This Diwali, Make Music

Diwali has a charm of its own. Diyas line the balconies, sweets do the rounds, family fills every room, and the sky stays lit until well past midnight.

The fireworks are the part we all remember. The morning after is the part we tend to forget.

After Diwali 2025, Delhi’s air held an average of 488 micrograms of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) per cubic metre. That’s more than three times its usual pre-festival level and around 32 times the World Health Organization’s 24-hour guideline. Cool, still autumn air keeps that smoke hanging low well into the next day.

It’s a tough night for our four-legged neighbours too. A dog’s hearing starts to hurt at around 95 decibels, while firecrackers can reach up to 125 decibels. Every year, frightened strays dart into traffic, pets go missing and birds are startled from their nests.

None of this means dimming the celebration. It just means there’s another way to celebrate the occasion. This year, we’re inviting you to put down the crackers, open your DAW, and make a piece of art you’ll remember. Our Diwali Sale is here to help, with savings on instruments and mixing tools to get you started.

We’ve rounded up a few plugins for our Diwali Sale that we believe could help you make the next track. Creative tools from IK Multimedia, Excite Audio, Scaler Music and Future Audio Workshop will help you get the idea down, and SSL & Sonarworks are there to take it to a finished mix.

Perfect Plugins from our Diwali Sale

FAW SubLab

Desi hip-hop lives and dies by its 808s, and SubLab was built for exactly that job.

Future Audio Workshop designed it for hip-hop, trap and future bass, and it’s built around X-Sub, a psychoacoustic sub oscillator that keeps your low end consistent on any system. So the bass is felt on laptops and phones alike.

Every sound is built from three layers: a synth, a sampler and X-Sub. The sampler comes loaded with 250 kicks recorded from classic analogue drum machines and modular systems, and if you drop in your own samples, SubLab detects the pitch for you. Add distortion and compression, then hit the auto-sidechain button so your kick punches through instead of fighting the bass.

Six signature bass packs come included, among them 808s from Atlanta producer Richie Souf, who has worked with Future, Young Thug and Gunna. That’s plenty to play with from the first session.

[Get SubLab for $10 with code DIWALIPIB3]

Check out SubLab

 

IK Multimedia AmpliTube 5 SE

India’s indie and rock scene runs on guitars, and AmpliTube 5 SE puts a full rig inside your DAW.

You get 80 gear models: 13 amps, 19 stompboxes, 14 cabinets, 14 rack effects, plus speakers, mics and rooms to shape the sound. IK’s VIR cabinet technology handles the speaker tone, and you can run up to three amps at once or load your own impulse responses.

Producers shouldn’t skip this one either. Put synths, drums, keys or vocals through a cranked amp and a couple of pedals, and you’ll get grit and texture no preset browser can give you.

It also runs as a standalone app with a looper and an 8-track recorder built in. That makes it a handy sketchpad for when an idea hits and you don’t want to open a full session.

[Get AmpliTube 5 SE for $9.99 with code AMPSE10]

Shop Amplitube

 

Excite Audio Bloom KSHMR Lite and Bloom Mura Masa Lite

Excite Audio built Bloom KSHMR Lite with KSHMR, who curated every sound himself, and it brings Indian and South Asian instruments straight into your DAW. Inside, you’ll find tablas and dhols, big Bollywood-style drum circles, bansuri flute loops, sitars, rababs and ouds, along with a set of expressive vocal loops.

There are 75 presets to get you started. Bloom’s sequencer and effects mean you won’t be stuck with the obvious.

Bloom Mura Masa Lite runs on the same engine but takes you to the club instead. Mura Masa picked every sound from his own session archives, and a lot of it comes from his Curve Club nights across Europe and the US. You’ll find gritty bass hits, warped percussion, synth stabs and loops, with 75 presets to start from.

Every sample in both is royalty-free. If you get hooked, you can upgrade to the full versions later, with 250 presets each and the option to load your own samples.

[Get Bloom KSHMR Lite for $3 with code DIWALIPIB2]
[Get Bloom Mura Masa Lite for $3 with code DIWALIPIB1]

Bloom KSHMR Lite

Bloom Mura Masa Lite

 

Fix The Home Setup

Sonarworks SoundID Reference for Headphones

Most of us mix on headphones, and every pair has its own sound. Some push the bass, others lift the highs, and your mix ends up compensating for it without you noticing.

SoundID Reference corrects that. Pick your headphone model and it loads a calibration profile that flattens the response, either as a plugin in your DAW or across your whole system. There’s also a translation check that simulates more than 20 playback devices, car speakers included, so you can hear how your track holds up before you send it out.

You set it up once, and every mix after that benefits.

[Get SoundID Reference for Headphones for $49]

SoundID Reference

 

SSL Native Bus Compressor 2 and Vocalstrip 2 [remove after Nov 1]

You don’t need a room full of outboard gear to get the SSL sound anymore. These two plugins bring it into your DAW for under $20 each.

Bus Compressor 2 is SSL’s own take on its G-Series bus compressor, the one engineers have used for years to glue a mix together. The plugin version adds a dry/wet knob for parallel compression and a sidechain high-pass filter, so the kick doesn’t drag the whole mix down every time it hits.

Vocalstrip 2 handles your vocal chain in a single window. The de-esser and de-ploser clean up harsh S’s and popping P’s, the three-band SSL EQ shapes the tone, and the compander pulls the vocal forward in the mix. If you record vocals at home, it can replace a stack of separate plugins.

[Get Bus Compressor 2 for $19]
[Get Vocalstrip 2 for $19.99]

Check it Out

 

Go Deeper

Scaler 3

When every progression you play starts sounding the same, Scaler 3 gives you somewhere new to go.

It comes with 860 chord sets and 929 Motions, which are performance patterns that turn a basic progression into something that sounds played. The Arrange page lays out chords, melody, bass and phrases on a timeline, so you can sketch a full idea in one place, and you can load your own instruments straight into it. It runs inside any DAW or as a standalone app.

[Get Scaler 3 for $69]

Scaler 3

 

BABY Audio Crystalline [Add after Nov 3]

If your reverb keeps washing out your vocals, Crystalline is worth a look.

BABY Audio’s algorithmic reverb syncs its attack and decay to your project’s tempo, so the tail moves with the track instead of smearing over it. The built-in ducker drops the reverb while your vocal plays and brings it back in the gaps, which keeps things clean without any extra automation. When you want something less subtle, Shimmer, Reverse, Freeze and an ’80s-style gate are all there.

There are more than 300 presets to get started with. At $5, down from $99, it’s the biggest discount BABY Audio has ever put on it.

[Get Crystalline for $5]

See Crystalline

 

IK Multimedia TOTAL VI MAX 2

If you’re still building your instrument folder one plugin at a time, this one does the job in a single download.

TOTAL VI MAX 2 is IK Multimedia’s biggest collection of virtual instruments. SampleTank 4 MAX covers drums, synths, keys, guitars and loops, Pianoverse MAX adds nine concert pianos, and Miroslav Philharmonik 2 brings in a full orchestra. MODO BASS 2 and MODO DRUM 1.5 use physical modelling, so the basslines and drum kits sound and play like the real thing, and there’s a Hammond B-3X for when a track needs an organ.

It’s a big one, with over 470GB of sounds and more than 15,500 presets, so make sure you’ve got around 530GB free before you hit download. At $49.99, it’s the lowest price this bundle has ever been, and you’ll only find it at Plugin Boutique.

Get TOTAL VI MAX 2 for $49.99

Check it Out