Vochlea – the company responsible for Dubler 2, a plugin that allows you to use your voice as a real-time MIDI controller – has announced the release of DubBox, a new app that applies the same concept to drum programming by converting vocal percussion into drum loops.

Aimed at producers and beatmakers that work out rhythmic ideas vocally, DubBox can transform spontaneous beatboxing into sample-based drum patterns.

This is achieved by training the software on the user’s vocal sounds, which are then used to trigger drum samples in real time with velocity sensitivity, which can then be recorded, quantized and exported as audio or MIDI.

DubBox can learn up to eight vocal sounds per project, each of which can be mapped to samples from its built-in library or imported sounds.

Stocked with 10 packs, the app’s sample library covers everything from classic 808s to futuristic sound design and industrial percussion. Each sample has individual controls for gain, pitch, tone, drive and filter, and can be assigned to choke groups.

Once samples are configured, the user can record to a click or freely with up to 20 takes of overdubbing, and DubBox will detect the BPM of a performance before stretching and quantizing the results accordingly, while preserving the feel of the original take. When quantizing voice recordings, DubBox’s Voice Warping function time-stretches the entire take to the grid rather than re-triggering individual hits on each beat.

When you’re happy with the results, you can export your input vocal, the sample track or a mix of both, or export a MIDI file to drop into your DAW.

"Everything we build starts from the same belief: the voice is the most immediate instrument there is," said Vochlea CEO George Wright in a press release.

"Dubler 2 turned it into a live controller for your whole studio. DubBox is a new instrument for a new player, the beatmaker whose beat is already in their mouth. Beatbox in, finished drum loop out."

Priced at $39/€39/£34, Vochlea DubBox is available now for macOS and Windows.

Find out more on Vochlea's website.

Charli XCX’s seventh studio album, Music, Fashion, Film, will be released on July 24, following up 2024’s world-dominating Brat project with a stylistic move away from the brash electro-pop of its predecessor that leans into a more reflective and guitar-led sound.

Ahead of the album’s release, Charli and co-producers AG Cook and Finn Keane sat down with John Kennedy for an episode of the Tape Notes podcast to talk through the making of three tracks from the project: Card Declined, Rock Music and No One Lasts Forever.

Finishing the record on a contemplative note, No One Lasts Forever features a spoken-word cameo from David Cronenberg, as the renowned director recounts a near-death experience in a monologue that mirrors the themes of impermanence Charli explores in the track’s lyrics.

“This song has made me change the way I think about my life and my art,” Charli tells Kennedy. “That was the journey I was going on while I was writing it.”

The song’s production was handled by longtime collaborators AG Cook and Finn Keane, who made use of heavily distorted guitar and vintage synths (namely the Minimoog and the PPG Wave) to fashion its distinctive sound, along with some unconventional sound design techniques and an AI-powered “audio mosaicing” plugin called Concatenator.

“The biggest difference in general compared to so many tracks that Finn and I have done together separately, and on any project, is this is so audio-heavy,” Cook says. “There’s pretty much no MIDI. Any MIDI that's in there is all chopping up something that we actually recorded or edited. A lot of the guitars, bass, all that, we're playing it in, drum kits and drum machines.”

Cook and Keane tell Kennedy that much of the material for the track came from an impromptu jam session that saw the pair recording and manipulating small fragments of sound from various sources – detuned guitars, processed synths, analogue drum machines and even snippets of other songs on the album – to create textural elements that take the production to a different dimension.

“We have all these little sounds that are throughout the track, all these little bits and pieces,” Cook says. “It’s funny because we’re literally running around the studio with as many things plugged in as possible and just doing the worst sounds.”

“We were trying to find the ugliest things,” Keane adds, “but then we actually did something kind of cool with the drums.”

“The whole second half [of the track] uses bits and pieces of this jam, and one tool I used to really bring the most out of it – apart from selecting and chopping, which felt a little bit predictable – is this weird plugin called Concatenator,” Cook says.

Developed by Datamind Audio, Concatenator is an innovative AI-powered “audio mosaicing” plugin that can transform an entire sample library into a playable instrument using a technique called concatenative synthesis.

Analyzing large numbers of samples using machine learning, Concatenator then indexes each sound by timbre, pitch and amplitude, organizing the samples as a mosaic at the centre of its interface. As audio runs into the plugin, Concatenator rebuilds the input in real time by stitching together tiny fragments of sound from its library that bear the most similarity to the incoming audio.

Cook used Concatenator to create a drum pattern out of the “bits and pieces” he and Keane recorded during their jam session. “This is like a drum loop, but it’s actually made out of pretty much all of those files,” he says. “You can see that we’ve loaded all of these [samples], MS-20, Vermona, Prophet stuff… and any audio file you throw underneath this will actually start finding tiny bits of all the samples that are similar in pitch.”

“It’s weird because it’s a very digital, new plugin, but we’re doing it with all these other things,” Cook says, comparing the glitchy aesthetic of the drum loop to the sound of skipping through stations with a radio dial. “It was a nice way of being able to sample tons of stuff in this really ambiguous, uncanny way that I tend to like. It’s a mix of selecting little regions and letting some bits be chaotic and random and very 3D.”

Listen to the full Tape Notes episode with Charli XCX, AG Cook and Finn Keane on Spotify.

For more track breakdowns and interviews with artists and producers, check out Tape Notes’ YouTube channel or subscribe to their Patreon, where members can access full-length video episodes, exclusive offers, merch discounts, artist gear lists and behind-the-scenes content.

Tape Notes also runs a monthly giveaway offering one Patreon member of their Extended Players Premium tier the chance to win music-making gear: this month, the prize will be a pair of D3V Desktop Monitors from Adam Audio.

Native Instruments has announced the release of Super*Saw, a new soft synth developed in collaboration with AG Cook, the Grammy-nominated producer, solo artist and PC Music founder best known for his work with Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek and Beyoncé.

Super*Saw is inspired by the supersaw, a classic synth patch that has figured prominently in Cook’s production work. Built by layering multiple detuned sawtooth waves together, it’s a bold, bright and aggressive sound that’s closely associated with trance music of the ‘90s and early ‘00s. Though the technique itself predated the synth, it was Roland’s virtual analogue JP-8000 that popularized the sound through its dedicated Super Saw oscillator.

Native Instruments says that Super*Saw seeks to push the supersaw “further than it was designed to go”, turning a "time-consuming production technique into a fast, fun, and flexible workflow” and producing everything from “rich harmonies to metallic dissonance, ravey leads to impossible glides, euphoria to tension, all from the same sound source”.

At the heart of Super*Saw are two independent 16-saw oscillator banks, Swarm 1 and Swarm 2. The Swarms panel, on the left-hand side of the interface, adjusts the number of active oscillators in each swarm and fine-tunes the pitch, panning, and amplitude of each saw wave, and three Motion controls introduce modulation to these parameters that’s applied to each oscillator individually.

In Super*Saw’s central panel is the Morpher, an XY pad that can morph continuously between four different patch states in each corner of the grid. (You can also hit the dice icons underneath to instantly generate a random patch.)

Here you’ll also find controls for the amp envelope and filter, which can be applied to each Swarm individually and offers both 2-pole and 4-pole slopes, along with high-, band- and low-pass modes and keytracking. Super*Saw also has three onboard effects: chorus, delay and reverb.

Super*Saw is an eight-voice polyphonic synth, but also features monophonic, unison and poly-unison assignment modes. In the Voice Control menu, you’ll find controls to adjust the detuning and stereo width of the voices in Unison mode, along with sophisticated glide controls that can be used to set individual portamento times for each of the synth’s eight voices, and a Shape control that adjusts the contour of the portamento.

The synth features five modulation sources, each of which can be assigned to an unlimited number of parameters. There’s a single tempo-syncable LFO with rate, shape, phase and retrig controls that can be applied per-voice or globally, and this is joined by two tempo-syncable, velocity-sensitive ADSR envelopes.

You’ve also got the mod wheel and the Voice Offset section, a bank of eight faders that each represent one of the instrument’s voices: when routed to any potential modulation target, that control will be offset by the value dialled in at the fader.

Though there’s plenty of scope here for manual sound design, Super*Saw also comes with a broad preset library of AG Cook-style patches, covering basses, leads, pads, plucks, soundscapes and more.

We spent some time with Super*Saw prior to launch, and were impressed by the depth of control and diversity of sound on offer in an instrument that’s designed to explore the possibilities of a single synthesis technique.

Much more than just a Native Instruments plugin with a famous producer’s name stamped on it, Super*Saw feels like a genuine collaboration that represents an extension of AG Cook’s artistry. Capturing the bold and distinctive hyperpop sound design Cook experimented with on projects like Charli XCX’s Brat, the plugin takes the classic supersaw sound to new heights with its focused but versatile architecture.

“It’s funny having my own synth plugin,” Cook says in the video embedded above. “It’s something that’s always been a goal of mine… I’m really interested in very specific tools, and I’ve been excited when I’ve seen certain artists do their own tools around the ideology they have.

“I’ve really enjoyed building on what was established as the supersaw in the ‘90s. A lot of instrument design is about taking things that exist in the world and looking at the corners of it, like: ‘what could we do?’, or ‘what could be improved or flipped on its head?’ To actually be involved in that sort of process, that’s the enjoyment – you’re building into this family tree of a musical idea that was started a long time ago.”

Native Instruments Super*Saw is available now for macOS and Windows in VST3/AU formats, and is priced at $99/€99/£89.

Find out more on Native Instruments' website.

Baby Audio has announced the release of SubCulture, a bass enhancement plugin that tracks the pitch of incoming audio and locks its processing to each note, generating tuned subharmonics that stay in key with the source material.

Where many bass enhancers rely on static frequency-boosting or basic pitch-shifting, Baby Audio says, SubCulture is built around what the company is calling a “fully adaptive architecture”: its whole processing chain aligns to its pitch detection engine and its subharmonics are derived from the input signal, helping to avoid the frequency clashes and phase issues that can often arise with synthesized sub layers.

