First look - they’re on the nice side and definitely useful when you want to quickly dial in something.
Otherwise, would have expected more, maybe more resolution, or more options or more depth.
I’ll give Guitar Rig and McDSP a go too.
Soundtoys is awesome. Top notch stuff
Trash2 for distortion (I like it more than decapitator most of the time)
Valhalla for the money is unbeatable
Fabfilter for eq
Izotope balance bundle for all in one
Eventide plugins are pretty good
Check out plugin alliance and see what rocks your boat there. You can demo all of them
Seventh heaven for bricasti like reverb
Cytomic the drop for a nice filter
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Permut8 is probably my favorite fx plugin ever. Endless possibilities
Acustica Lemon is the only delay I use besides U-He ColourCopy and Magnetic (for Ableton Live)
OverLoud ReMatrix is the reverb I use the most ITB, I dont really use algo reverbs, I prefer convolution
Ozone Imager for stereo widening
SoundToys make many great ones, I use Crystallizer a lot
I love D16 plugins, I use Decimort, Fazortan (phaser) and Syntorus (chorus) often
Acustica Crimson for ITB saturation, the closest I’ve heard to actual analog saturation/distortion
Ohmicide is a crazy distortion plugin too
But I usually prefer outboard for most of this, they just simply give you a lot more depth and “feel real”, even if digital:
Roland DEP 5 (early digital multi fx)
Roland SDE 1000 (early digital delay)
Yamaha SPX90 (digital multi fx)
Dynacord VRS 23 (crazy good analog delay/reverb)
Dynacord DRP 16 (lofi digital reverb)
Virus B (especially the reverbs are excellent in it)
TASCAM 112 mk2 (professional casette deck)
TASCAM Porta One (lofi casette deck)
TEAC 32-2b (mastering reel-2-reel deck)
Moog DFAM and Minitaur (for analog filtering)
90s Mackie 1402 (for drum processing and distortion)
This covers most stuff, I might get more if I see them cheap. Also one thing many people dont mention, if you have any kind of decent interface you can utilize its D/A and A/D stages and make your digital sounds a lot more realistic and vibey just by going through the loopback (you can try even multiple times).
i’ve discovered GOODHERTZ plugins a while back and fell for it. They are superb ! all of them …
This is a pretty broad topic.
I’ll mention some recent favorites that I don’t think have been mentioned.
Oeksound Soothe 2
Eventide / Newfangled Audio Elevate Bundle
Also a fan of
Soundtoys
Eventide
Valhalla
Fabfilter
Arturia
NI stuff
There’s honestly so many more good ones from other companies too.
I don’t see a lot of mentioning of these companies and their plugins on Elektronauts, so I thought it’s worth bringing them up:
Black Rooster Audio plugins are really great, especially the preamps and their compressors. The OmniTech 67A offers wonderful, natural sounding saturation, the quality is fantastic. Their VPRE73 is also really great, again, very smooth and natural sounding. The VLA-2A is a classic and captures that LA2A vibe like few other native plugins in my book. As a curve ball, their RO-SPR is a unique spring reverb effect to my ears, I use it for sound design on synths and field recordings, especially algorithm E brings something unique to the table in this application.
Fuse Audio Labs also has really good plugins. I love their compressors and preamps / harmonic saturation plugs. The VCL-4 is a great LA2A rendition and the VCL-515 is really good on the mix buss, very open and hifi sounding. Dozer Drive and Flywheel also seem to be universally loved, I think they bring interesting flavours of their own.
Reimund Dratwa is the man behind Fuse Audio Labs and also behind some of the best Black Rooster Audio plugins. He’s also behind some of the best/best loved plugins available on Plugin Alliance. So the man stands for quality modelling to a meticulous degree.
The third company I love and don’t see mentioned that often (more often than BRA and FAL but still not nearly enough :)) is Kush Audio by Gregory Scott. In terms of compression, the AR-1, UBK-1 and the new-ish Silika compressor are all really great offerings that, to my ears, play in the top leagues. In terms of preamps/saturation, the Omega 458a and the Omega TWK are really great, I particularly like the Omega 458a, brings an instant presence and openness to any source, I love that one. The Clariphonic EQ is also special on mix bus. Two I haven’t tried myself yet but have heard lots of good things about are the REDD DI Box and Blyss.
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Izotope Trash was free yesterday with an account. Not sure its still on today.
