Maybe if enough of us buy some soundtoy plugins they can finally afford to pay a UI designer that was born after the year 1935.
I joke, their stuff is awesome and sound awesome, but any time I fire up echo boy on a retina screen I feel like I’m using a plugin from windows 98.
I use echoboy fairly frequently, I should probably snap some other Soundtoys plugs. What are people favs? Is the phaser decent?
I use the Effect Rack presets which is kinda an education in how to use them together.
Crystalliser is nice for random granular type stuff.
Super plate is nice for a different flavour of reverb.
Between Radiator & Decapitator you have a very nice suite of options for warming up a sound.
Sie-Q is a nice sweetener type EQ. Best for making quick and big moves without the brittleness that can creep in with surgical EQ.
Micro shift for stereo thickening, and Little Altar boy for all those formants.
Filterfreak, panman, tremolator I mess with presets on, but all are promising.
The only ones I’ve not touched really at all are Primal Tap and Phase Mistress.
I hear a lot of people saying bundles like Arturia give lots of options, but that this can quickly become too many options. What I like about Soundtoys is its very little filler if at all. Just good quality options in key effect departments, most of which offer something g different or interesting outside of stock plugins. It’s a really nice sweet spot.
I wonder what these guys have been doing with their time, the rack and a plate reverb in a decade!
The phaser is probably my least used in the set.
Decapitator is a classic for a reason.
Devil Loc is crazy for brutal drum crushing.
Microshift to give things some width and space. I like putting it on a bus and treating it like a reverb, add enough to hear it then back off a bit. I do that with a Dimension D plug too. Makes a flat part a little more special.
Little Alter Boy to mess with vocals. I had some vocoder parts that weren’t quite weird enough and LAB took care of that. Also messes (unpredictably) with the stereo field which is good and bad.
Panman is great for auto panning stuff. Even constraining things to a relatively small stereo area, but moving a bit within that, can make things sound a little more interesting and less repetitive, and Panman has some nice options to not make the movement sound too sterile.
I need to spend more time with Primal Tap, I get nice results with it whenever I try using it but don’t really know what I’m doing.
little radiator found its way into my assortment of random plugins that were transient free offers or whatever but i’ve been using it all the time as a send for saturation and it definitely helps make what i’m working on sound less like a daw
I too upgraded from Lite to Suite, and am in the US, and haven’t run into any issues so far, but you may want to email Thomann or Ableton Support first.
Haha … after googling said plugins, what I found does rather remind me of the WW2 radio that was provided to me in my teens.
I’m looking into this and I’m in the UK. I can save about £70 if I buy Live Suite from Thomann in USD (a significant saving) but I have to tell the site that I’m in the US and I seem to have to put an address in. It doesn’t seem to be complaining about my UK address in the last stage but I haven’t yet hit the “Buy” button so I’m wondering if it’ll work at that point!
I feel a bit cheeky doing it but I can’t see how it’s different than me going to the US and buying it while I was there, I just save the air fare this way.
At this point it’s more about me deciding if I need another DAW and I think we all know the answer to that question…
I genuinely think that music software should run equal pricing based on the dollar/baseline value. Remember that mad NI glitch sale? People went crazy because Uk peeps got access to amazing pricing and others around the world didn’t. But given that we pay 10-15% more for everything literally every time we buy something (including on sales prices), it doesn’t seem that cheeky to me.
I believe with some sites like Arturia, the only 2 options are Euros and pounds. In that scenario your address is irrelevant since you can’t pay in your native currency anyway. And there’s always options like JRR shop which allow Uk people to buy in dollars. It all seems slightly messed up given that prices should theoretically be global.
Microshift sounds interesting, will check it out.
I have the Arturia version of the Sie-Q, which I really dig. It’s made me lust after the hardware. Hopefully someone will clone it.
I share the same feelings with regards to plugin bundles. Less is definitely more, hard to keep my gas in check tho.
Im in the same position regarding whether i need a new DAW. I wonder if the Thomann prices are standard or is it a sale?
Does anyone know if that Thomman deal will require a full upgrade to 12? Because I know if you buy 11 through ableton site it upgrades in to 12 when it comes out.
Looks like it.
For whom are the Thomann prices lower than at Ableton?
I’m considering upgrading from Suite 10 to Suite 11, and that’s way cheaper via Ableton.
Bitwig always has black friday sales 
Primal Tap is maybe one of the coolest sounding delays out there, IMHO. There’s a ton of character in it and you can work with very long and short delay times to get a ton of differing sorts of delay effects. It’s definitely worth spending the time getting your head around. I almost always get cool results with it.
Re: the question of Arturia vs Soundtoys, all I know is I own all of both of their offerings and I will reach for SoundToys almost 100% of the time. There’s likely a lot of bias in that, but it is what it is. It also interesting in that a lot of the Soundtoys plugs aren’t exactly cutting edge, coding-wise. They still get the job done though with really consistent results.
Yep, this BF I have resisted the Arturia offers on FX & Pigments crossgrades from V Collection. I like Soundtoys a lot, so have upgraded to the full bundle. Between Soundtoys for the classics, Ableton for bread and butter effects, and Baby Audio for some newer stuff, I’m covering a lot of ground. It just makes sense to spend time there and Ableton, bringing Baby Audio in for specific tasks (Smooth Operator) and for the things they do especially well, which is generally clean and modern versions of classic effects (Crystalline, Spaced Out, Taip.) The only effect I reach for outside of this and not covered by either package is Valhalla Vintage Verb, which is my fav of all the verbs. Tempting to pick up more Valhalla, but you can of course do that anytime since they don’t run sales.
A free reverb.