The plugin combines three individual bass enhancement engines: Sub Layer blends in a pitch-shifted version of the input signal at up to two octaves below or above the original, Root Boost is a pitch-tracking EQ band that can cut or boost by up to 18dB at the fundamental frequency of each incoming note, and Resonance is a parallel filter network inspired by analogue hardware that adds “warmth and resonant energy” at the tracked pitch.

SubCulture is also equipped with an analogue-modelled saturation section which offers five clipping types (Tube, Tape, Diode, Vintage and Crystal) and a multi-mode compressor for dynamic control. A basic three-band master EQ tweaks the sub, low and high content of the enhanced signal and is joined by a global high-pass filter and a mono control that sums low frequencies below a chosen point.

SubCulture is designed for monophonic sources like basslines and vocals, but the plugin’s MIDI mode lets you control the pitch of its engines manually, which Baby Audio recommends for polyphonic sources.

As well as bass enhancement, Baby Audio suggests a few alternative use cases for SubCulture: beefing up synths and guitars, thickening vocals with an extra sub-octave, or spicing up drum patterns with experimental self-oscillating effects.

The plugin comes with 177 presets from producers and sound designers including Craig Bauer, Dacota G and Eryck Bry.

In a press release for Baby Audio, mixing and mastering engineer Dacota G said: "Just when I thought my toolbox was set you came through with one of the most essential plugins. SubCulture is 1000% going on every single mix going forward.

"This is exactly what I’ve been missing. I almost want to go back and use it on some of the mixes where I wish I had something like this."

SubCulture is available now for macOS and Windows in VST/VST3/AU/AAX formats, priced at an introductory discount of $79 before it goes up to the full price of $129. There's also a free trial available if you want to give it a try.

Find out more on Baby Audio's website.

Zplane has released Peel Stems 2, an update to its real-time stem separation plugin that promises significant improvements in speed, sound quality and usability over the first version.

Like its predecessor, Peel Stems 2 splits mixed audio into four stems (Drums, Bass, Vocals and Other) directly inside your DAW. Load the plugin on any track and you're given independent level controls for each stem, letting you mute, isolate or rebalance individual elements of a mix in real time, without waiting for offline processing to complete.

The headline improvement in Peel Stems 2 is speed: powered by the latest version of Zplane's proprietary separation technology, the plugin's processing latency has been reduced from 483ms to 245ms at 44.1kHz, a drop of almost 50%. (Intel Macs are still supported, with latency coming in at 385ms.)

Zplane says separation quality and clarity have been improved too, delivering cleaner stems with fewer artifacts, and the isolation slider, which fine-tunes the strength of the separation, now has a broader range and a more noticeable effect on the signal.

Elsewhere, the interface has been redesigned with new stem colours and clearer visual feedback, and the Focus EQ's Focus Frame – a spectral tool that isolates specific frequency ranges and stereo information – now displays cutoff frequencies at both ends of the spectrum.

Unlike cloud-based stem separation tools, Peel Stems 2 processes audio locally, so there's no need to upload files to external servers.

"With Peel Stems 2, we wanted to push real-time stem separation within DAW-native workflows further," Zplane CTO Tim Flohrer said in a statement. "With significantly reduced latency and improved audio quality, Peel Stems 2 represents a major step forward in stem separation technology."

Zplane's Peel Stems 2 is a one-time purchase, with no subscription or login required. Available now for macOS and Windows in VST3/AU/AAX formats, it's priced at €59 and owners of the first version can upgrade for only €19.

Find out more on Zplane's website.

Fresh from the release of Voxcraft, a versatile plugin designed for creative vocal manipulation, UJAM has unveiled Retrocraft, a multi-effect that's built for adding vintage character to audio through saturation, degradation and colouration.

UJAM says Retrocraft can bring the sought-after tones and textures of vintage audio equipment to any sound. This is achieved through its Hardware panel, which is made up of three sections that can imitate the character of an assortment of amplifiers, players and speakers, from tube amps, cassette players and gramophones to car stereos, boomboxes and dusty vinyl records.

Once your signal passes through the Hardware section it hits the Effects section, Retrocraft which is equipped with six individual effects modules – each can be switched on and off and adjusted independently, but their order in the chain is fixed.

First up we have Lo-Fi, which reduces audio quality through a variety of methods including bitcrushing and ring modulation and offers six different modes.

Following this in the chain is a modulation module that covers chorus, ensemble, flanger and phaser, followed by the Instability module, which mimics the wobble and flutter of tape machines and the artifacts of early digital audio equipment.

You also get Delay and Reverb modules, both armed with six distinct sonic flavours, and a Chop module, which slices, rearranges, repeats and reverses small sections of audio for a glitchy Beat Repeat-style effect.

At the bottom of the interface are an array of global controls that allow you to adjust the dry/wet mix and input/output levels, apply low- and high-pass filters, double-tracking and compression.

"We're big fans of the many character-processing tools available today, but we felt there was room for a more integrated solution that combines these types of effects with important additions like modulation and ambience processing," UJAM co-founder Peter Gorges said in a press statement.

"Instead of tediously building effect chains, Retrocraft lets you start with a complex effect combination you like and easily tweak it to make it your own. The element of surprise and fresh ideas really stands out here."

Priced at an introductory discount of $49 until August, UJAM's Retrocraft is available now for macOS and Windows in VST/VST3/AU/AAX formats.

Find out more on UJAM's website.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: There’s no question we’re definitely spoilt for choice when it comes to plugins, and as developers continue to get ever more creative, or unearth ever more esoteric hardware to emulate, sorting the wheat from the chaff becomes harder and harder.

The best way to negate option paralysis (and get the best out of the plugins you already have) is by developing a stock set of favourite or ‘golden’ plugins. That’s just what I’ve done.

Some more complex tasks might require a helping hand from other plugins, but in general terms, these 6 go-tos typically serve me just fine when working on my projects.

So here are my particular 6 choice plugins - along with my reasons for liking them and keeping them close…

1. Waves Doubler

One of the oldest plugins in this list and in my setup, Waves Doubler is a plugin I always come back to.

It’s very easy to use and, to be fair, it is a bit of a one-trick pony. But what an excellent trick that is.

Built along similar lines to the classic Eventide H3000 micro pitch-shifting effect, it comes in two and four voice plugins that provide, rather unsurprisingly 2 or 4 additional voices respectively. I said it was simple.

It’s an additive effect and the interface includes control of the dry signal and additional voices so it’s easy to use as either an insert or auxiliary. Other options include 2-band EQ and modulation. There’s a bunch of great presets with plenty of producer contributions too.

Doubler is great for adding width and richness to sounds, and with fast and deep modulation settings can produce some quite weird outcomes. Nevertheless, my favourite effect is a lot more subtle and uses the 2 voice version with a static micro pitch shift on one side and a slowly modulation pitch shift on the other. This is particularly good for vocals but also works well for adding width and richness to other instruments.

2. Soundtoys Decapitator

Soundtoys Decapitator sounds like a pretty destructive plugin, and at extreme settings it can certainly do plenty of damage. But it’s far more flexible than the name implies, and is an excellent tool for adding a bit of audio interest when everything is sounding a bit sterile.

The engine is built around 5 main saturation circuits. Each models a specific and fundamentally different piece of hardware and is designed to create the complex harmonic behaviour and dynamic response they produce.

These include the valve-based Ampex 350 tape machine preamp (A), the Germanium translator-based Neve 1057 input channel (N) and the Chandler/EMI TG Channel (E).

Rounding things off are two modes from Thermionic Culture’s Culture Vulture, based on triode (T) and pentode (P) topologies. Further options include low and high pass filtering, and overall tilt style EQ and of course input drive.

All told it’s a slightly oddball plugin that delivers a broad palette of sonic goodness. It’s great for adding weight or grit to bass, fatness to drums and beats, and anything from mild to heavy harmonic distortion to pretty much anything.

However, I like to use it subtly across multiple tracks. This is great for adding flavour and provides the perfect antidote to those pristine DAW-based productions.

3. UAD EMT 140

You’ll find plate-style reverbs in many reverb plugins. However, if you’re looking for a plugin that gets properly close to the richness and depth of the original hardware, then a quality hardware emulation is the way to go.

The UAD EMT 140 is in my opinion the best, and much like the original hardware creates a wonderfully spacious effect. Based on the stereo version of the hardware (EMT 140 ST) the plugin actually has 3 different plate emulations.

Two are based on two different valve-based originals, and one on a Martech upgraded unit. In practice this means you get to choose from 3 quite different sounding plate effects. Much like the original you can adjust the reverb time using the damper controls, meanwhile you also get access to the internal shelving and high pass filters relevant to both the original and Martech designs.

In typical plugin style the whole package then gets a load of extra features that go beyond the original hardware. These include 2-band EQ, modulation, width control, left/right balance, and wet/dry mix.

There’s also a built in pre-delay, something which is not part of the original hardware. The EMT 140 is surprisingly flexible, increasing the damper setting achieves great shorter reverbs perfect for punchy back beats, and medium settings can be great for vocals. But if your track has the sonic space, then my favourite application is a longer setting for the classic shimmering and lush plate reverb.

4. Cableguys ShaperBox 3

Often we want a creative effect that does something unexpected or out of the ordinary, and although it’s perfectly possible to piece together individual processors to create a bespoke outcome, an all-in-one plugin often provides options we’ve not considered.

ShaperBox 3 from Cableguys is a perfect example and a fantastic tool that can create everything from subtle movement to complete re-arrangement of the incoming audio.

The modular design includes a palette of effects that ranges from basics such as volume and pan, to phasing/flanging, distortion, pitch shifting, filtering and reverb. There’s even an oscilloscope so you can visualise what you’ve created.

Effect parameters are controlled via onboard drawable LFOs, and these can be triggered by the incoming audio, MIDI or simply run continuously in sync with your DAW. I’m a particular fan of this last option which makes for some pretty amazing outcomes.

