When it comes to creative effects processing and sound design, while you can get great results by simply chaining together conventional reverbs, delays, filters, distortions, compressors and the like, if you really want to grab the attention of your listeners, something more ambitious and purposeful in its stated objectives might well be called for.
Here, we’ve rounded up a quartet of iconoclastic and inspiring plugins guaranteed to take your audio signals to places they’ve never been before, whether you’re looking to add a touch of ear-catching weirdness to a guitar or drum track, turn a bassline or string section inside out, or utterly transmogrify a vocal or synth lead. Get your hard hat on – we’re going in…
Anything By Freakshow Industries
Without question the maddest development house in the business (their ingeniously masochistic 2023 Black Friday “anti-sale” saw them raising prices by up to 400%!), there’s nothing in Freakshow Industries’ entire range of plugins that doesn’t qualify as wholly crackers yet also incredibly productive. The current line-up of “audio effects for the end times” comprises Pocket Dimension (“Visual cortex abrasion”), Dumpster Fire (“Apply directly to the garbage”), Backmask (“The finest qualty”) and Mishby (“Not for use”), and their overarching theme is one of extreme processing and experimental sound design. Of course, behind the Lovecraftian allusions and abstracted interface design, there’s plenty of serious DSP going on under the hoods – granular manipulation, tape emulation, distortion, pitchshifting, etc – and you do get a good degree of control over the parameters once you’ve figured out what each knob and slider actually does. It’s all rather tricky to describe, if we’re honest, on a collective or individual plugin basis, so take a tour of Freakshow’s hilariously unhinged website to get a feel for the kinds of noises and effects we’re talking about – it’s quite a trip…
Unfiltered Audio SpecOps
Unfiltered’s high-concept multi-effects plugin prepares the input signal by slicing it up into thousands of FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) ‘bins’, then sends them into a series of three frequency-targeted effects slots, each drawing on a roster of 36 spectral processing modules across six categories: ‘Filters’, ‘Mixing’, ‘Geometry’, ‘Freezers’, ‘Effects’ and ‘Glitchers’. The FFT frame Size, Window shape and (frame generation) Speed are adjustable, and the effects vary in both nomenclature and functional conventionality from the self-explanatory likes of ‘Compress’, ‘Expand’ and ‘Slope LP’ to ‘Duststorm’ (mismatched audio compression encoding/decoding), ‘Glitch Fire’ (randomly swapping frequency bins) and ‘Contrast’ (level-responsive amplitude reduction across the spectrum). Prior to the effects slots, the Geometry section applies pitch and frequency shifting, while the post-effects Spectral Compander compresses/expands each bin separately for a broad array of dynamic treatments, and a super deep modular modulation system enables every parameter to be automated in exquisite detail.
SpecOps’ cleverly pared-back interface makes its complex engine admirably approachable, and while an understanding of its architecture and technicalities is certainly rewarded, this is a plugin that encourages experimentation, granting access to a vast world of spectral transformations that just couldn’t be discovered without it, from gentle texturising through granular-style cloudiness and swarming, to brutalist distortion and beyond.
Sinevibes Vague
Although not on anything like the same level of derangement as Freakshow Industries, Ukrainian developer Artemiy Pavlov’s enormous catalogue of creative plugins is equally worth exploring when your music calls for something… different. Among his more recent releases, Vague resides somewhere within the Venn diagram of reverb, resonator and modulation effects, but ultimately transcends all those descriptions with the multi-dimensional signals it delivers. Billed as a “binaural time diffusion processor”, it centres on a bank of 16 all-pass comb filters with progressively increasing delay times, the output of which can is captured at four separate stages for manual or LFO-modulated crossfading between. The two LFOs can also be applied to the Expansion control, which dials in alternating stereo offset between the all-pass filter stages, and the Scale knob, governing the size of the virtual space; and enabling the Chaos switch for either LFO introduces randomisation of its frequency and amplitude.
As with all Sinevibes plugins, what at first seems like a head-scratching proposition with a workflow to match turns out to be wonderfully intuitive, and the sheer scope of the uniquely thrilling spatial effects that can be conjured up with Vague is impressive.
Sonic Charge Permut8
Although best known for the amazing Synplant ‘genetic synthesiser’ and Microtonic drum machine, Sonic Charge are also responsible for one of the wildest plugins ever devised, giving adventurous producers a formidable weapon in the war against humdrum sounds. Permut8 is essentially a vintage-style 12-bit digital delay, running at clock frequencies (ie, sample rates) from 0-352.8kHz – the higher the clock frequency, the cleaner and brighter the sound, but the shorter the maximum delay time – with the option to sync the ‘memory cycle’ to host. So far, so… well, odd; but that’s just the start of the craziness, as two serial ‘instructions’ are then used to modulate the left and right delay playback read positions in all manner of bizarre ways, each instruction offering a choice of four specific ‘operators’, and each operator comprising a pair of 8-bit ‘operands’, with the two rows of switches flipping their individual bits on and off. As well as that, there’s a one-knob low/high-pass filter that can be placed on the input, the output or in the feedback path; soft clippers on the input and output; and a brickwall limiter in the feedback circuit, right after the input gain control.
Permut8’s old-school presentation appears completely bewildering at first, but it doesn’t take long to get acclimatised to. And once that’s done, the addictive ‘circuit-bent’ effects – mind-bending echoes, filthy flangers, excoriating digital distortions, skittering loop slicers and so much more – and brilliant workflow of Sonic Charge’s fabulous sound-mangler will have you utterly in its thrall.
What’s the looniest effect in your plugins folder? Tell us all about it in the comments.