DRC Synth – Plugin Review and Interview with Imaginado
DRC Synth – Plugin Review and Interview with Imaginado Today we are sharing with you a short review of the softsynth DRC by company Imaginado (whom we recently posted about their free DLYM plugin). This synth just passed its second anniversary of being released so we thought it to be a fine time to do a review and talk to some of the developers of the plugin. DRC is a lovely synthesizer all around and it is one of the more heavily equipped plugins we have seen in terms of modulation capability. In the upper left, you’ll find two oscillators, a suboscillator, a modulation matrix for them and a performance matrix. The first oscillator has an octave transposition knob, pulse width control, and a dedicated pulse-width modulation LFO. The second oscillator doesn’t have the pulse-width control but it makes up for with a semitone transposition option. In …
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Beat Lab Artist Series Recap: Katherine Redlus
Beat Lab Artist Series Recap: Katherine Redlus This past weekend we had an another Artist Series workshop brought to you by Beat Lab Academy, featuring professional Harpist Katherine Redlus. Katherine went through the presentation by giving a bit of history leading up to today. She fell into Harp like many young musicians do with their respective instruments, an authority figure or guardian urges you into the practice. In Katherine’s case, it was her grandmother who wished to have a Harp player in the family so Katherine was granted that fate. Fast forward to high school, Katherine had persisted with the instrument and was quickly outpacing her peers. By the time Katherine headed off to undergrad university she had performed and mastered nearly every classical piece of music written for a Harp; that’s why she sought new frontiers to explore in college. Ableton Live gave her the new sense of direction …
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ElliptiQ – Elliptic Equalizer by HoRNet
ElliptiQ – Elliptic Equalizer by HoRNet This week we have a very special type of equalizer, an elliptic equalizer. This type of processing tool has its roots based in the history of vinyl cutting. Cutting vinyl made for stereo recordings will inherently produce a sound meant for two channels, left and right. If lower frequencies like bass or kick happen to be out of phase then this can cause cancellation problems and decrease the quality of the recording. An elliptic equalizer works on the stereo field of low frequencies to avoid phase issues. Allow the developer to elaborate, “A tool like this is needed because if the bass frequencies goes in anti-phase or the difference between left and right channel are too wide the needle may jump outside the groove in the final vinyl master, so an elliptic eq works on the difference of the two channels removing part of …
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Outist – FREE M4L Device: Route Audio Anywhere in Ableton Live
Outist – FREE M4L Device: Route Audio Anywhere in Ableton Live We did a post awhile back about the new flexibility in Live 10 to route audio to places previously unavailable, well now there’s a Max4Live Device that gives you the power to take control of that flexibility. Outist is a plugin that lets you route audio from anywhere in Live to anywhere in Live, route audio internally or send it out of the DAW to somewhere external. The control is in your hands with this plugin. The device has an extremely straightforward interface, simply select the destination in the first drop-down box and select the routing signal in the second drop-down box. In the picture above you can see that Outist is being used to split the signal and send to different effects, one part continues on in the track FX chain to the Amp effect and the other signal is sent to …
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ATK Side Compressor – FREE Sidechaining Compressor Plugin
ATK Side Compressor – FREE Sidechaining Compressor Plugin Audio ToolKit has released a free sidechaining compressor called ATK Side Compressor. The plugin is pretty straightforward but features some unique parameters to offer a little bit more character in its processing. Below is a detailed signal flow diagram of how the side chain compressor works! From the developer, “The side chain capability allows an outside signal to trigger the compressor, like a filtered version of the original signal or a completely distinct signal. Bass triggered by drums is the typical example of a side-chain compressor effect. The plugin features a unique color section that enables non linear compression near the knee. A negative color lowers the gain while a positive color increases the gain above 0dB (a simple compressor always has a gain less or equal to 0dB). In linked channels mode, both channels attach/release filters are working independently while their …
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Droplet – Rain Drop Delay by Sinevibes
Droplet – Rain Drop Delay by Sinevibes Sinevibes has introduced a cool new delay effect called Droplet that produces a delay effect similar to the sound of falling rain, or other small objects on a surface. This effect is produced by chaining together 24 delay lines and randomizing the output order of them. The delay chain then utilizes a feature called variable frequency damping which applies filters to the outgoing delay lines at random. Time modulation is also applied and then the phase routing is switched; this along with randomized stereo panning creates quite the beautiful entropy. Here’s what the developers had to say about it, “Since the parameters are randomized each time a Droplet instance is created, just as any natural process it will never sound exactly the same – even the same preset on two different tracks in the same project will sound different.” Below is the full list of features. …
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