Couple this with the Time module, which allows you to stutter, reverse and generally mess with the incoming audio and you have a pretty compelling and creative effect.

5. IK Multimedia AmpliTube 5

There are a lot of guitar amplifier emulation plugins to choose from. Many of these are excellent, and picking a favourite for all applications isn't easy. Nevertheless, the one that I keep coming back to is IK Multimedia’s AmpliTube and there are a number of reasons for this.

First up, it has incredible variety in terms of the types of the hardware it models. This includes the individual amp, cabinet speaker and pedal components that form AmpliTube rigs, and also integrated access to the IK Multimedia’s Tonex system of captured tone models.

Next up, the design is guitarist friendly, arranging the components in rig style configurations that any guitarist will find recognisable. There’s a handy onboard tuner, flexible routing to allow more complex rigs, and good control over cabinet miking and speaker choice, which strongly appeals to my engineering mindset.

In terms of sounds, various bundles are available, but you can also buy expansions and additional rig components, as well as Tonex expansions.

There’s also a massive number of presets and also preset sharing via the online ToneNET ecosystem. Finally, and most importantly, it does sound really good, even when you strip things down to single components.

6. Oeksound Soothe

If you’ve spent any amount of time notching out undesirable frequencies from audio, you’ll appreciate how refreshing it is to find a tool that makes the process easier.

Soothe 3 from Oeksound is by no means the only resonance reducing processor on the market, and it’s worth giving a shout out to both Baby Audio’s Smooth Operator and Kern Audio’s Smooth. Nevertheless, Soothe is my favourite, and its latest v3 iteration is better than ever.

It’s very easy to use, and coupled with the flexibility to address specific frequency regions is highly flexible. It can also be quite aggressive should that be required.

To get started all you need to do is use the EQ style curve to select and focus the target frequencies.

Then simply choose from the Hard or Soft modes and adjust the Depth. The Detail option lets you adjust how precise the behaviour is, and if you want to hear what it’s actually doing, simply select the Delta monitor option.

Although I have used Soothe 3 for aggressive resonance reduction, for me it’s at its best when used moderately to help tighten up a sound.

Arturia’s catalogue of effects has expanded rapidly in recent years and, for our money, the latest generation of its FX Collection bundle offers one of the most well-rounded software packages on the market right now.

While much of the FX Collection is built around software emulations of classic hardware, the company’s latest plugin is something more original.

Rev Ocean is a reverb that, as its name suggests, takes inspiration from the sea, supposedly resulting in a plugin that can turn “a simple reverb tail into a living sonic current” and “transform any sound into a fluid, ever-shifting sonic space.”

That description might sound a little New Age and vague – and the plugin’s UI design looks like it could be lifted from a flyer for your local aromatherapy clinic – but under-the-hood Rev Ocean features an interesting combination of reverb, pitch and modulation tools.

The plugin is built around a feedback delay network design with multiple stages of diffusion. It features three modes, labelled Abyss, Tide and Foam, which each offer a different combination of diffusion behaviour and modulation.

Abyss adds multiple reverse layers in parallel, with subtle pitch modulation used to spread these reverb tails resulting in, according to Arturia, “a harmonically rich evolving tail.”

Tide, meanwhile, introduces independent filtering of the left and right channels of the reverb output, to create ‘wave-like’ stereo swells.

Finally, Foam has a long, slow attack and cloud-like build up designed to destroy transients and create dense, washed-out effects that are said to be perfect for shoegaze-style guitars.

Beyond the modes themselves, Rev Ocean has controls for Decay, Size and Brightness. There’s also a high/low input filter, and controls for width, transient control, ducking and pre-delay.

Rev Ocean is available now priced at €49. Head to the Arturia site for more information and to grab a free demo.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: The very term ‘saturation’ sometimes feels like it has a negative value attached to it. Throughout recording history, technology has sought to deliver the cleanest signal possible, so why for the love of Joe Meek would you want to turn a clean signal into a distorted one?

It turns out, the answer is relatively simple. As human beings living in an organic world, we quite like impurity and a measure of chaos - and that's where sensible use of saturation can bring an awful lot to the musical table, whether it's individual instrumentation, as well as an entire mix.

The term distortion is very closely linked to saturation, but while they are subtly different, one could not have existed without the other.

If we go back around 100 years, the predominant music of the era was jazz, and particularly big bands. Electric guitar amplification was not particularly advanced, and would now be probably described as ‘lo-fi’.

Guitarists would often turn up their equipment as high as they could go (we don’t think ’11’ was a thing back then), in an attempt to compete with the loud acoustics of a large band. This would lead to equipment overdriving or speaker cones failing, with the resulting sound being something close to the guitar distortion that we know today.

With the advance of electronics, distortion pedals began appearing in 1962, and by the 70s, they were both commonplace and an essential part of a guitarist’s rig. This gave guitarists ultimate control over their distorted sound, without the need to destroy an amplifier on a weekly basis!

But why should guitarists have all the fun? With the rise of synthesisers in the 70s and 80s, synthesists and producers realised that they could get some pretty gnarly tones by attaching the same distortion pedals to synthesizers.

Nothing exemplifies this more than the acid house era of dance music, from the late 80s and early 90s.

It was this period where the now-legendary Roland TB-303 was repurposed from a humble bassline machine to the must-have device for the genre. It turns out, whacking up the resonance on the 303 filter produced an amazing sound through a distortion pedal. Club-avoiding guitarists, however, were largely non-plussed.

So what exactly is saturation, and what does it bring to the production table?

By and large, saturation is designed to be more subtle than distortion, often with a penchant for mimicking good old-fashioned analog equipment. You remember our previous point about clean signals? We rest our case!

Saturation excites and distorts certain frequencies and harmonics in the signal, depending on your chosen plugin. What's more, we can trace the saturation story back to the late 90s.

Back then, CDs were the predominant format, and many musicians and producers were reporting that the overall sound of the digital signal chain was a little cold and sterile.

Couple this with the emergence of one of the first rack-mounted units to offer a one-stop mastering solution - the TC Electronics Finalizer - and basic mastering saturation became commonplace.

TC Electronics described this saturation as 'Digital Radiance Generation', or DRG for short.

DRG applied second harmonic distortion to a mix, designed to mimic analog equipment and specifically analog tape, so it's no surprise that it was quite a hit.

However, over-using it could quickly destroy a mix, forcing mix engineers to pay close attention.

Fast forward to the current DAW age, and we are now flush with a plethora of different saturation plugins, with many being very highly regarded and offering bespoke solutions, depending on your production requirements.

One of the big boons of plugins, is that you can use them as many times as you like, and while it is probably a bad idea to sprinkle saturation on every instrument in your mix, there are definitely places where employment can pay dividends.

If you find yourself recording an electric bass part directly via your audio interface, you could choose to use amplifier simulators to colour the signal. This could be regarded as a form of saturation, but you could also go all-in and just apply a saturation plugin to warm up the signal.

One of the most highly regarded in the current market is Decapitator from Soundtoys. Not only is it flexible, but it can go from incredibly subtle to total extreme very quickly.

When applying saturation, it is always really important to listen objectively. The moment you feel the signal is getting too aggressive, it's time to back off, and that may not necessarily be exclusively down to the saturation amount control.

Just about all plugins will be equipped with a Wet/Dry see-saw control, and adjusting this can scale an extremely saturated sound to help it blend in more nicely.

Of course, this principle could also apply to sampled bass sounds, which may be a little too clean for your mix. It's also a concept which could be applied to drums, specifically if you are working with samples within your DAW.

It's a common complaint that many drum samples are just too clean, so it could be very useful to add a little saturated colour to your drum track. The only problem is, the drums themselves often sound great with saturation, but the hi-hat and cymbals can react less favourably…

A sensible solution requires the creation of 2 drum tracks, both with accompanying MIDI parts. You can then mute all of the drums on one channel, muting all of the metallic instruments on the other. This leaves the path clear to saturating the drum elements on their own, with no effect on the cymbals and hats.

Before you get lost in instrument saturation heaven (or hell, if that's your preference) be aware that some instruments do not embrace saturation so readily, particularly instruments with a more acoustic persuasion, such as acoustic pianos, string sections or brass and woodwinds. There's no harm in trying, but don't be surprised if saturation does little to improve the sound.

With a slight sense of history repeating itself, we have to revert to TC’s DRG concept, and discuss how beneficial subtle saturation can be to an entire mix.

Mastering suites, such as iZotope’s Ozone, offer a number of saturation solutions, designed to be used during the mastering phase. These include tools to excite upper frequencies, and elements for inducing the sound of vintage tape.

But if you want a little more control, one company that personifies the application of saturation to mimic analog is Universal Audio. It has produced an array of exemplary plugins which are perfect for subtle saturation across your mix.

If you are nervous about over-applying saturation, take a look at the Verve Analog Machines plugin, which is available in two forms; the first is an entry-level Essentials version, offering four saturation models, while the upper-level version provides 10 models.

The idea is simple - apply across your mix, and adjust the tone and amount controls to suit your production. The included models range drastically from subtle, through to downright dirty, so it's important to be objective.

For even more control, UA’s emulation of the Ampex ATR-102 Mastering Tape Recorder is stunning. This plugin can induce everything from saturation through to hiss and even wow and flutter. It just depends how extreme you want to go!

One final thought. We've mentioned on several occasions that you need to be objective about your saturation exploits, and be careful not to overuse. You can easily destroy a mix by being a little overzealous.

If you find yourself regularly creating or delivering stems of your mix, be aware that many saturation plugins induce noise.

If you deliver half a dozen stems and they all have noise on them, when all the stems are played back together, that's going to be quite a racket. It’s probably best to defeat the noise element as much as you can, in this setting, so that your music doesn't get drowned out by hiss.

We spent many years trying to get rid of tape hiss and noise, so you don't want to end up back where we all started.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: Back in the early 80s, many of the mainstream companies that had ploughed their energies into analog drum machines were starting to feel the pinch of digital technology.

