Post by (@idiosync) on Tue, 06 Sep 16 11:32:34 +0000 View Full Post

Below is my brief overview of free effects that I find interesting and/or useful. I tried to select the most unusual ones. All of these are for OSX, compatible with 64-bit DAWs. I know that there are many more great plugins for PC, but someone else will have to review those. Multiply (Acon Digital)

A very interesting chorus with frequency and amplitude modulation, and an equalizer to determine which frequency range is affected and to what extend. It has six voices to get your sounds singing, and a stereo spread control to really fill in the space.

Doppler Dome (Aegean Music)

With this plug-in you can surely recreate the doppler effect. You can position your start and end points, set the curve between them, establish the degree of pitch, volume and pan modulation and recreate that special feeling of a siren passing you at a great speed.

Anarchy Rhythms (Anarchy Sound Software)

Don’t let the interface put you off, this is a very impressive effect module. You get four channels, and you can arrange each channel’s events along the built-in sequencer and then edit every event however you like: control its volume, pitch, pan or filter envelope, feedback, comb, and many others. With this one you can dramatically alter the accents, modify rhythms and altogether change the sound. The effect requires some patience to master, but it is oh so rewarding.

FuzzPlus3 (Audio Damage)

A very powerful distortion engine. Aside from distortion itself you can control the frequency affected, the amount of resonance, as well as feedback volume. All of this allows you to create effects from subtle warmth to screaming demons.

Defacer (Audio Assault)

As the name states this plugin can wipe off the face of your track. It has ‘A’ and ‘B’ modules, so you can set each one differently and crossfade between the two.

Octave Shifter (Audiowish)

This is one of the most interesting pitch shifters I’ve ever come across. No matter what combination of settings you choose once you transpose your sound the resulting effect always sounds interesting.

Fracture (Glitchmachines)

With Fracture you can send you sounds to the furthest dimensions. It chops the signal into blocks, and you can control how long they are, how many times they repeat and how fast they go through the cycle. You can also run the signal through a band/pass filter with a resonance, adjust the amount of feedback and delay, and, most importantly, apply LFOs to any of these parameters in a variety of combinations. You’ll most likely get stuck twiddling knobs for hours with this one. Fracture’s younger cousin, Hysteresis, is also worth checking out.

Svep (Klevgrand)

Svep has quickly become my favorite phaser/flanger/chorus plugin, partly because of its beautiful interface. It may lack parameters that other similar tools offer, but it’s just so much fun to rotate and tweak those shapes.

A1 Trigger Gate (Alex Hilton)

This gating sequencer is amazingly flexible. You can choose between several kinds of steps, shape the step’s attack, hold, decay, sustain and release, and further tweak the sound with gain and timing settings. The plugin even features a monitor to show you how your modified signal looks like.

Thump (Metric Halo)

Thump captures incoming signal and generates its own. It operates within the low frequency range. Set the attack and sustain frequency of its oscillators and the plug-in will synthesize a wave of the selected pitch following the amplitude characteristics of the source sound. For instance you can feed it a drum loop and get a pattern of kicks in return.

Atom (Sinevibes)

Atom is an incoming signal filter. You have two LFOs on the sides, and the filter with a plentitude of options in the center. The ‘chaos’ setting introduces an additional oscillation.