Our Guide To The Best MIDI & Music Theory VST Plugins
We’ve compiled the best MIDI and music theory VST plugins for producers available on Plugin Boutique.
The world’s most famous plugins are usually instruments and effects. From the likes of super synths like Pigments 5 and Diva, through FabFilter and Soundtoys effects, there’s a lot of love for audio plugins. But there’s a third category of plugin that can be infinitely more creative than an instrument or effect: the humble MIDI Plugin.
The workflow with MIDI plugins is simple and requires just a touch of signal routing inside your DAW. All the magic happens within the plugins themselves, where you’re able to generate and pick apart melodies, chords and riffs with ease, making them enormously useful as music theory tools. While most DAWs have their own basic step sequencers, arpeggiators and chord generators, third-party developers offer more complex MIDI VSTs that are capable of intelligently generating MIDI sequences tailored to the key, tempo and style of your project.
With the right MIDI plugin at your fingertips, inspiration is just around the corner. In this article, we’ll take a look at seven of the best MIDI and music theory VST plugins for producers available on Plugin Boutique.
InstaComposer by WA Production
A Music Theory Plugin for Producers
When the creative well has run dry, and inspiration is lacking, MIDI-generating plugins like InstaComposer can be invaluable ways of getting your musical flow up and running once more. Fuelled by AI, this innovative plugin can conjure melody, rhythm, bass, pads, ostinato and chords across five separate tracks at the click of a button. Your personal preferences are taken into account, with a host of customisable parameters that feedback into the plugin's intelligent decision-making matrix. Set time signature, scale and riff length – it’s up to you!
Five Track Attack
Each track inside InstaComposer is assignable to a different MIDI channel. These tracks are assigned to sections, for example, bass, rhythm, lead and so on. The idea is that you can choose to populate multiple tracks with one of InstaComposer’s many presets, or output MIDI in a single channel. The presets are labelled as chord progressions, which serve as building blocks, and you can also instruct the plugin to incorporate a number of different parameters into the MIDI sequence, from repetition probability to the complexity of chord shapes.
Scaler 2 by Plugin Boutique
The Best MIDI VST Plugin
If you find yourself coming up short in compositional situations, our very own music theory workstation Scaler 2 will provide you with the software assistance you need. A hugely comprehensive and sophisticated music theory workstation, there’s not much that Scaler 2 can’t do. The plugin analyzes your existing MIDI and audio data to determine what key your music is in and then suggests chords and entire progressions to go with your music. Chords and progressions can be ‘clicked together’ and played using one of the 30 in-built instruments to preview, or you can choose from 200 artist chord sets and 200 mood-based chord sets.
Audio to MIDI Plugin
In fact, the action doesn’t stop at chords – Scaler 2 is able to output whole phrases, riffs and melodies that have been adapted from real human performances. You can also explore alternative chords based on what key you’re in, and quickly find extensions and new voicings of the chords you’re using. Furthermore, Scaler 2 can also be thought of as an audio to MIDI plugin, as a new feature was introduced that’s able to detect chords or scales from audio. It’s not quite as accurate as the plugin’s MIDI detection, naturally, but it’s still a useful tool that extends Scaler 2’s reach and functionality.
Fluid Chords by Pitch Innovations
The Ultimate Pitch-Bending MIDI Chord Plugin
The key feature in Fluid Chords is that it allows you to scale lock your pitch bend function on your MIDI device. It’s a simple but progressive idea that shakes up the traditional pitch-bending model and creates the potential for the kind of unique pitch FX that you might hear in a Hans Zimmer score. Fluid Chords is compatible with any MPE-enabled synthesizer, which means you can load up instruments like Pigments into the plugin and get cool-sounding chord bends straight away. You can also integrate presets from other MIDI generating plugins by using the Learn feature, giving you a way to lay out chord progressions to bend between.
The Future of Chord Bending
Normally, using a pitch bend wheel to move a group of notes causes each note to move incrementally at a unified rate. In other words, all the notes move the same amount, at the same time. If you want to pitch shift a full chord to another chord though, some notes will need to move further or fewer distances than others, a problem which Fluid Chords solves. Pitch Innovations’ intelligent chord bending wizardry targets chords instead of pitches, meaning pitch shifting a six-note chord into a five-note chord won’t leave you with an extra note that’s off-key.