As we look back on that period, we can now appreciate the charm and character of those analog beat boxes - and the fact that they just don't sound like real drums has actually become a key part of their enduring appeal.

Emulating real drums with hardware doesn't seem to matter much anymore, because we now have solutions that can present the realism of live kits via software.

But back in the 80s, technology companies were still looking for ways to try and compact real kit sounds into one affordable box. Perhaps the newfangled world of digital technology held the answer…

This wave of digital drum machines incorporated (quite lo-fi) sampled sounds, and intended to bring a new dimension of similarity with real kits. It didn’t quite work out as they planned, but it did usher in what many now regard as a golden new era of quirky and distinctive electronic drum machines.

Here's a few key examples of these digital drum machine legends, and where you can find top-tier emulations in plugin form today…

1. Linn LM-1

Roger Linn released the iconic LM-1 Drum Computer in 1980, and the resulting effect that this machine had on popular music culture was like a tsunami that swept across all forms of production.

It was the first in a line of machines that became generically known as the LinnDrum (a name that was popularised by a successive model), and caused a seismic upheaval, in both the production of music and with how drum machines themselves were used.

Based around 12 drum voices, the crunchy 8-bit samples became legendary across all genres.

The solid kick drum, the phat snare, and hi-hats and cymbals that, actually, did sort of sound like the real McCoy, made the LM-1 a sought-after bit of kit.

There were stories of artists removing analog drum sounds from their records, to be immediately replaced by these new digital sounds.

That’s what happened while The Human League were recording their breakthrough album Dare. They even secured the accolade of the first UK No.1 chart single to use a drum machine, with their hit Don't You Want Me

But the Human League weren't alone, with notable adopters spanning the likes of Gary Numan and ABC, through to Prince and Michael Jackson.

Thanks to artists like Daft Punk and The Weeknd popularising its distinctive signature across the last few decades, the 80s Linn sound is still very much in demand.

In trying to secure samples or Linn-shaped plugins, it's important to gravitate towards sounds which adopt the low sampling rate used on the original machine.

One of the longest standing options for a Linn plugin, comes from Aly James Lab. An authentically-designed recreation, VPROM is now at version 3 (€56). It also brings some very useful additions, such as the ability to compile your own sample sets.

Another option is GForce’s applauded IconDrum (£69), which offers an exceptionally authentic Linn look and feel, although it will only operate from within a DAW, as it does not employ an onboard sequencer.

What it lacks in sequential duties, it more than makes up for in sonic detail, including sounds from further Linn Drum revisions.

2. Roland TR-909 Rhythm Composer

Our next contender for the digital crown is a digital drum machine in sheep's clothing, because it's not entirely digital!

When Roland started to develop the replacement for the TR-808, the engineers realised that they needed to do something to improve the realism of many of the sounds. The answer was to digitally capture (i.e sample) the cymbal and hi-hat sounds, while keeping the rest of the drum machine in the analog domain.

The problem was, by the time it was released in 1983, the bewilderingly authentic Linn was everywhere, and the humble 909 was just not cutting the mustard for people in production circles. It was regrettably another commercial flop, heading straight to the bargain bins and secondhand ads.

Enter the jilted (house) generation, who hoovered up these second-hand units, and by the early 90s, the sound of the 909 was everywhere!

You could not move for acid house tunes that relentlessly employed the iconic hi-hat sound in the classic closed/open pattern.

Used prices for hardware 909 units have calmed these days, with the 808 occupying the priciest used-unit top-spot position.

The first and most obvious place to look for a 909 plugin is Roland. The company reproduced the 909 in hardware form, as part of its Boutique range with the software following not far behind in plugin form.

By its own admission, tinkering has been done with the original make-up of the machine to make it more usable, yet sonically as people remember.

Even so, for a mere £133 ($153), you can have modelled sounds from the originators, complete with a host of additional production elements.

You can also locate samples from many suppliers, including the ubiquitous Samples from Mars and Splice.

We've also got a few free processed samples as part of this exquisite collection we compiled not so long ago. Click the button below to find out more

3. Oberheim DMX

The extraordinary success of the Linn LM-1 set an incredible benchmark, which many other companies were keen to capitalise upon.

Where Roland shifted to sampling its cymbals, Oberheim took a similar approach to Linn, producing the DMX later in 1980, making it the second fully programmable drum machine to employ samples.

The Oberheim DMX differed in a number of ways; firstly, it featured 24 individual drum sounds which were derived from 11 different samples.

These could be deployed up to a maximum of 8-voices at one time, polyphonically speaking. It also offered tuning for each drum voice and provided humanising features such as rolls and flams, along with variation of timing, which was designed to make it sound more like a real player.

Much like the LM-1, the DMX had its fans, particularly hip hop artists such as Run DMC, but perhaps its most famous usage is represented by its soloistic placement in New Order's Blue Monday.

The thundering kick was particularly popular, so much so, the kick drum alone was used as part of the drum track for Every Breath You Take by the Police. Nothing else - just the kick!

The most notable software reproduction in our view comes from GForce Software, which has painstakingly reproduced the DMX in plugin form, with the full endorsement of Oberheim Electronics.

Not only does it include all the classic sounds, but it embraces the updated sounds, which were introduced in 1983. As the original hardware adopted a system of swappable EPROMS, for altering sound sets on the original machine, GForce has also included many of these iconic variations, such as the Sequential Drumtraks.

It's a very complete solution, but one that requires a DAW due to the lack of internal sequencer.

4. Honorary mentions

We cannot delve into the world of digital drum machines emanating from vintage culture, and not mention one of the most groundbreaking and indispensable machines from the era.

In 1988, the Akai MPC60 offered the iconic sound of 12-bit sampling for both individual drum hits and loops, making it an entirely flexible device for any user to record their own samples.

Developed in collaboration with Roger Linn, the MPC was way ahead of its time, but was embraced wholeheartedly by many producers, particularly those working in styles of music that were dependent upon breakbeats.

It set the precedent for many of the similar technologies which we take for granted today that operate in a very similar way, by controlling software on computer via hardware.

Even though the current music tech market is brimming with drum and sample software, it's extraordinary how popular these original sounds remain.

Whether it be the heavy transient clicks of the kick, or the fatness of the snare, coupled with the bright and cutting hi-hat, these retro drum sounds are firmly still in vogue and sound just as fantastic as they did 40 years ago - but with all the advantages and cost-effectiveness of software.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: Whispers, rumours, leaks. Like the crescendo of a filter sweep, the return of Absynth – the iconic software instrument that helped define the sound of early 00’s electronic music – reached fever pitch in the lead-up to its unexpected rebirth at the end of 2025. Behind the scenes at Native Instruments, the energy was no less frenetic.

“Maximum crunch, constant panic” is how Brian Clevinger, Absynth’s creator and founder of Rhizomatic described the final pre-release push.

Speaking to MusicRadar mere days before the launch of Absynth 6 - and prior of course, to the recent news that Native Instruments would be acquired by InMusic - Clevinger seemed keenly aware of the high expectations he and the development team were expected to meet.

You see, Absynth isn’t just any soft synth. Its sea-green colour scheme and idiosyncratic architecture is something that a generation of sound designers and synthesists have grown up with.

This relaunch wasn't just a new version: it’s a full-blown resurrection.

Arriving two years after the product was discontinued by Native Instruments, and 16 long, long years since the release of Absynth 5.

Now sporting MPE capabilities, newly designed filters, a slickly upgraded UI, a trippy new spatial method of navigating presets, and all the sonic firepower long-time fans could ask for, this 2025 iteration of Absynth was, thankfully, worth the wait.

Back in the year 2000, when Clevinger released version 1 as ‘shareware’ (what we might now describe as a freebie) he had no idea how large the impact would be.

“I didn't think anybody would be into it,” he admits. “But I was just inundated with responses. People were really excited about it, it was kind of an instant hit.”

Looking back, it’s easy to see why. VSTs were still toddlers, having only been invented four years previously. The very premise that you could work with computer-generated sound, rather than triggered audio samples, was still fresh, and the available instruments were mostly rudimentary emulations of pianos and Minimoogs.

“The whole concept of a software synth hadn't sunk in yet,” Clevinger says of that time. “The idea that you play a note on your keyboard and the sound comes out of your computer was a weird idea for most people.”

In that context, Absynth, much like the potent beverage from which it takes its name, was a mind-melting experience. Its three-channel lanes and swappable modules could combine multiple types of synthesis and audio processing simultaneously.

Equipped with a waveform editor, it allowed users to draw custom shapes before applying additional algorithmic transformations, including the now-iconic ‘Fractalize’ function which added new harmonics by recursively pushing a waveform back into itself.

Its approach to modulation, which put user-defined, multi-stage envelopes front and centre, was, and still is, a remarkable contrast to the dominant paradigm of LFOs.

Perhaps most importantly of all, it took all of those powerful sound–shaping tools and made them comparatively easy to experiment and play with. It’s little wonder that Absynth was snapped up by Native Instruments a year later, becoming one of the company’s flagship products from 2001 all the way up to 2023.

All that innovation is made even more impressive by the fact that Clevinger’s skills as a software developer were entirely self-taught. Rather than a formal study of computer science, his pathway to Absynth was guided by a life-long fascination with the inner workings of audio.

“I was just always really interested in sound,” he recalls. “With certain sounds, it was kind of an emotional thing. When I was a little kid there was this big drain pipe with three smaller pipes at the back, we'd go in there, clap our hands, and it would make this just incredible comb-filter kind of sound. I wish I could hear it today.”

That ear for the unusual eventually led Clevinger to study music composition at university, where he first got his hands on classic hardware like the ARP 2500.

“This was in the early ‘80s,” he recalls. “It was just before MIDI and I was still working on analogue systems, but, at the same time, I was hearing examples of the computer-generated music that was happening at IRCAM. They were doing stuff I really wanted to do myself, but it was just completely inaccessible.”

