Meat Beats offers Orbhits and other free 90s-inspired virtual instruments for macOS and Windows. Several plugins are available for free download right now, with more coming soon (sign up to get notified about the releases).
Meat Beat is bringing back the sound of the 90s and giving it away for free. 90s House, Rave, and UK Garage heavily influence the available and upcoming instruments. So, if that’s what you’re into, check them out now.
Two instruments are available for free download right now (Orbhits and Micro Piano), and two are coming soon (FEM-BASO and Micro Keys). You can enter your email address on the Meat Beats website to receive a notification when additional plugins are released.
Orbhits is a new virtual instrument sampled from the Orbit 9090 rackmount synth. This instrument offers 170 hits, stabs, pads, and bass sounds that were the backbone of many 90s tunes. Meat Beats has done a good job capturing the character of the original hardware, from the sound to the distinctive yellow image.
Micro Piano is the instantly recognizable classic House piano sound. I have to be honest; on its own, it’s not a sound that I’m crazy about at all. But it just works so well for that genre, and you can’t have a 90s House hit without it.
The instruments in the coming soon category start with FEM-BASO, sampled from various hardware units, including the Yamaha DX100. It comes with over 100 presets inspired by Detroit Techno, House, and UK Garage.
Classic House Keys is the last of them, and it provides 32 classic keys from the 90s. The presets include electric pianos, bass keys, strings, organs, and synths. It has controls for Filter, Reverb, and Pan Mod.
If any of the abovementioned genres interest you, you could do far, far worse than these freebies. The sounds are pretty on point, and the combination of instruments provides a solid foundation for your next 90s banger.
Anyone who doesn’t feel nostalgic about the 90s or is too young to remember them can check out something entirely different in Bitty. It’s a, well, it’s a, never mind, you’ll see what it is.
Looking for more retro inspiration? Check out our list of free vintage synthesizers and download the retro synth classics such as Fury-800, PG-8X, and Exakt Lite.
These plugins are (will be) available in AU and VST formats for macOS (10.14/10.15/11/12) and Windows (8.1/10/11).
More info: Meat Beats
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18 Comments
Numanoid
onThanks for the info about meatbeats.com :-)
Numanoid
onThe Micro Piano sounds retro great, seeing that the sample is just 500KB !
MRG
onIndeed, the Micro Piano is micro, and lovely. 5 star-imprinted pills out of 5.
Unfortunately I have major issues with Orbhits. All instruments seem to be monophonic, some are best that way, some might be fun in poly. And, well I’m not sure why but most instruments stay silent on my computer, so I cannot rate it anyway.
No hate on Maize intended, but it’s never been the most stable thing around unfortunately, and you can’t update the ‘player’ part yourself when bugs are fixed. :-(
Brenny C
onI preferred the Mitsubishi imprinted pills. 🙃
L C
onI think the pad presets are polyphonic, but the bass, SFX, and (weirdly) chord presets are all monophonic.
Numanoid
onAdd two instances of the plugin, and pan them to get “faux” stereo ?
Orbit v1 came with only 8MB of sample memory, but what set the module apart is the Z-Plane filter. Have any free filter plugin yet emulated that ?
I really like the concept of this plugin, a lot of old samples could be brought back to life given a similar Maize interface, like Zero-G’s classic Analog 2 Digital sample libs of the early 90’s
MRG
onMonophonic/polyphonic not monophonic/stereophonic :D
Airwindows did something based on the EMU e6400 sampler filters. I haven’t tried them yet. Search for ‘e6400’ on his website.
Jake
onThere’s no link.
Brenny C
onhttp://www.meatbeats.com
MRG
onKinda sounds like an adult website link, and it kinda is since you needed to be alive in the 90s to fully enjoy it… ^_^;;;
Brenny C
onHahahaha it really does, MRG.
Tomislav Zlatic
onThanks, added to the page!
TORLEY
onDo these Meat Beats have a Manifesto? 🤣
Nice tight presentation with the color themes. Orbhits is obvs a tribute to the E-mu Orbit with the related Proteus 2000 line. Wow, takes me back. https://www.vintagesynth.com/emu/orbit.php
Brenny C
onYep, lol I’m thinking the dev is an MBM fan. Then again, who isn’t (/wasn’t)?
cmd
onJames, Orbit 9090 is a sampler not a synth :) just like any Proteus. Wouldn’t this be like rompling any Spitfire or Kontakt paid library? I guess you can’t later on say “I made this song with MB Orbhits”.
Numanoid
onThe Z-plane filter could make a user think one had a synth in Orbit instead of a rompler
MRG
onI always preferred the word S&S, Sample and Synth, for those, Roland JV/XP series and so many more. But the word rompler was indeed coined for these machines. Synths using samples instead of OSCs (analog or digital), with filtering and the like. Okay, except the Kawai K1 who forgot its filter at home. ^_^
But CMD, usually the word sampler is reserved to machines who can record samples. In the case of software, at least load your own samples to make an instrument because sampling audio from a VSTi (in the early days of the format) was basically impossible or very cumbersome.
paopi
onThe micro keys looks lovely indeed, but the YouTube demo gives headhache…a waterfall of nonsense random modulations!
it makes me sick after a minute!