ENS-86, PhaXer, and Relic: 3 Free Plugins Worth Grabbing This Week
This Week's Free Plugin Pickups
Three new freebies landed in the last 72 hours, and all three are actually finished products, not teaser builds for a paid upsell. One's a vintage chorus, one's a phase-correction tool, and one is a 12-plugin analog bundle that showed up out of nowhere. Here's what each one does and where it's genuinely useful on a bass-heavy Ableton session, plus where you need to be careful with it.
ENS-86 by Hivetune — a Real Bucket-Brigade Chorus, Free
Hivetune released ENS-86 on October 1, modeling the bucket-brigade-device (BBD) chorus circuits found in classic '80s synth chorus sections. It's VST3 and AU on Mac (Intel and Apple Silicon) and VST3 and standalone on Windows 10+.
The control set is small but well chosen: Rate (0.1–12 Hz), Depth, a Phase knob (0°–180°) that controls how the two modulated voices sit against each other in the stereo field, a Mid/Side Width control that goes up to 200%, and independent Dry and Wet level knobs. There's a preset manager with three hardware-style voicings (I, II, and I+II). The base plugin is free — Hivetune asks for an email to send the download link, which is the same soft-gate pattern we've flagged on other free releases this year, not a trial. A $4.99 Complete Edition adds 20+ presets and alternate GUI skins, but every processing control is unlocked in the free version.
One detail worth knowing before you load it: pulling the Dry level all the way down turns the chorus into a vibrato effect, since you're left with only the pitch-modulated signal and none of the original.
Where this gets dangerous on bass: chorus works by detuning and panning copies of a signal across the stereo field, which is exactly what you don't want happening to your sub fundamental. If ENS-86's Width knob is cranked and you print it across a full-range bass track, your low end can lose energy the second a mono system (a phone speaker, a club sub array that's summed) plays it back.
The fix is the same one we've used for every stereo-effects-on-bass post this year: don't put it directly on the bass channel. Send only the upper harmonics to it.
- Create a return track and set ENS-86 on it.
- High-pass the signal going into that return around 150–250 Hz, so the fundamental and first harmonic never reach the chorus.
- Keep Width modest (30–60%) on that return rather than maxing it, even though it's only carrying harmonics.
- Blend in sparingly — a little bit of BBD wobble on the upper harmonics of a bass patch adds analog character without touching the part of the signal that has to stay centered and strong in mono.
If you want the vibrato trick specifically for a bass patch, do it on a duplicated, high-passed layer rather than the main bass channel, for the same mono-safety reason.
PhaXer by Soundins — Phase Correction, and a Naming Trap to Know About
Soundins' PhaXer hit version 2.1 this week (confirmed free, no email or account required), adding linear-phase filtering to its correction engine. It's built to find and fix phase-correlation problems between the left and right channels of a stereo signal — specifically the kind that cause low end to thin out or disappear when a mix gets summed to mono. It ships as VST, VST3, AU, and AAX for Mac and Windows.
The workflow is straightforward: a Frequency selector picks the band you're correcting, a Focus control sets how wide that band is, a Threshold sets how aggressively the correction kicks in, and a real-time correlation meter (switchable between 1/1, 1/3, and 1/6-octave resolution) shows you the before and after. Soundins is upfront that this is meant as a final corrective pass rather than something you leave running by default — their own documentation warns that phase processing is easy to overdo, and recommends comparing stereo and mono sums carefully before committing to a setting.
Here's the thing to watch for: there's a separate, similarly-purposed plugin called PHIXER from RiverFlux Audio (released back in September) that does essentially the same job — adaptive phase rotation with bass-focused processing. PhaXer and PHIXER are not the same plugin, not the same company, and not interchangeable presets — they just happen to solve the same problem with near-identical names. If you're downloading one, double-check the developer name on the file before you install, or you'll end up with two phase tools and no idea which is which in your plugin list.
Bass use case: if you've ever recorded a DI bass through a reamp chain, or layered a sampled sub under a recorded take, and noticed the low end gets noticeably weaker the moment you hit the mono button, that's a phase-alignment problem between the two signals — exactly what PhaXer is built to catch. Set the Frequency selector down around your bass's fundamental range, watch the correlation meter while toggling mono, and nudge the correction in until the meter reads closer to +1 without obviously changing the tone. If you have to push Threshold hard to get a clean mono sum, that's a sign the two bass sources were never well-aligned to begin with, and you may get a better result re-recording or re-triggering one of them rather than fighting it with correction.
Relic by RiverFlux Audio — 12 Plugins, One Free Download
This is the biggest find of the week. RiverFlux Audio dropped Relic on October 2 as a genuinely free (not time-limited, pay-what-you-want-including-$0 on Gumroad) bundle of 12 separate plugins: five compressors (optical, tube optical, VCA, FET, and stereo vari-mu), five EQs (a preamp-style unit, a three-band proportional-Q design, a ten-band graphic, a passive program EQ, and a midrange-focused processor), and two tape machines (a multitrack deck and a mastering-style recorder). Each one is its own standalone plugin rather than one bloated multi-tool, available as VST3/CLAP on Windows and Linux and VST3/CLAP/AU on Mac. Gumroad checkout doesn't require an account — you'll just enter an email for the download link, same as most "free" plugin drops this year.
Every plugin in the set includes 33 factory presets, A/B comparison, copy/paste between instances, latency-aligned bypass, and Delta (difference) listening, plus external sidechain input on all five compressors and 2x/4x/8x oversampling where it applies. That's a genuinely deep feature set for something with no price tag attached.
For bass specifically, the compressor choices matter more than usual:
- FET compressor — fast attack, aggressive gain reduction. Good for adding punch and controlling pick/finger transients on a recorded bass without squashing sustain.
- Opto compressors (there are two — a standard optical and a tube optical variant) — slower, program-dependent response. Better for smoothing out level inconsistencies across a whole bassline without audibly "grabbing" individual notes.
- VCA compressor — the most neutral, predictable option. A safe default if you just want consistent levels before the signal hits anything else in the chain.
- Stereo vari-mu — designed for bus-width material, not a single bass track; save it for your mix bus or a drum bus instead.
The two tape machines are worth a pass on a bass bus even if you don't touch anything else in the bundle — tape saturation adds harmonic content in the low-mids that can help a thin bass patch read as fuller on small speakers, without the stereo-width risk that chorus or delay effects carry. Start with the multitrack deck model at a conservative drive setting before reaching for the mastering recorder, which is tuned for a different (gentler, wider-bandwidth) kind of saturation.
The Takeaway
Of the three, Relic is the one to grab regardless of what you're working on this week — a 12-plugin free bundle with this feature set doesn't show up often, and the compressors alone are worth having in your browser. ENS-86 is a genuinely good-sounding chorus if you respect the mono-safety rule and keep it off your bass fundamental. PhaXer is a useful diagnostic tool specifically for stereo-bass phase problems, but go in knowing it has a confusingly-named cousin from a different company — get the right one.
And if you haven't grabbed them yet, Low End Candy's own free plugins are worth a look too: Ratchet for stutter/glitch rhythm effects and The Clap for layered clap and snare design — both permanently free, no email required.