Early musical programming environments like Max/MSP and Supercollider offered Clevinger the experimental sonics he was interested in, but lacked the intuitive accessibility of a musical instrument.

That tension stayed with him and, as computer power increased and real-time digital synthesis became possible in the mid-90’s, he began teaching himself DSP programming with aspirations to bridge the divide.

“The soft synths that were available were pretty limited,” he says. “It was either really simplistic things that didn't sound great or super complex modular environments. So I thought Absynth could be a sweet spot in-between.”

While he knew where he was aiming, Clevinger makes clear that Absynth was definitely not the result of some master plan.

What began as 'crappy little oscillators and really crappy little low-pass filters' were steadily refined and linked together, eventually coalescing into the foundations of Absynth’s first version.

“It just came out of whatever experiments I was doing at the time,” Clevinger says simply. “I mean the whole setup with three channels happened pretty early and I was originally thinking of it as a temporary solution till I figured out how to make it more modular, but after working with it I really liked it. Things just evolved until they got to the point where it felt right.”

Absynth broke new ground upon its release, and continued to do so over the following years: V2 introduced sample playback and granular synthesis; Absynth 3 added surround sound output, even though, as Clevinger laughingly admits, almost no one had multi-channel setups at the time; the fourth iteration brought vastly improved preset browsing and assignable macros, and the fifth instalment introduced Mutation.

It’s worth pausing to appreciate the genius of Absynth’s Mutation feature. Using tags for instrument type, articulation, genre, and more, users could define a narrow list of presets before hitting the Mutate button. This would then pull random parameters from those presets and combine them with whatever sound you were currently working on.

Not only that, but you could define how much randomisation should occur, how far from the original sound you wanted to deviate, and even lock down specific modules to exclude them from the mutation process.

A dedicated Mutation History window would save each new variation, allowing you to build up a library of related sounds at lightning-fast speed. It’s a feature that is still impressive all these years later, but at the time of its release in 2009, it was inspired.

“People kept asking for a randomiser,” Clevinger says of Mutation’s origin. “But if you just start randomising the parameters it gets very complicated because each preset can have a completely different set of modules. I wanted to do it in a meaningful way, where the musician could guide that random process somehow.

“I was looking at the preset list,” he continues. “And thinking about how you can select just bass sounds, and it'll only show you bass. I thought if you could pick one of those related presets, grab little bits from it, insert it into the preset you're working on, and then add some randomisation, that would be the key. I wanted it to be like going on a journey, instead of just jumping around between random sounds.”

Version 5 was a triumph, but it was also the point at which Absynth began to languish. Development slowed, and after growing increasingly long in the tooth the instrument was eventually discontinued in 2023, much to the dismay of longtime users.

For just about any other soft synth, that would have been the end of the story. But the remarkable longevity of this instrument, its sheer uniqueness and its undeniable musical prowess ensured that, even once it was gone, it was not forgotten.

“I had no idea that so many people were still using it, to tell you the truth,” admits Clevinger when asked about the community response to news of Absynth’s demise. “But I just got tons, and tons, and tons of messages from people begging me to bring it back somehow.”

Those pleas have now been answered. Working closely with the Native Instruments' team, a process that Clevinger unreservedly describes as 'fantastic', Absynth is back for a sixth outing and is looking better than ever.

“We have really been focusing on the user interface,” emphasises Clevinger. “Because nobody's ever been happy with Absynth's UI. It’s a super complex thing to get right, and involves endless discussions to try and work out the problems, but I'm really thrilled with what we've got now; it's so much better than what we had before and the design team's been great.”

For Clevinger, the top priorities during the development process were ensuring backward compatibility with legacy presets (presets from versions 4 and 5 are compatible with Absynth 6) and that the original audio engine was retained - a section of code that Clevinger says he touches 'as little as possible.'

But it wasn't all about preservation: significant improvements were made to Absynth's granular synthesis chops.

“All of that stuff is much denser than it was previously,” Clevinger told us. “We added a high density mode, and the Aetherizer and the Cloud filters sound much closer to what I originally wanted.”

One of the most striking new UI elements is the Preset Explorer that greets you when you first load up Absynth 6. A dizzying array of presets, dating back over two decades, are rendered as a multi-coloured point-cloud that you can click through and navigate as you might a geographical map.

Native Instruments tasked a number of artists with designing custom presets for Absynth 6, including none other than synthesis pioneer Brian Eno himself.

Working with Eno was something of a full-circle moment for Clevinger, who was inspired by Eno’s looping techniques when designing the envelopes for the original Absynth plugin.

That’s not all. Using deep learning techniques, Native Instruments’ Applied AI team trained a model on Absynth’s entire back catalogue of presets, allowing them to be spatially grouped by sonic characteristics. The goal is to help users break past the preset-paralysis that so often arises when scrolling through endless walls of text.

“I don't think there's anything musical about a list of presets,” says Andy Sarroff, head of Applied AI at Native Instruments, and himself a former mix and mastering engineer. “There’s something inherently uninspiring about staring down thousands of names and tags when you're trying to create. So, how do we solve that problem? There's never gonna be any perfect solution, but being able to visualise and explore this huge universe of sounds in a spatial way will hopefully either help you find what you want quickly, or be inspired by adjacent sounds.”

Of course, Absynth still has a more traditional preset browser system that you can switch to if you prefer, and Sarroff makes clear that accommodating different working styles is a top priority. “It's always a balancing act for us,” he points out. “We’re trying to figure out how to do this in a way that helps people feel like they're having fun, and not that they're being talked down to in any kind of way.”

Alongside all of that there was alos the inclusion of MPE and polyphonic aftertouch, enabling those performers who want to feel the maximum amount of nuance and expression from the instrument the ability to go deeper.

However, for Clevinger, it wasn’t this that caught his finely-tuned ear; his favourite new addition was the humble ladder notch filter.

“I really like the new ladder notch filter,” he says, confiding that he unconsciously drew some inspiration from one the first synths he ever used, the ARP 2500, during its design.

“My favourite thing on the ARP 2500 was this multi-mode filter that had a notch mode - and I certainly did not try to emulate it or anything, but that was the sound I had in my head. The notch filter mode, that's my favourite.”

It’s an attitude that seems emblematic of Absynth’s quarter-century run: bedrock features and idiosyncratic innovation, a workhorse and a dream machine, the essentials and the esoteric, all blended together to serve up a truly intoxicating sonic concoction.

As fans look ahead to the next 25 years, they can feel assured that Absynth has lost none of its potency, or its relevance, least of all to Clevinger himself.

“It's been a real emotional thing bringing this back,” he reflects. “This is the best project I've ever worked on.”

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: If there’s one artist that truly captures the current state of DIY music production, then it’s Fred Gibson aka Fred Again. His inherent musicality, combined with deep computer-based production wizardry have seen him enrapture millions.

As the years have passed, Fred has also developed his own more introspective style, an evolution that can be traced across his recorded output.

“I try and make a few ideas a day, and most of them are rubbish…” Fred told Instagram’s Ask It Anyway. “The thing is for me, the joy and the journey of finding out what you like, just like closing your eyes and throwing paint and seeing what sticks,” he said.

“I would definitely preach all day about, the more you can fall in love with the obsession of it and the craft and just chasing chasing, to me that’s the win. The best feeling to me is when you play back the thing you’ve made that day and you actually feel good about it. That’s the drug I’m chasing every day.”

Here we’re going to look at three key aspects common in his productions - reverbs, vocals and found sounds - and show you how to go about achieving similar results with the help of typical plugins.

Technique 1: Creative reverbs

Step 1. Fred’s use of reverbs and delays is key to many of his productions. Check out the track Delilah (Pull Me Out of This) above to hear a multitude of examples across its runtime.

We often use reverbs to create a homogenised effect, but Fred tends to be a bit more focused, often using big long reverbs to add interest on specific sections or parts, or alternatively to create a washy pad-like effect. Let’s take a look at how to set that up.

Step 2. When using reverbs in this precise, additive way, it’s often easier to set up the reverb on an auxiliary send. This allows us to use the reverb on multiple sources, and also provides a bit more flexibility if you want to add specific processing to just the effect return. Here we’ve selected a rich algorithmic reverb, and set a long decay time of 10 secs.

Step 3. We want our reverb to have plenty of density and minimal early reflections - here we’ve set the balance to 100% late reflections. You might also want to add some modulation, which creates some pitch interest. Meanwhile to tame the lower frequencies, which can often get too overbearing, use the reverb EQ or simply add a regular EQ after the reverb plugin and adjust this to taste. Here we’ve used a low shelf which is cutting from about 500Hz downwards.

Step 4. Next, rather than just set a static send level to the reverb, use your DAW automation to pick out specific sections. On a vocal this might be specific phrases. Try words at the ends of phrases, as the reverb can then fill the space. Alternatively, try automating dynamic levels to create a reverb swell - we’ve used both techniques here.

Overall, use the send levels to create specific reverb spot effects

Step 5. Finally, side chain compression is a key aspect of Fred’s sound. Rather than rely on side chaining the source sound, we can actually apply this independently to the reverb return and then automate the depth as needed. As an alternative to a compressor you could use a volume modulation plugin. Here we’re using a tremolo plugin, removing any stereo panning, then offsetting the timing to create a pumping effect.

Technique 2: Hooky vocal phrases

Step 1. One of the most recognisable aspects of Fred’s production style is his creative approach to vocals. Whether these are sung, spoken, or sampled from speech, which they often are, phrases are often deconstructed, processed and rearranged in a piecemeal way to create hooky, repetitive phrases. Check out the track Marnie (Wish I Had U) above to hear a key example of what we’re referring to here.

Step 2. Firstly, find sections that will work in this way. Look for rhythm or timing in the source audio that will work with the feel of the track. If the words can impart some kind of universal meaning then even better. Stick to shorter sections, no more than one or two bars. Once you have a usable section move it to a new track.

