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Alex Acheson is an EDM/pop producer in Nashville, Tennessee. Though he may be young, he has an extensive musical background, with a degree in music education from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where his primary instrument was the tuba.
Notably, he has also been in several a cappella singing groups as both a singer and a beatboxer/vocal percussionist, including the Colorado-based group 5280 A Cappella.
After moving to Nashville three years ago, he started dedicating himself to the art of music production, studying on his own, and working for the online music production school Produce like a Boss. Now, he has a growing list of clients, as well as his own EDM artist project going by the name EXNO.
When he’s not making music, Alex loves visiting beaches (though there’s not too many in Nashville) and surfing, snowboarding, playing soccer, and reading anything by Malcolm Gladwell. A self-described "goofy guy", you can expect to find plenty of jokes, puns and laughs wherever he goes.
It can be extremely daunting to open up a fresh patch in Serum, stare at the blank slate in front of you, and try to get from the default saw wave to a head-crushing bass sound, or a gentle bell pad.
This list is to give you a few places to start your sound design process, and to set you up with some common techniques you can keep in your back pocket, which you could probably use in other synth plugins too!
Here it is folks, one of those coveted lists of goodies for producers, mixing engineers, and indie bedroom artists.
We’ve got the sauce for your studio in the form of all the free plugins you could ask for, so strap in for this rapid-fire rundown of the best free plugins you can get in 2025.
If you’re reading this, you probably don’t fully understand compressors, and you need to know that it’s ok; most people don’t!
To work with compressors, all you need is a basic understanding of what they do, but if you really want to know what happens under the hood, keep reading!
Vocals can really make or break a song. There’s nothing like having a great singer on your track lending it the final sparkle it needs to become a hit, but it’s all too easy to overdo things and ruin a good take with effects.
VST, or Virtual Studio Technology, is a file format that came out in 1996 as a way to digitally emulate various pieces of hardware, like compressors, EQs, and synthesizers.
It quickly became the standard for various software developers, and there have been a number of improvements to the code, resulting in VST 1.0, 2.0, 2.4, and now VST3.