Available as: Mac-AAX, Mac-AU, Mac-RTAS, Mac-VST, Mac-VST3, Win-AAX, Win-RTAS, Win-VST, Win-VST3, Win x64-AAX, Win x64-VST, Win x64-VST3.

• Native Apple Silicon support

• Native DSP code for optimal performance.

• Full MIDI control and automation support with silent, zipper-free parameters update, advanced response control and MIDI Learn.

• No CPU load on idle: when the plug-in is fed with silence, the processing smoothly shuts down, to optimise the CPU usage of your Digital Audio Workstation.

• Customisable user interface with transparency management and zoom.

• Smooth Bypass: activate/deactivate the plug-in with absolutely no noise.

• Undo/Redo. 

• Fully featured integrated presets manager.

• Copy/paste the state of the plug-in between instances using the system clipboard.

• Any sample rate supported.

How Do I Get These Free Plugins?

Head over to the Blue Cat website and download them, as we said no sign-up, credit card or anything, they are completely free.