Step 3. Next, look for words or phrases within the part that can be repeated. Focus on the rhythmic or melodic hook and how you can enhance this through repetition. This could be the first or last word in a phrase - it’s the latter we’ve used here.

Step 4. If you need some help with this, there are plenty of plugin options you can try. Here we’re using the Logic Pro effect Beat Breaker, which is re-arranging one bar of audio in a creative way. Other options include Cableguys TimeShaper 3 and Stutterizer from Repiet & Revealed. These types of plugins are great at creating multiple outcomes, and you can then pick out something that works in your track.

Step 5. Finally, try messing with the pitch and formant of the sound. You should be able to adjust this in most DAWs, and changing formants in particular can be a great way to make a vocal part sound younger or older without changing the actual pitch. Here we’ve used Flex Pitch in Logic Pro to shift the formants up on one specific section.

Technique 3: Found sound manipulation

Step 1. Finally, we couldn’t talk about Fred Again’s productions without a quick mention of found sounds. His approach is to sample real life sounds and then manipulate them using processing to create something new.

This may be a field recording or something as simple as desktop finger drumming (check out Fred’s Tiny Desk Concert). This approach can add an interesting layer sonically and helps create something that’s truly unique amongst the many quite similar stock sounds. Here we’ve tried to add to our beats using some recorded table taps, and to make things a bit more lo-fi we’ve recorded this using the mic on our smartphone.

Step 2. The plan was to simply record a few hits and then use the one we liked and copy it round to create a repeated kick style sound. However, while recording we accidentally added an additional quieter tap and this added some feel which sounded really good.

Step 3. To finish up the process we’ve used two adjacent beats, leaving them in the bar position where they were performed. Then we tightened up the timing a bit, and then copied round one of them to complete the bar. This section is now ready for further processing with your plugins of choice.

Sounds suitably Fred-esque, but with a little bit of our own quirks thrown in for good measure. Hopefully exploring Fred's emotion-first attitude will unlock some new ideas for your own productions.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: Classic drum machines, beatboxes, rhythm composers - whatever you choose to call an analogue box-o-tricks - they still make a fantastic percussive sound that continues to infiltrate many areas of contemporary production.

We are talking about drum machines that were produced in the period around the mid-70s to early 80s, with sounds that used analogue circuitry to try to bottle the feel of real drums… and therein lies their initial downfall!

Unfortunately for the analogue drum machine, most of them did not sound very much like a real drum kit - which is what most people were striving for at the time.

Roland produced the original ‘Dr Rhythm’ DR-55, under its Boss branding, specifically to try and encourage guitarists to take them down the pub on a Saturday night, rather than using a live drummer.

Great for a lone singer-songwriter - less so if you’re a Motorhead tribute act!

Just about all analogue drum machines were a commercial flop. Apart from a few select placements in notable songs, their initial history was consigned to the bargain bins in most music stores, only to be purchased at a knockdown price by the cash-strapped next generation, looking for bedroom studio-based beats.

The resulting electronic music of the late ‘80s and ‘90s saw these instruments re-appraised in this new context. Finally, they were given their due respect.

Here then, we're going to shine a light on three of the very best analogue drum machines from music history, highlighting where you've heard them before, and where to find the best examples in software.

1. Roland TR-808

We have to start our list with the daddy of all drum machines, and the mainstay of dance music. The 808.

The Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer, to give it its full name, was first released in 1980. All analogue in design, it offered the user 16 buttons across the front, which for the most part would equate to 16th notes, making up an entire bar.

This was one of the first instances of Roland’s distinctive drum programming layout which became known as XOX-style,. The patterns could be assembled into song formation, with storage for up to 32 patterns.

With an initial price tag of £765, the 808 ceased production in 1983 - but not before a few choice placements had sealed its status for future years.

Marvin Gaye used the 808 to provide the complete drum track for Sexual Healing. In fact, recording engineer Mike Butcher cites it as the first time the 808 had been used for its own qualities; “As far as I know, he was the first person to program a TR-808 as its own instrument instead of trying to imitate a drum kit,” Butcher told Electronic Sound. “He would do things like put the side-stick on a beat, which a drummer wouldn’t do.”

Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance with Somebody put the iconic 808 cowbell sound firmly on the menu, thanks to its extensive use throughout the song (particularly the introduction).

However, where the 808 found its forever home was in the realms of hip-hop and R&B.

Afrika Bambaataa & the Soul Sonic Force religiously used the 808 in their early releases, this association with hip-hop became key to the 808’s longevity.

It didn't take long for other artists to realise how the sinusoidal kick-sound of the 808 could literally shake a room. Its attraction widened further, becoming a mainstay central component of techno and other electronic genres.

The price of a used hardware 808 extends to several thousands, and that's for a machine which might not have MIDI as a retrofit, so software could be a highly attractive (and far cheaper) alternative, without the hassle of vintage maintenance to boot.

Roland has rejuvenated the 808, in a plugin form, which is available for £133/$149 from Plugin Boutique, or as part of a Roland Cloud subscription.

There are also some great sampled versions of the 808 available, such as the UVI Prime8+, which operates within UVI's own Workstation plugin, for just €39.

For a more universal option, try the extensive set of processed samples from Sample from Mars, available in numerous sample and production formats.

And, because we're quite kind here at MusicRadar, we have our very own 808 and 909 samples for you to download and use for free, just click the buttons below to find out more about (and grab) each of our SampleRadar 808 packages.

2. Roland CR-78

The CR-78 sonically resides not far away from the 808, being the machine that preceded it.

It has the honour of being the first mass produced programmable drum machine, although any programming required the additional WS-1 Programmer, which was rare and expensive even from new. Consequently, most users tended to just make do with the onboard preset patterns.

Being a newfangled gadget of the times, it was notably used by a number of artists. Soft Cell used the Foxtrot pattern to provide the backing for their cover of Tainted Love, while the Disco 2 preset was used by Phil Collins on the iconic In the Air Tonight - prior to the big live kit entry of course.

The CR-78 allowed subtle variation of patterns, thanks to the ability to mute certain sounds on playback, which created a degree of flexible usability for artists.

One enormous plus point for owning a CR-78 in plugin form, is that you will likely get the best of both worlds; the original presets, and the ability to program your own rhythm tracks.

Once again Roland has produced a faithful recreation of the CR-78 in plugin form.

Cherry Audio has also produced a very accurate version of the CR-78, complete with beautiful graphics, XOX-style user pattern programming and a superb standalone application, which will run on your desktop Mac or PC, for just £39/$49.

3. Korg Rhythm KR-55

The Korg KR-55A (and its updated model - 55B), has become another much loved classic since its first release in 1979.

Regular users of this analog machine included Depeche Mode, but its most famous deployment has to be Joe Jackson’s Steppin’ Out, where the the basic, but driving, analog beats provided the backbone for the entire song, although the snare was doubled by a real snare, played by a drummer.

Even so, it was laden with plenty of preset patterns, and some really classy sounds that feel very rounded by comparison to some of its competitors.

Once again, the clever folks at Cherry Audio have undertaken the task of bringing us the very best that the KR-55 had to offer.

The KR-55C, includes production-ready content from both the 55A and B revisions, along with a heavy dose of additional control elements, and a XOX-style programmer.

You can trigger sounds from your DAW or build patterns using the standalone version, but either way, it's incredibly good, and all for just $49!

There are a handful of smaller sample producers who have captured the original KR-55, such as WaveShaper, available through Loot Audio.

4. Honorary mentions

The mid-70s to mid-80s was undoubtedly a fertile time for drum machine development, with plenty of analog models available - many of which are quite rare and unique.

There are a few that we have to give honorary mentions to for their services to electronic music and pop culture in general.

The Korg Mini-Pops series of machines were unique in sound and style, which was not lost on electronic pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre.

The Mini-Pops 7 provided the main rhythmic backbone for his first two albums Oxygene and Equinox.

The Mini-Pops 7 had a unique party trick, where you could combine and playback two rhythmic presets simultaneously. This combination of rhythms was a technique employed continually by Jarre in the making of the two albums. You can read more about Jarre's extraordinary process in this lengthy feature.

The Boss Dr Rhythm 55 (DR-55) was a very basic programmable drum machine. Running on AA batteries, it was the drum machine of choice for Depeche Mode, who effectively used the machine as their drummer for their early live gigs.

According to Vince Clarke, it was Dave Gahan’s job to pick the right preset and set the tempo, before pressing the start button. Simple times, with simple devices!

Finally, we have to mention the Roland TR-606. Another one of those machines aimed at guitarists who needed a drummer, but with the advantage that you could link it directly to a TB-303 should you also need a synthesised bass player too.

It didn't catch on, but the 606 has become known as a classic unit in its own right, despite having been unfairly labelled the poor man’s 808. It’s comparatively limited, but still sounds fantastic!

The good news is, all of these machines have been remodelled in either hardware or software, and you will find plenty of sample libraries, should you want to explore their unique pallets more fully, and what's not to enjoy about that?

The distinctive sounds of these analogue legends is today, more accessible than ever before. And really, no self-respecting producer should be without them.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: In 2023, plugin developer Minimal Audio got into hot water when it announced that its new synthesizer, Current, would only be available through a subscription. The backlash was immediate and ferocious. Minimal Audio reversed its decision, making the instrument available for outright purchase or via a rent-to-own scheme instead, a decision that was greeted with nearly unanimous praise.

Software subscriptions remain frustratingly common in the music industry. While they can offer easy access to instruments and effects, they can also come bundled with all sorts of additional problems, not least of which is that you never actually own the product you’re paying for.

Rent-to-own, on the other hand, is seen as the more logical alternative. You’re still getting the benefit of access without having to pay the entire amount upfront, but you also get to keep the plugin at the end of the rental period.

However, it’s not always so cut and dry. The saying ‘too good to be true’ exists for a reason, and even though rent-to-own (hereafter RTO) is generally better than a subscription, it is still not without its own pitfalls.

Before we go any further, it could be helpful to define the model.