Melody Sauce 2 by EVAbeat
Make Easy MIDI Melodies
Writing masterful melodies is easy with Melody Sauce 2, a supercharged music production assistant that delivers immediate results. The AI-powered plugin mirrors the way top producers build melodic phrases and has an accessible user interface that saves on clutter and goes big on efficiency. To generate a melody all you need to do is give the MIDI plugin some guidance on things like key, speed, octave and groove and then jump into the Creation Mode section of the plugin, which is where things get really interesting.
Style Points
With a Style Mode that features over 300 style settings, you can instruct the plugin to generate melodies that suit the genre you’re working in, whether it’s house, techno, pop, trap, hip hop or reggaeton. Although Melody Sauce 2 is a MIDI plugin that you can route to other instruments, it boasts a sound engine of nearly 100 sounds and three built-in FX which means you can hear your melodies straight out of the box. Once you’ve landed on something you like, simply drag and drop your MIDI melodies inside your DAW, or do some tweaking using Melody Sauce 2’s Advanced Editor section.
Stutter Edit 2 by iZotope
Create Amazing MIDI Effect Chains
Stutter Edit 2 is an ingenious multi-effects plugin designed by electronic music producer BT in collaboration with iZotope. The plugin builds upon the ‘stutter effect’ that he helped to pioneer in electronic music (from which Stutter Edit 2 takes its name), whereby small fragments of audio are rhythmically repeated in combination with other effects – a previously laborious technique that can now be recreated in seconds. With Stutter Edit 2 you can create a unique chain of effect events instead of static settings, which can be called up using MIDI input. In other words, you can sequence or play complex stutters at the touch of a button!
Custom Editing
You can use Stutter Edit 2 in either Auto or MIDI mode, with the former syncing to the internal clock of your DAW and the latter reacting to incoming MIDI notes. The plugin has a large bank of ‘gestures’, which are the effect events we spoke about previously, including cinematic rises, exciting transitions and club filter sweeps. There’s a handy purple bar that gives you a visual representation of what’s happening to your audio, and you can customise gestures for length, release, direction and more, as well as editing modulation curves in the TVM (Time Variant Modulator) grid that affect the stutter itself.
deCoda by zplane
An Audio to MIDI Music Theory Plugin
Have you ever wished you could listen to a piece of music and immediately identify the key, tempo and chords? Well, now you can, with the help of zplane’s music theory MIDI plugin deCoda. deCoda is a song deconstruction tool that analyzes any audio file and breaks it down so that you can learn and understand the music quickly and comprehensively. Inspired and informed by professionals in the music and recording industry, deCoda will recognise the sections of a song and divide it up for you to easily navigate through, allowing you to explore verses and choruses, or beats and bars.
Practice Makes Perfect
Whether you want to learn how to play a song or jam along with it, deCoda is the perfect tool for music practice. Highlight any instrument in the mix with Focus mode, listen to it solo’d and then remove it to practice with the backing track only. zplane’s time-stretching algorithm, élastiquePro, means you can slow things down or speed them up to fit your playing ability, and even change the key. You can also add a metronome to the track that will play in 4th, 8th or 16th beats, and view and export the melodic content of the track as MIDI for transcription elsewhere.
Playbeat 3 by Audiomodern
The Best MIDI Plugin for Making Beats
In the software realm, step-sequencing is a MIDI-based tool that divides a measure of music into a predetermined number of note values called ‘steps’. Audiomodern’s groove machine Playbeat 3 makes use of not one, not two but eight totally independent internal sequencers capable of combining all sorts of parameters including volume, panning, pitch-shifting and more. Select sounds from Playbeat 3’s bank of kit presets or load any audio file of your choice, and start programming better beats instantly.
Intelligent Grooves
Playbeat 3 makes rhythmic pattern creation easy, but it doesn’t wrestle all the creative control away from you. The way you choose to use it matters, especially as the plugin now works off Audiomodern’s brand new SMART algorithm, which learns your preferred patterns through daily usage and then adapts generated patterns to better fit your personal style. What’s more, you can also map MIDI output routing, meaning you can feed in any other piece of software or hardware from your own collection, as long as it accepts MIDI.
