In the intricate world of sound design, efficiency is key. This is where Krotos plugins can really help. In this article, we delve into five ingenious ways Krotos plugins, including Reformer Pro, Weaponiser, Igniter, and Dehumaniser, can revolutionise your creative process. Beyond merely expediting tasks, these plugins serve as catalysts for creativity whether you're crafting immersive soundscapes or engineering intricate audio effects. Let’s take a look at some of my favourite ways to incorporate these tools into my work.
Igniter
Tracklaying car sounds, especially for something like a chase sequence, can be laborious and time consuming. I can remember manually selecting and layering sounds for a 5 minute car chase a few years ago, and all of the editing took me ages. Krotos Igniter allows for a much faster workflow by allowing the sounds to be 'performed' in real time. 24 high-quality, performable vehicle sounds are included, from pickup trucks to sports cars, electric vehicles, drones and more.
Sounds can be performed from within the plugin interface, or, better still, from a MIDI keyboard. This provides the greatest degree of control, and allows for multiple parameters to be adjusted and automated at once. Having used Igniter recently for a sequence involving a Tesla and a helicopter, I was very impressed with just how easy it made the process. It should be noted that Igniter can be purchased either as a standard version which includes the 24 performable vehicles and 630 samples, or with the expanded ‘Full Tank’ option which still has 24 vehicles, but greatly increases the number of included samples to 2689, totalling around 75GB.
There are 4 tabs in Igniter, Granular, Synth, One Shot and Loop. Granular allows for playback and manipulation of the pre-recorded sounds. These include not only engine sounds but also vehicle foley such as doors, windscreen wipers and windows. The Synth engine consists of 5 oscillators with AM, FM and vibrato controls for each. This is great for layering interesting textures along with the granular sounds, or for creating more abstract or sci-fi sounds such as spaceships. The One Shot tab is good for adding sounds which are to be triggered when the engine rises or falls in RPM. An example would be a skid sound. Finally, the Loop tab is where things such as engine sounds can be selected, layered and controlled. These are linked to the Master Revs control, which is what makes the performed sounds respond to your input and sound believable!
Watch my video below which demonstrates how to create everyday car sound effects using Igniter.
Dehumaniser 2
I’d say that Dehumaniser 2 is perhaps my favourite Krotos plugin. Part of the reason for this is that it’s just such good fun! Dehumaniser allows you to perform creature vocalisations using just a microphone and your own voice. Using a node based system in which different types of processing can be chained and layered to create endless variations, Dehumaniser allows you to craft some pretty crazy monster and creature sounds in real-time. I quite often start with one of the included presets and tweak it as required. It’s actually surprising how many uses I’ve found for Dehumaniser. Zombie sounds are a fairly obvious one, but I’ve also used it for robot sounds and a variety of more abstract growls and roars in both horror and action based productions.
Getting results with Dehumaniser is every bit as easy as you’d hope it would be: load the plugin, choose a preset, connect a microphone and start performing vocal sounds. With practice, even better results can be achieved once you understand exactly how Dehumaniser responds to the pitch and intensity of the trigger sounds.
To see and hear Dehumaniser in action, check out the video in my article ‘Using Krotos Plugins To Add Texture To Voice Recordings’.
Weaponiser - Game Sounds
Weaponiser, as you might expect, is a great option for creating firearm effects. A wide variety of real-world gun sounds are included, along with multiple presets for sci-fi weapons. Creating interesting and unique sounding gun sounds typically takes a lot of time and experimentation. If you need high quality results without a load of effort, Weaponiser is a superb tool.
The plugin consists of 4 engines: Onset, Body, Thump and Tail. By loading sounds into these engines and also engaging the included synth engines, very solid sounding, impactful weapon sounds can be crafted. One big consideration when making gun sounds is variation. Whether it’s for a film scene or for a game, the last thing you want is for each successive iteration of the sound to seem like a direct repeat of the last. Fortunately, Weaponiser allows for variation of speed and pitch each time a sound is triggered. What’s more, multiple different samples can be loaded into each of the 4 banks found within each engine. Weaponiser can cycle through these each time it’s triggered, creating variation.
If you’re working on sound assets for a game, Weaponiser is, in my opinion, an essential tool. Naturally, you’ll want to tailor your own sounds for this, but by combining the included samples with some of your own, blended with the synth engines, some extremely unique and interesting weapon sounds can be created. See it in action in my article and video Krotos Weaponiser - Is This The Ultimate Weapon Sound Design Tool?
Weaponiser - Whooshes And Transitions
Weaponiser again, but this time for whooshes and transitions for trailers. I’ve worked on my fair share of trailers over the years. For the classic movie trailer style, whooshes, stings and transitions can help to elevate the production value, at least when done well. Finding high quality sounds and having sufficient variety within them is half the battle. Weaponiser includes presets for exactly this purpose, all of which can be tailored and customised as required.
The basic version of Weaponiser includes 1385 samples, spanning categories including weapons, whooshes and trailer assets. There’s also Weaponiser ‘Fully Loaded’ which expands the number of samples to 6737. If you’re working on trailer content regularly, this is worthwhile because it provides you with a broader array of assets so you can create more varied and engaging trailers.
Reformer Pro
When working from home, foley can be hard to perform and record cleanly. Reformer Pro provides a practical solution, allowing you to trigger all kinds of sounds, in real time and in sync with picture, just using a microphone or MIDI keyboard. When I’m working from home, or there isn’t the time or budget to perform and record foley in the conventional way, Reformer Pro gives me an effective way to achieve it using just the included sounds and a microphone to trigger foley samples.
There are multiple use cases for Reformer Pro but the two I’d like to focus on here are footsteps and horror sounds. I recently completed a short, low budget horror film, and parts of this involved some quite gory scenes with lots of movement. The location sound wasn’t great and the director could be heard in several places, meaning that the majority of the original sound was unusable. Reformer Pro proved invaluable in this case as I was able to create all of the footstep sounds on a variety of floor surfaces and, importantly, some of the gore sounds. For this, I used the Fruit Squash Pro preset. The nice thing about Reformer Pro, along with the rest of Krotos’ plugin line-up is the performative approach taken to triggering sounds. In the case of Reformer Pro, sounds can either be activated via MIDI or by using a microphone to vocally perform trigger sounds. As long as you can get the right timing, the vocal input sound simply acts to trigger the playback of samples from Reformer Pro. As with Dehumaniser, the best results are achieved with a bit of practice, but after a short time using it, very convincing foley can be achieved, requiring no actual foley props, just a microphone and your own voice.
In the video below from my article Workflow Power Tips To Get The Best From Your Krotos Plugins, I demonstrate how variation can be easily achievable with Krotos Audio’s Weaponiser and Reformer Pro when chained together. Weaponiser can deliver natural-sounding variation in sound design, very quickly. By adding Reformer Pro in the signal path afterwards, you can get huge variation from different surfaces and materials.
Final Thoughts
I’ve covered a few different use cases for Krotos plugins in this article. These are just a handful of the ways in which I’ve found their plugins useful in my own audio post-production work. Naturally, if you have a creative mind, the possibilities are only really constrained by your own imagination. If you haven’t tried Krotos plugins yet, I strongly recommend checking out the demos. Their whole line up of plugins are available as fully functional 10 day demos.