Rather than pay for a plugin entirely upfront to receive a perpetual license, you lease it from the developer or a third-party reseller and pay it off in monthly instalments. Once you have completed the payments, the leaser then transfers the license to you and you fully own it as you would if you had bought it in one lump sum.

One of the first high-profile RTO agreements was between sample-provider Splice and Xfer Records, the developer of the uber-popular soft synth, Serum. Splice continues to offer RTO options for products, passing your payments on to the developer rather than acting like a bank and buying the license on your behalf.

Third-party retailer Plugin Boutique is also in the RTO business, as are more and developers, such as Ableton, who recently made not only new purchases of Live 12 available in this way but also now upgrades as well.

While RTO is certainly convenient, especially when buying expensive items like DAWs that may be impossible to afford outright, they are not without their dangers, as we shall see…

Here are seven points to keep in mind before entering into an RTO agreement. You might be surprised by some of these.

1. Say goodbye to sale discounts

When you buy a plugin via RTO, it’s true that you generally don’t pay more than the standard list price. You pay in monthly instalments at a rate that is the total price divided by the number of months.

While this is convenient, and may seem like a deal, that total amount will never be lower than list price.

What happens if the plugin goes on sale, such as during November when it’s common practice to offer deep discounts for Black Friday? Nothing happens. You still pay full price.

In other words, when buying RTO, you cannot take advantage of a sale.

“(Developers) make their money by never giving you a sale price,” notes Reddit user 'HooksNHaunts', “Say you pay for a plugin that is $150 but it’s on sale everywhere for $75. You don’t get the sale price. You’re still gonna pay the full $150 through the rent-to-own process.”

'Kirk_Bananahammock', also on Reddit, makes a similar point in a thread called Is Serum's Rent-to-Own on Splice a Scam? “Plugins often go on sale, so you might have paid $100 towards the plugin, only to find the plugin on sale somewhere else at a discount and you could have paid less overall if you had waited.”

Upgrade pricing could also be affected when paying RTO. In general, software companies will grant you a discount on an upgraded version of a plugin when you already own an earlier revision. If you’re still paying it off via RTO, however, you don’t technically own it yet, and so may not be eligible for the upgrade.

Splice, for its part, will allow you to move up to the new version - but you’ll still have to continue paying for the original plugin on top of the latest one, adding time to your payment contract - and disqualifying you from any sales pricing in the meantime.

2. Beware impulse buying

When you only see the monthly payment price and not the total amount, impulse buying can become a real danger. “When people pay for things monthly, the first payment is what they see in their heads (in terms of) what is owed,” musician Jon Salichs tells us, who has experience leasing plugins. “So they might go crazy” buying things they don’t need", he adds. "Why stop at Serum when you could also get Arturia’s Pigments 7, or Current, or Massive X from Native Instruments? Or indeed all of them?”

Splice also offers bundles via RTO, with multiple titles included for a discounted total price. But do you really need both of those plugins or are you pulling the trigger just because the monthly payment is tantalisingly low?

Arturia’s V Collection Pro is $699 new, an eye-wateringly large amount. But when broken down into instalments, it’s only $24.99 per month. But do you really need everything in that package?

“I got a combo so it was more expensive,” explains Jon. “You could, for example, rent-to-own only the latest Ozone instead of getting Ozone and Neutron in a pack for more money. Maybe you don't need everything in that combo. Consider what you need.”

3. Subscription creep can happen here too

In much the same way that’s it’s easy to buy too much at a time, you could also end up with more RTO plans than you can afford to pay.

In the modern landscape of subscriptions being the norm, this is often referred to as ‘subscription creep’. In much the same way that you can end up with too many streamers like Netflix and Amazon Prime, you could find yourself with hundreds of dollars worth of payments per month to companies for RTO instruments and effects. It can all start to add up…

4. You have to be online

Much like with subscriptions, leasing outfits need a way to verify the plugin is authorised to use.

This is generally done online, and often through a third-party app that needs to be open and connected to the internet, such as the Splice app. While remembering to open the application at the beginning of a session can be cumbersome, for some having to be connected to the internet at all is a push too far.

“I personally don't care for the ‘log-in daily’ thing, as sometimes I have my machines offline for several days,” says KVR Audio commenter Shabahbriah.

Some producers opt to work on perpetually offline computers. For them, this system would be impossible.

5. You can't resell your license

While this danger is less common than others, it’s quite possible that even after you finish paying off your license, you’ll be forbidden from reselling it.

Every developer has their own rules about transferring licenses, with many turning into NFRs (Not For Resale) after one ownership change.

This can also be true when buying via RTO, with the license becoming an NFR after completing payment. You may technically own it - but you’re still not free to transfer it to someone else.

In response to the question, “If the developer normally allows for (a) product to be license-transferred, does that still hold?” on KVR, user 'riddim83' discovered that at least one company doesn’t allow resales: “It’s definitely not normal licenses across the board, as D16 (Group) licenses become NFR.”

This will not affect all producers, as many do not resell plugins anyway. Says Jon Salichs, “I've never sold any software. Though there might be a way, I just don't do it.”

6. If a problem arises, who do you deal with?

Any RTO agreement will have to involve some amount of DRM and authentication, and with those additional hoops to jump through, something could go wrong. If you’re leasing directly from the developer, you would reach out to their customer service department (and hopefully they’ll get back to you in a timely manner).

But when dealing with a third-party, who do you contact? the leaser or the plugin company?

This is exactly what happened to Reddit user 'ChildShapedMan' when paying for Serum through Splice. “I went to use Serum today and it came up with the license expired error message,” they wrote. “I followed all of the troubleshooting I could and nothing helped. I've emailed the support team and they are saying they can't see any plan on my account. I have emailed them my receipts and proof of payment for the last two transactions but (I am) currently waiting for their reply…”

Other Redditors had also had issues, and some recommended contacting Xfer Records directly, while others suggested signing in and out of the Splice app and website. While this is admittedly an older issue, with no recent similar comments appearing when performing searches, the fact remains that technology has a way of breaking, and when you’re stuck in the middle of a session with not one but two companies to deal with, it can be frustrating to say the least.

7. If you can't make payments, you're locked out

The biggest and most catastrophic issue is, of course, that, much like with a subscription, if you can’t make payments, you’re forbidden from using the software.

In the middle of a session? Too bad. Finally got the vocalist in the studio after months of waiting? Sucks to be you.

The good news is, however, you’ll able to pick up where you left off with no penalties when you can start making payments again.

“If you pause your membership before you've paid it off you'll lose access to it,” notes Reddit user 'Poop Fandango' "But you don't lose your progress towards paying it off. That will pick up from where you left off if you start paying again.”

However, lack of penalty or no, if you can’t pay, you can’t play. You could, of course, employ an alternative instrument or effect in the session.

“Probably that did happen,” Jon says when asked if he had any trouble in the studio when he paused payments. “But in that case, I (used) an alternative plugin. It wasn't really a problem for me because I know other ways to achieve the same effect. But it might be for someone who doesn’t.”

This solution, of course, won’t work if the software that you’re leasing is not an instrument but a DAW like Bitwig or Ableton Live!

Ultimately, paying for music software through a rent-to-own scheme can admittedly, be a convenient and affordable way to get access to instruments and effects that you might normally not be able to use.

But it makes the most sense for plugins that tend to not go on sale and don’t charge for updates, like Xfer Records’ Serum.

However, you should still use your common sense when signing up and be aware of the prospective pitfalls we’ve highlighted here.

Make sure that you read the terms and conditions and understand what you’re getting into - and what will happen if you can’t continue to pay.

Nothing would be worse than opening up a session, ready to work, and finding that you can’t access an important instrument because your credit card was declined.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: Typically, dynamics processors have a relatively specific function. We don’t mean what type of processor it is – compressor, limiter, whatever – but rather which specific model of processor is used on what specific instrument or sound source at which specific stage of the production process.

When a processor is well-matched to these specifics, then excellent results can be produced; when deployed outside of its specialism, though, even the most lionised of tools can deliver unsatisfactory results.

For example, a Fairchild 660 (whether hardware or a decent software emulation) has a legendary reputation as a vocal compressor, but its charms often aren’t as apparent in a mastering context. Similarly, a Shadow Hills Mastering Compressor has a near-magical ability to add “glue” and cohesiveness to a mix, but is not so impressive when slapped onto a vocal track.

Given this specificity, it’s rare to come across a dynamics processor that complements any sound source: vocals, instruments of every type, sub-mixes, full mixes, masters, music, dialogue, foley… the lot! It’s even rarer for that processor to be well-suited to every stage in the production process, from recording and tracking all the way through to final mastering.

Nevertheless, since its inception a decade ago, Oeksound Soothe has grown into exactly this – a rare example of a jack-of-all-tracks also being a master of all, as revered and relied upon by recording and mix engineers as by mastering and audio post-production facilities. And with the latest iteration of the plugin boasting a freshly-minted low-latency mode capable of realtime processing, live sound engineers are sure to be catching the bug soon too.

But we’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves! Before getting to what’s new in Soothe3, we need to ask: what makes Soothe so ubiquitous and widely beloved, and more pertinently, what does it actually do?

What is Soothe?

Soothe is described by Oeksound as a “dynamic resonance suppressor”. If that leaves you scratching your head, perhaps the closest comparison would be a dynamic EQ. As you may well know, a dynamic EQ is an equaliser in which each EQ band contains a compressor-style gain reduction processor. Thus, if the signal amplitude within a band’s frequency range exceeds the band’s threshold, the compressor will reduce the volume of that band.

The primary use of a dynamic EQ is to reduce resonance and prevent frequency buildup – this is when frequencies produced by multiple instruments combined become overpowering when they sound together. A suitably configured dynamic EQ can detect these “hot” frequencies and reduce the band’s gain accordingly. A multiband compressor can do something similar too, although we typically use these for broad-brushed dynamic control, whereas dynamic EQ is a better for more focussed and surgical frequency control.

