I have set one of these up four times for other people. Twice on kitchen tables. Every single one of them had already spent money before they asked me anything, and every single one of them had spent it in the wrong place. One had bought a bundle. I am still not over the bundle.
A hundred dollars is ten weeks of allowance in this house, so I am going to be precise about it. A recording setup is eleven jobs. Free software now does eight of them at a standard that cost a studio real money not that long ago. I am talking about 2011. The remaining three are the ones where free software is merely correct, and correct is not the same thing as interesting. That gap is the only thing worth paying for, and it is much cheaper than the internet would like you to believe.
01 — The shape of itEleven jobs, and most of them are already solved
Start with the desk. The program you record into and press play on. Your computer very probably came with one, and if it did not, the free ones are not demos or crippled editions — they are simply quiet about themselves in a market full of shouting. Learn one before you extend it. A person who knows one program well finishes more music than a person who owns four.
Everything after the desk is a slot. Something to make a sound. Something to shape its tone, control its level, dirty it slightly, and tell you honestly how loud you have got. Then something to put it in a room, something to give it depth in time, and something to make one voice sound like two. That is the whole architecture and it has not changed in thirty years. I was not there. I have read about it.
02 — The free spineEight slots that cost nothing, and are not compromises
These are not trial versions and they are not lesser editions with the good parts removed. They are finished tools that stopped charging before you arrived. Install these eight, in this order, on the day you start.
Surge XT
Open source, and deep enough to still be teaching you in three years. This is the slot that used to cost real money.
$0Martinic Kee Bass
A 1960s monophonic bass keyboard, modelled and then given away. One job, done with an accent.
$0Spitfire LABS
Recorded strings, pianos, choirs and odder things, free in small collections. Download two. Not nineteen.
$0TDR Nova
It can react to the signal, which used to sit behind an expensive door. Accuracy is the whole job here, and this is accurate.
$0TDR Kotelnikov
Clean, and very hard to make sound bad. For your first year a compressor is mostly there to stop you ruining things.
$0Airwindows
Hundreds of small, ugly, single-purpose plugins, given away for years by one person. Pick three. Ignore the rest.
$0Valhalla Supermassive
Better at huge unreal spaces than small believable ones. Keep it even after you buy a room reverb.
$0Youlean Loudness Meter
The free version tells you what you are actually doing to your track. Nothing else here stops you lying to yourself so efficiently.
$0Stop at eight
I watched somebody install ninety plugins in a weekend and never open the project again. Ninety is not a collection. It is a way of not starting.
Free, and it costs the mostThat list finishes records. I want to be very clear about that before the part where I ask you for money. If you install those eight, learn where they sit in the chain, and write forty songs, you will be a better engineer than someone who bought everything and wrote four.
Slots out of eleven filled before any money changes hands. The hundred dollars is not buying a studio. It is buying the last eighth of one.
So what is missing? Three things, and they are all the same thing wearing different hats: space, depth and width. A room around the sound, a repeat behind it, a second copy of it slightly out of step. Free plugins can all do these. They tend to do them correctly. The difference between a correct reverb and an interesting one is the difference between a recording that sounds finished and one that sounds like it was made on a kitchen table, which is where I made most of it.
The ninety-dollar chain, slot by slot
Eleven slots in the order the signal passes through them. Three of them cost money. The prices in the blue rows are what Martinic listed on 19 September 2026 — check them before you spend, because prices are not a law of physics.
Two lifetime licences and one rented year. Not a bundle, not a sale, and not all in the same week — see the buying order at the end.
03 — The argumentWhat the ninety dollars is actually buying
A free equaliser and a paid one both cut 300 Hz by four decibels, correctly. Nobody has ever heard a licence. Accuracy got solved and then got given away, which is the best thing that has happened to home recording in my lifetime, and my lifetime is short.
They will tell you the bundle is a saving. It is a saving on things you were not going to open.
What did not get solved and given away is character. Character is somebody taking a specific piece of old hardware — a tape echo from an Italian factory, the reverb chip in an early-90s sound module, a tremolo pedal from 1974 — and measuring it for months until the model misbehaves in the same places the metal did. Slow work, unglamorous, and the only line item here genuinely worth money.
Martinic does that work, which is why three of their plugins are in my chain and why one of them, the Kee Bass, sits in the free column. I will not pretend their prices are all trivial. AXFX is $99, the Prodigy synth is $99, the AX73 is $149, and Retro Pack 2 — the bundle I keep telling people not to start with — is $239. Those sit outside a hundred dollars on purpose. What fits inside it are the small single-job plugins, which is what a beginner should be buying anyway.
