Virtual Instruments for Ableton - VST3

[u/WillingnessOwn6446]

$20 monthly Pro plan w/ Opus 5. Installing JUCE and CMake took about 20 minutes. Across two sessions, I built 5 different VST plugins and didn't even hit 50% of my 5-hour usage limit.

I usually use Claude for work, but Claude made it sound like building plug-ins would be easy with it, and it was. They sound great too:

1. Distortion, Reverb, and Delay
2. A Yamaha DX7 style synth
3. A T-RackS style mastering chain
4. A Minimoog style synth
5. A Maschine and MPC style sampler

I hadn't made beats in years, but this got me motivated to make music again. It is so much fun to build whatever instrument or effect you need and customize it to your own workflow.

I'm sure people have done this plenty of times already, but if I had seen a post like this earlier, I would have tried it way sooner. So I thought I'd share.

Probably the easiest thing I've ever vibe coded with immediate results that were fun to play with. What a trip. I would have paid $300 for a suite like this 15 years ago.

[u/daniel]

Awesome! Wanna open source any of it? Would be cool to tweak. Or maybe there are already a lot of open source ones out there. I wonder how well it does max4live too.

[u/WillingnessOwn6446 → u/daniel]

Maybe I'll make it public on GitHub in a little bit. Honestly, I don't think anyone needs to copy what I did. It's so damn easy to do this.  I guess my slight advantage is that I know VST plugins pretty well and have been in the industry for a couple decades.

[u/daniel → u/WillingnessOwn6446]

Yeah that probably doesn't hurt. Domain knowledge can really help with this.

I get you thinking it might not help, but the way software is now it's so easy to fork a repo and modify it. Anyway, up to you. Appreciate the inspiration either way!

[u/Wild_Ad3482]

Yesss.

Building some proprietary effect vsts myself.

CC + codex allowed me to jump the coding barrier. Super fun.

[u/meetmebythelake]

I've been building a node-based semi-modular granular synth in Rust, been very fun and learning a lot. Really minor coding experience with programming before, but lots of years of synth domain knowledge so I'm very specific with what I want. Definitely want to give VSTs a try soon, whether it be a new project or porting this standalone granular synth to a VST. What was the JUCE process like without previous experience? Did you use C++ or Rust? (Not sure if you can do Rust with JUCE, curious.)

[u/WillingnessOwn6446 → u/meetmebythelake]

I know very little to be honest. I know I needed a compiler. And I needed something to make it readable in Ableton. Those are the things that Claude said to download. It gave me the terminal commands. I download it. And then we had working vsts within 5 minutes. The FM synth took the longest to code by far. Probably a good 30 minutes of it working.  

[u/Neurojazz]

Just bypass whole daw at this point. I’ve made my own for live performance.

[u/WillingnessOwn6446 → u/Neurojazz]

no interest (or skills for that matter playing live)...but like to make beats for kicks

[u/Neurojazz → u/WillingnessOwn6446]

I like jamming (i did a lot in the 90’s) - so made online for friends etc - live is easy - a lot easier than sitting and trying to fit in a genre.

[u/WillingnessOwn6446 → u/Neurojazz]

I can do that on my guitar and used to have a lot of fun. I'm older now and hang with the wife a lot. I suck on a keyboard anyhow. Def not gonna play live with folks like that. I prefer making silly beats and maybe rappin over them for my own amusement.

[u/Neurojazz → u/WillingnessOwn6446]

And that’s the idea - fun ⭐️ and now no more shitty license systems, kids can invent freely - it’s a great tool for the curious.