I love these plugins! That’s the only subscription I have and feel it’s worth every penny (I bought others like Soundtoys)
I find Kush plugins really great in coloring and processing sound in a musical way (to my ears). Just this morning I was using Blyss on sub busses for a mix I’m doing and it is amazing. Highly recommended.
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I recommended cytomic the drop already in this thread. If you can, crank up the two distortion levels of high and low pass… that distortion is pretty nice. Nicer than most plugins I own, even the ones that are programmed for distortion
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In case you go after free plugins or paid ones dedicated to specific genres, maybe you would want to check Plugins
also, the lists are being updated consistently, so you can keep eye on it
Does anyone know of a reverb plugin that has does some kind of physical space modelling, in particular with an intuitive interface? D16 Spacerek seemed interesting until I tried the demo and found that none of this is user-configurable -
Clicking on any of that just brings up a preset selection menu which changes all of that, not what I’m looking for at all. Something with an interface a bit like that, where I can set the dimensions and characteristic of the space and set the source + mic positions quickly would be great. And I’m really looking for stuff that allows for really huge spaces potentially too.
It’s not quite the thing you are asking, but in terms of convolution reverb, Altiverb is a must have. With it, you don’t create a space, you choose a space (like a bathroom, a church, a studio, a car or whatever) and then you can adjust the parameters.
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Thanks, but yeah I’m really looking for realtime control of the space, listener and source positions. With the amount of processing power available today I would have thought such a plugin to be quite viable, but I’m finding almost nothing like that.
There was this from like ~15 years ago -
I remember using a demo and it being pretty cool but development seems to have died long ago and it’s no longer readily available.
This is neat but it doesn’t go nearly big enough -
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Again, not quite your research, but the only reverbs I know that are really detailed parameter-wise are the Exponential Audio ones, like Symphony 3d and Stratus 3d.
I guess you’ll have to find something that fits between the convolution ones and the detailed ones like these. Or you could make your own, with Max or Pure Data, it might be doable.
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Expensive and probably under the radar for most people:
Benn Jordan does a pretty comprehensive video about it:
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Thanks, but yeah those still aren’t quite what I’m looking for. I’m really interested in something more like that D16 Spacerek, but actually configurable. Being able to quickly dictate the dimensions of the space, source position and putting the listener close to a wall for example would be the baseline. I’ll probably have to cobble together something in a plugin chain to approximate what I’m looking for, but hopefully some plugin designer does something like Rayspace again. There’s more than enough processing power in the average computer for really cool stuff like that these days.
Was looking for tape/vinyl sims to treat some piano and vox chops for a track to age them a bit and found these great free plugins:
…apart from the last daw of my life, bitwig, there’s only shaperbox, microtonic, syntplant, valhalla, unfiltered audio and xo left, i can’t do it without…
thinking picking up ShaperBox3 or Infiltrator2, anyone uses both can share some pros and cons?
definitely don’t need both and can emulate most of the things with Live stock plugins and Shaper, but I don’t like Shaper interaction for curve adjusting and overall point placements, also it’s kinda cramped in the M4L format if I want to use more points… so was looking at the ShaperBox and Infiltrator and both seem very capable but wanted to hear practical opinions rather marketing blobs…
I’ve trialled Infiltrator a few times (you can reset the file that sets it at 14 days.) I’m sure others own both, as this is a category of FX where once you pop… I own Shaperbox 3 didn’t ever pick up Infiltrator.
It somewhat depends on how much you use these effects as a “preset & tweak” machine, vs doing your own thing with it.
One of the things I hear a lot and somewhat agree with is that Shaperbox is great on paper but a bit fiddly to use. Having the LFO full screen is nice, but actually just clicking and dragging the points can take a minute to get into. I somewhat prefer the slightly simplified approach of Effectrix where you draw your blocks in, and then edit them (lightly) at the bottom. Infiltrator essentially combines Shaperbox and Effectrix in terms of approach (and I think the developer described it as a lovechild of the two.) And it is a really neat design and workflow, the combination of sequencer, LFOs and also dials to tune stuff is kinda neat.
The only reason I didn’t pick up Infiltrator is because (preset bias here) it seemed best for all-out sonic destruction and glitchiness (if you’re doing your own presets then you won’t care about that I guess.) They really change the core sound in a way that the others sometimes don’t. I tend to prefer the lighter touch you get with Effectrix, Shaperbox and even EFX Motions out of the box, which for my purposes gets me quicker results.
So I’d say if presets are your thing then do a good runthrough of each of them on demo and see what you like the sound of. And if they’re not, the best thing would be to spend a bit of time in the main editor and see what you gel with.