04 — The trickYou can rent a plugin for a year, and sometimes you should
This is the part nobody told me, and the part that makes a hundred dollars go further than it should. Most Martinic plugins are sold two ways: a lifetime licence, or a one-year licence at roughly a third of the price. The one-year does not renew itself and does not bill you again. When the year ends it simply ends, and you decide again.
Do not rent the plugin you already know you love. Buy that one outright and stop thinking about it. But the third plugin — the one you are curious about, the one you might use twice and forget — is exactly what a one-year licence is for. Sixteen dollars to find out is a better question than forty-nine.
Martinic, in full, with both prices
Every price here was read off martinic.com on 19 September 2026, in US dollars. The one-year licence is non-renewing: it does not charge you again. The three rows in blue are the ones inside a hundred-dollar budget.
| Plugin | What it does | Lifetime | One year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kee BassInstrument | 1960s bass keyboard, modelled | Free | — |
| TG100 ReverbSpace | Eight early-90s reverb and delay algorithms | $25 | $9 |
| Lem Echo MusicDepth | Italian tape echo | $49 | $16 |
| AX ChorusWidth | The chorus circuits from two 80s synths | $49 | $16 |
| Colorsound TremoloMovement | A 1974 tremolo pedal | $49 | $16 |
| Scanner VibratoMovement | The scanner vibrato from a tonewheel organ | $49 | $16 |
| AXFXEffect rack | Eight-unit rack from the AX73 synth | $99 | $33 |
| Pianet TInstrument | Electric piano, modelled | $99 | $33 |
| ProdigyInstrument | Analogue mono synth, modelled | $99 | $33 |
| Elka PantherInstrument | 60s Italian combo organ — includes Lem Echo Music | $99 | $33 |
| AX73Instrument | 80s analogue synth, with two preset collections | $149 | $49 |
| Retro Pack 2Bundle | Six instruments and effects together | $239 | — |
Every paid plugin on that table comes with a thirty-day trial, so the honest first move this month is to download the Martinic trials and spend nothing at all until you know which two you keep reaching for.
Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you buy through them, HowTo: Tech Edition earns a commission at no extra cost to you. It does not change the table above, and it does not change my advice that the free column is the one that finishes records.
05 — The failuresFive ways a hundred dollars disappears
I have watched all five of these happen. Two of them I did myself, which is how I know how long the regret lasts.
Buying the bundle first
A bundle is good value on the day you already want four of the six things in it. On day one you want none of them, because you have not made anything that needs them. Buying six to get two is a deposit on a future self who may not turn up.
Starting the trial before you have a song
Thirty days starts when you install it, not when you are ready. Install the trial the week you have something half-finished to put it on. You only get one.
Buying a synth before you can finish anything
Free synths are the most solved problem in this hobby. A paid one will not make you finish a song, and an unfinished song is the only real problem you have. Buy one in year two, when you know what the free one cannot do.
Buying a compressor you cannot hear yet
Compression is the last thing a beginner actually hears, which makes it the easiest thing to buy and the hardest to judge. Use the free one until the day it annoys you. That day is the receipt.
Installing it all in one weekend
Eleven new plugins in two days is not a studio, it is a menu. You will spend the session choosing instead of working, and choosing feels exactly like working while producing nothing. One new thing at a time.
06 — The orderFour months, not one afternoon
The chain above is the destination. This is the route, and the route matters more than the destination, because the route is the part people get wrong.
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Month one — install the eight free ones and spend nothing
All eight. Nothing else. Write four things, however bad, and finish them. Finishing is a separate skill from making, and it decides whether any of the rest was worth buying.
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Month two — buy the space
The reverb, $25 for a lifetime licence. Space is the first thing a listener hears and the first place a free plugin sounds like one. Put it on a bus, send several things to it, and stop putting a separate one on every track.
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Month three — buy the depth
The tape echo, $49. Once a sound has a room around it, the next thing missing is time — a repeat behind it, slightly wrong, slightly degraded. This is the one people notice without being able to name it.
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Month four — rent the third one
Whichever it is by then. Take the one-year licence at $16, not the lifetime, because you do not yet know whether it is the plugin you love or the plugin you have not tried. Next September you will know.
Ninety dollars after four months, three purchases, and a chain with nothing missing. The ten dollars left over is not a rounding error. It is for a replacement cable, because a cable will fail, and it will fail on the good take.
One last thing, which is the whole article in a sentence. Nothing in the free column is a compromise. It is not the beginner version of a real studio — it is the studio, and it stopped charging before you arrived. The ninety dollars buys character on top of a chain that already worked. Remember it in that order.