I'm looking for an unusual instrument plugin.

Free or paid plugins are fine.

Do you have any recommendations?

 

Aalto - Madrona Labs
Aparillo - Sugar Bytes
Atoms - Baby Audio
Buchla Easel - Arturia
Current - Minimal Audio
Drambo - iOS, but sort of works on Mac desktop too - crazy powerful
DS Thorn - Very slept on synth. Capable of bread and butter sounds, but can get very experimental
Factor Synth - Anemond - Super slept on dev. His stuff is really unique. Hes also super nice. Buy it to support
Factory - Sugar Bytes
FKFX Krishna Synth - Its bread and butter but the randomization is powerful and gives unique results
Kaivo - Madrona
Knif Audio Knifonium - not really experimental, but can be
Dawesome - Kult - or any dawesome really
Lith - Soda devices - Randomization yields excellent results
Korg Opsix native - classic but can get weird
Newfangled Pendulate - Nasty little synth, weird, fun, free
Klevgrand Pipa - Unique-ish vocal synth
AudioDamage - Quanta - nothing too crazy but more than capable for weird
Random - beatsurfing - awesome glitched out synth. really cool for leads and basses
Surge XT - Bread and butter open source synth, but very capable for weird. FREE
Synthi V - Arturia - a classic reimagined
Klevgrand Tomofon - interesting little noise maker
UAD Opal Morphing Synth - bread and butter but actually can get weird. pretty cool little synth
Unfiltered Audio LION - one of my personal fav's - Everything from Unfiltered audio is on my desert island list

also, Rando - from monkey c. not a synth, but one of the best purchases ive made in a while. its a random sampler, that pulls random files from your samples folder and puts them all in key and on beat. crazy inspiring with wonky, weird results. Depends on your sample folder of course

Deep sampler 2 from audialab - free beta version is out now, (mac only for now) paid pro version is around the corner. Generative AI using stable audio. Very well done, endless results. takes some setting up but its awesome.

If you have maxforlive / ableton, all the dillon bastan stuff is a must have. he's the king of experimental.

Hope this helps!

 

Welcome to the forum, =6SÁÅK>.

Like Shinyzen said, pretty much anything Madrona Labs, and I'll add Newfangled Audio's Generate (Pendulate is their free one oscillator version), one can go far into the aether with KHs Phase Plant (falls under the "not cheap" category, or if you don't like normalcy you can always do go the road less traveled and go full mad scientist with a grain/sample engine like the Audio Bulb AUXTURE. If you can run ancient 32 bit instruments and if I can find a discontinued version of their old buggy but worth it Sophia I'll give you a copy of it.

 

If in general, see above posts.
If you need a virtual Theremin, look for Spook Keys or Super Spook Keys vsts.

 

I love phase plant. it takes a second to wrap your head around programming it, but once you get it, its a great synth.

 

Reason Studios Objekt & Friktion. Very tweakable physical modeling synths. An electric piano made with Objekt as a combinator patch for Reason.

 

objekt is so freaking cool. i actually dug out my old reason license and paid the upgrade just to buy it

 

Reason 13 went on sale for 60% last Christmas, when I found out it applied to Objekt I had to scoop the permanent license because it was so good, I paid $120 for a bigger upgrade than just the factory upgrade from 11 to 13 it came with the one rack extension that couldn’t get left out

 

Unfiltered Audio - great effects, LION and Battalion are full of potential
VCV - bit of a learning curve but you get access to a free full eurorack environment and the Cardinal plugin gives that to your workstation
Pigments - might be something everyone knows about but it just got more powerful with its recent physical modeling update
Absynth - hard to get but very powerful, something that has recently felt under the radar
HG Fortune plugins - were made free and work well for anything cinematic
Falcon 3 - like pigments but somehow supercharged in its abilities, it’s basically phase plant from another universe
Reaktor or at least the first party ensembles - the factory library may have something you’ll like and there’s tons of user content
Surge XT - FREE and very powerful, it can do lots and more than bread and butter synth patches
Plogue chipspeech - various robot voices which can sing and are based on old voice synthesis chips
Madrona Labs - interesting instruments and their new spectral monster Sumu recently came out
Zebra2 and u-he - Zebralette 3 only beta so far but the 2 version is ridiculously deep and there’s other interesting plugins like Bazille and Hive

 

Is Absynth still supported? Really should pull that back out.