HBF’s resident tech-head, James Trigo, takes you through this month’s tech news with a new plugin from Waves, Native Instruments’ Molekular, Taylor Holliday’s Audulus and Credland Audio’s BigKick plugin.
First up in our software-centric round up is Waves new multi-band harmonic enhancer, Vitamin. Aiming to emulate an effect similar to a parallel chain of EQ, compression and saturation, the enriched signal can be mixed to your taste into the original, potentially reducing the amount of plugins required whether it be on instrument, buss, or mastering chain. Looks-wise it appears fairly simple in layout, so should be reasonably fast to get results, and with five frequency bands, which can all be adjusted for individual frequency crossover, as well as width control, useful tricks such as making bass mono or widening the top end can be achieved all with zero-latency processing.
As with most new Waves plugins they’re doing an introductory offer of $99, but Vitamin will usually retail for $200.
http://www.waves.com/plugins/vitamin
Although strictly announced at the end of March, we thought it would be a shame not to mention Native Instruments’ latest addition to their plugin arsenal, Molekular. With the ability to design your own modular effect system, using 35 different effects ranging from spectral shift and angel delay, to iteratron and track OSC, each can be routed in any order or configuration. The modulation section contains 4 LFOs, various wave shapes and a step sequencer, there’s also an interactive morphing field to move between five different presets, which can be controlled manually, or using the comprehensive modulation options.
For what appears a very powerful effects plugin the interface seems clean, tidy and logical, so shouldn’t take long to get a lot out of this. The helpful chaps at Point Blank have also got a four part tutorial to give you a good idea of what it can do before you fork out the £129, so check out the video below.
Also missed out of last months round up, Audulus, the software based modular synth for MAC and iOS. Now with added support for iPhone, we thought this was a good enough excuse to include it this month. From developer Taylor Holliday, Audulus boasts sleek, sexy visuals that make iOS modular syntheses look rather inviting. Based around nodes, which are either predefined or custom built, they offer a leg up from the programming of something like MAX/MSP, making the creation of interesting instruments and effect that little bit more achievable.
The MAC version can be controlled via a MIDI controller and can be used inside most DAWs including, Logic and Ableton Live. The new iPhone version includes auto-scrolling, which alleviates the restrictions of the smaller screen when making connections by moving with your finger gesture and snapping in place. There’s also iCloud syncing so any work done on the move is synced with your MAC, which is an excellent selling point to get both versions.
At £10.49 for the Mac version it is slightly more expensive than the iOS variety, which is currently £6.99 due to there being a less features, although the iOS version does offer in app purchases to tempt you even more.
In a joint effort with Credland Audio, Plugin Boutique have released their first plugin, BigKick, a kick drum creation and shaping tool. With a sample library of 300 attack types and 110 presets, BigKick attempts to reduce the time you spend trawling through sample libraries, by allowing you to quickly and simply edit and shape samples to replicate drum sounds old and new. It also gives you greater control over phase, eq, tuning and layering, so finding a kick to fit should become a more efficient process. You can drag and drop your edited samples straight from the plugin onto your DAW, so you can check how it fits in the mix and of course any of your own sample library can be used too.
For £40 BigKick could be a useful tool that’s more focused than your bigger drum editing tools so you can get that all-important kick sorted right from the start.
