We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: you don’t need to spend a fortune – or, indeed, anywhere close to it – to get your hands on primo plugins these days. Following last year’s round up, here’s a fresh selection of low priced virtual instruments and effects released in the last few months that you should check out in 2023…
Minimal Audio Morph EQ
There are plenty of affordable EQ plugins on the market, but not many go as far beyond the basics as Minimal Audio’s amazing plugin. Morph EQ’s workflow centres on the usual interactive graphical display/spectrogram, with more specific controls arranged below, and even in terms of the fundamentals, it has plenty to offer. There’s no limit to the number of filters that can be called up, each one set to any of seven types: high/low/band-pass, high/low shelf and notch). Signal flow through the filters is set to serial or parallel; there are global controls for collectively adjusting all active filters’ frequencies and stereo offset; adaptive Q is onboard for dynamically responsive resonance if required; and a soft clipper on the output provides two levels of limiting.
That’s all good stuff, but it’s the wild EQ morphing setup that really gets things moving. Essentially a built-in automation system, this enables every filter node to be animated under the governance of the global Morph knob, tracking whatever path you draw for it in the display. It’s just brilliant, giving Morph EQ a unique creative spin that elevates its remit well above static sound-shaping, and makes it a powerful tool for artistic filtering.
BLEASS Sidekick
Now this is clever. Sidekick, by French developers BLEASS, is a plugin effect combining a kick drum synth and step sequencer with a ducker, giving you everything you need to fire up and program electronic kicks, and have them duck (ie, sidechain compress) individual or grouped tracks, all in one place.
The kick synth is decidedly ‘analogue’, with a nicely focused control set including waveform selection, Body, Impact, Punch and Decay, while the sequencer runs at up to 16 steps long, with adjustable step note value and Groove amount. Alternatively, the kick can be triggered by MIDI. The ducker is a regular compressor that’s applied to the input signal, with the kick synth hardwired into its sidechain input so as to trigger it with every hit – it’s also possible to route the kick out to a separate audio channel via the host DAW’s mixer for independent processing, without affecting its input into the ducker.
Sidekick doesn’t make simply setting up a regular kick drum track and sidechain compressor in your DAW any less viable or more comparatively problematic than it was before the it came along, but it’s certainly a nifty way to keep the whole process self-contained at a pocket-money price.
AudioThing Things – Bubbles
A quirky filter bank and delay plugin geared up for experimentation, and part of AudioThing’s eminently affordable Things range of effects, Bubbles serves up all manner of ear-catching, liquid-y blips and plops. Up to ten band-pass filters are instantiated at the turn of a knob, as represented by the ‘bubbles’ at the top of the interface, and each one feeds into a feedback delay. The Spread knobs associated with the Cutoff, Resonance, Delay Time and Feedback parameters apply variation across the bands, and these are key to turning the raw bubbliness of the sound into something more musically meaningful. An instant sound effects machine for dub and electronica.
FKFX KrishnaSynth Legacy
Those who have been working with virtual instruments for a while might remember Devine Machines’ groundbreaking 2007 plugin KrishnaSynth, which made a real impression at the time thanks to its novel ‘Frame Analysis Technology’. This was akin to granular synthesis: samples were loaded into the specialist Frame Oscillator, where they were sliced up into individual ‘frames’ that could be edited using a palette of wave drawing tools, and played back, wavetable-style, under the guidance of a flexible modulation system. The Frame Oscillator was partnered with two analogue oscillators, a multimode filter, copious envelopes and LFOs, and a rack of effects, and it all came together at the time as a quite remarkable synth for pads, textures and adventurous sample mangling.
Flipping to the present tense, now anyone can discover (or rediscover) KrishnaSynth’s scintillating delights for themselves thanks to FKFX, who have resurrected it and brought it up to modern standards, adding 64-bit processing, a VST3 version and Apple Silicon compatibility. All 2000+ Movies (the proprietary wave format to which imported samples are converted) and 1000+ presets of the original are present and correct, and there’s a fully functional free version via which to assess whether or not it’s something you might want to drop a very reasonable $49 on.
HoRNet Plugins VHS
It might not hold a candle to the technological scope of Slate’s all-conquering VSX, but coming in at roughly 3% of the price, HoRNet’s new speaker-and-room emulation plugin stands as a surprisingly solid option for the thrifty producer looking to improve the translatability of their headphones-monitored mixes. VHS (Virtual Headphones System – yes, it’s a bit of a misnomer) uses frequency correction and room simulation to “recreate the acoustics of a professional studio, complete with the sound of high-end speakers and the natural reverb of the room”. The specifics of that room and speakers aren’t provided, but having selected your headphones from the 100-strong menu (do check to make sure your particular cans are supported before getting involved), the response-flattening EQ curve and gently beneficial ‘control room’ spatialisation applied to their output by the plugin work well and seem to be free of phase issues and artefacts. Either section can be deactivated, too, while the front-to-back listening position and speaker placement in the room are adjustable. A useful on-the-go monitoring utility, and an unarguable bargain.
Loomer Sequent 2
Well over a decade after it originally launched, Loomer’s crazy sequencer-driven modular effects plugin received it’s first full version upgrade earlier this year. Sequent 2 still works in the same way as it always has, with virtual cables freely dragged around between effects blocks to route the input audio signal through them, and independent step sequencers dictating the modulation of each and every parameter of every effect; and the update adds to the Distortion, Delay, Gate, Pan, Looper and two Filters of v1 with (freezable) Reverb and Frequency Shifter effects, plus Split and Merge modules, the last greatly expanding the internal signal routing possibilities. A few new editing tools have been introduced, too, with which to shift, rotate and invert sequences, while VST3 and Apple Silicon support, and a newly resizable GUI are all welcome. The effects sound great, the workflow is quick and intuitive, and the £50 pricetag feels just right.
Has this year brought any notable new plugins to your software studio? Let us know in the comments.