But Soothe isn’t actually a dynamic EQ, and nor is it a multiband compressor. There are elements of crossover with both, but Soothe goes about its business in a very different way, and has a sonic impact that’s different to both. Soothe continually monitors the incoming signal, sensing for resonances and frequency spikes, and when a resonance is detected, Soothe reduces the amplitude of the affected frequencies until the resonance has passed.

Per-frequency gain reduction is visualised in realtime in the plugin, and this visualisation is overlaid by a curve that, to the untrained eye, looks for all the world like an EQ curve – but don’t be fooled! The curve (and the bands that define the nodes of the curve) describes frequency-specific modifications to the resonance detector’s sensitivity.

Detection is more sensitive where the curve extends above the centreline, and less sensitive below it. This means frequencies are more likely to be reduced where the curve is above the centreline – which is essentially the opposite of an EQ, if you think about it – and entirely unlike a dynamic EQ.

How has Soothe changed over the past decade?

The original version of Soothe featured just three customisable sensitivity bands, and it processed higher frequencies with more detail than lower ones. This meant the plugin excelled at dealing with problems in the upper-mid and high frequency ranges, but was less precise in lower registers – capable of controlling a bit of low-frequency rumble or low-mid boominess, but not so effective at surgical fixes in the low-end.

This didn’t stop the plugin from becoming an immediate hit. As the company’s marketing director, Atte Karm, told us: “The success of the original Soothe was way out of proportion compared to expectations, and its continued success is something that no one could have expected”.

There are those who, if finding themselves having released a runaway success like Soothe, would have simply basked in the glory of their achievement, but that wasn’t the case for Oeksound. With the lessons of the first version’s development fresh in their minds and an eye on their users’ feedback, the company embarked on a complete rewrite of Soothe.

With an all-new full-frequency-range engine, an additional sensitivity band, and new band modes, Soothe2 offered far more depth and focus in its control over lower frequencies than its predecessor. The update also inaugurated the concept of Soft and Hard processing modes, the former designed to be more transparent and adaptive to source dynamics, the latter being more aggressive, level-sensitive and compressor-like. Soothe2 also gained attack and release controls for shaping the response time of the gain reduction, mid/side processing, and the ability to weight the sensitivity between stereo channels – left-to-right in L/R stereo, or mid-to-side in M/S mode.

Importantly, Soothe2 acquired the game-changing ability to work with external sidechains, thereby allowing it to be used for tasks such as reducing mic bleed, creating spectral space to reduce frequency masking, helping a vocal or lead line stand out within a big wash of reverb, and many other creative tricks.

All of this significantly broadened Soothe’s appeal, pushing the plugin into a far broader range of studios and facilities than previously. But Oeksound still wasn’t satisfied, and embarked on the development of a third version, making further changes, adding new features and generally sprucing up a tool that was already a staple in the workflow of producers and engineers across the globe. (Check out the video below for a comparison of how Soothe2 stacks up against the newly-released Soothe3.)

Soothe's next generation

While the most obvious change in Soothe3 is the crisper, brighter interface, the most impactful changes lie in the plugin’s resonance detection and reduction algorithms. As Atte explained to us: “The balancing act was to keep the process feeling ‘effective’, and at the same time make it easier and quicker to end up with settings that tame just the ‘bad resonances’ instead of sucking the life completely out of the source signal.”

To that end, Soothe3’s Soft mode now senses resonances based on their strength relative to the overall spectrum at any given moment. This makes the processing threshold entirely independent of input level, thereby ensuring resonance control is independent of dynamic variations in the audio. As a result, processing is more musical and transparent, and setup time is reduced (just turn the large and inviting Depth dial!) Hard mode retains the more compressor-like response of Soothe2, making it ideal when it comes to applying sidechaining tricks such as de-bleeding and de-masking.

Soothe2’s Selectivity and Sharpness controls, which determine the frequency bandwidth of detection and processing (respectively), have been combined into a single Detail dial. As Atte explains: “We felt that the Selectivity control was important, but often either difficult to understand or didn't yield wanted results. So we decided to do a deep dive into how this aspect should be controlled, and we ended up at the single Detail control.” This new control saves a huge amount of time, and makes you wonder why control over the frequency focus of detection and gain reduction were ever presented as separate controls in the first place.

Where Soothe2 has a fixed set of six sensitivity bands – high-pass and low-pass filters plus four variable bands – Soothe3 can now freely add and remove bands up to a maximum of eight, and each band offers a free choice of eight band types. New here, and replacing the band-shelf mode, is the band-pass mode.

This focusses the sensitivity in a specific frequency range while leaving the remainder of the spectrum entirely unprocessed – essentially the same as using a paired high- and low-pass filter. Adding additional band-pass bands creates additional sensing and processing ranges, but any other band type falling outside of the range of that band will have no effect.

The tilt band type is also gone, but has been reimagined as the all-new Tilt feature. This lets you apply tilt – that is, a positive or negative ramping of strength – to the plugin’s Detail, Attack and Release parameters.

The tilt for each parameter is split into two, one part affecting low frequencies from around 500Hz downwards, the other affecting high frequencies from around 2kHz and up, and each tilt part can produce either a positive or negative ramp. So you can, for example, have progressively slower attack times for both low and high frequencies, or increase the Detail in the low end while reducing it in the high end. This is far more versatile than the old tilt band mode, yet also manages to be more intuitive and understandable.

Soothe3's low-latency mode

As mentioned, Soothe3 boasts a low-latency mode, and this impressively allows the plugin to run with 0ms latency when operating at 44.1kHz/48kHz sample rate, and just 1ms at higher rates. Of course, you do still have to take your own audio I/O latency into account, but nevertheless, this is a game-changer.

In the studio, it means being able to deal with unwanted mic artefacts at source – handling noise, proximity effect, de-essing and popping, and even bleed from other sources, but what’s really exciting are the live applications. Alongside giving venues all of the tonal and sonic benefits that studio-based users have come to love, we’re struggling to think of a better way of suppressing feedback and quickly compensating for the Mobile Flesh Baffle effect (the difference an audience’s size and position can make to the sound pumping from a PA rig).

Support for multichannel surround up to a 9.1.6 configuration will make Soothe3 even more invaluable in TV and film post-production than its predecessor. Each output group (LR, LFE, Centre, Surround, etc.) can be independently enabled and has its own Depth setting, which makes a lot of sense – after all, you probably don’t want the same amount of low-end control on the LFE channel as on the main LR channels, for example.

There are various other smaller changes, such as a Max Cut setting, which defines the maximum gain reduction that can be applied to any frequency, a linear phase mode that helps with parallel processing setups at the cost of a little latency, and a streamlining of the plugin’s performance controls with separate settings for realtime and offline processing.

What's behind Soothe's success?

Soothe’s particular way of shaping the spectrum and taming errant frequencies, combined with the transparency of its processing, is quite unlike anything else and can be exceptionally useful at every stage of production. You can overcook things with Soothe, but it’s pretty obvious when you do, and very easy to back off the extreme settings… unless you like how they sound!

Applied to individual tracks and parts, Soothe can mitigate unpleasant acoustic resonances, de-ess sibilant vocals and de-squeak acoustic guitars, control mic pops and handling noise, dial out unwanted mic response characteristics, and even reduce mic spill.

When creating mixes and sub-mixes, Soothe does a much better job of calming frequency build-up than does a dynamic EQ, and can also be helpful in dealing with frequency masking problems.

At the end of the chain in mastering and post-production, Soothe provides a unique means of cleanly modifying problematic frequencies and adding cohesion in a way that’s more focussed than a broadband compressor, more effective than a dynamic EQ, and more sonically transparent than either.

Despite its many talents, though, Soothe isn’t a magic wand. It can’t repair a bad recording, it can’t add life to a dull performance, and it won’t make an ineptly-mixed track sound professional.

What it will do, however, is help your audio sources stand out in their own spectral and sonic space. It can address rumbles, boominess, honkiness and harshness, it can transparently shape a source’s tone without wrenching it through an EQ, and – when configured just right – it can make the difference between a decent mix and an amazing one.

The tracks used in this article were sourced from Telefunken Elektroakustik's Live From The Lab series and the Cambridge Music Technology multitrack library, both of which offer producers a catalogue of downloadable multitracks to practice their mixing skills.

We'd like to thank Telefunken, Cambridge MT and the artists involved, Hayley Reardon, Pau Figueres, Albert Kader and Remember Jones, for allowing us to host their music.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: Free plugins come and go, and while we see plenty of excellent ones passing through our inbox, it's not often we stumble on eleven gems all at once.

After ceasing operations in February of this year, software developer Inear Display subsequently made its entire catalogue of audio tools available as pay-what-you-want downloads - and that means you can have them for free, if you're not able to make a contribution.

Writing on Inear Display's website, founder Thomas Hennebert says that while the company was a commercial endeavour for 12 years, it became a side project in 2025, and now that he's moved on to pastures new, Inear Display's suite of sound-mangling plugins has been generously gifted to the world. Here's a list of the whole bunch.

• Ephemere: Glitch percussion synth
• Amalgame: Sound design playground
• Litote: Granular exploration box
• Lancinantes: Drone synthesizer
• Gorgon: Ultraviolent distortion
• Interstice: Esoteric dual band delay
• Incipit: Creative delay toolbox
• Cruelle: Brutal distortion unit
• Antagone: Glitchy dual delay
• Bref: Random glitch percussion synth
• Regressif: Audio degradation effect

Available in both VST3 and AU formats for macOS and Windows, the plugins on offer span both instruments and audio effects, covering distortion, delay, lo-fi processors and granular effects.

On the whole, they all share a distinctly glitchy, chaotic and experimental character that will appeal to electronic music-makers taking a leftfield approach to sound design.

Ephemere is an FM-based percussion synth capable of producing some rather brutal sounds that would be right at home in an industrial techno track – hits can be sculpted via the multimode filter and dual envelope generators, and extensive randomisation options are on hand to keep things interesting.

Litote is an audio effect that creates ambient soundscapes and atmospheric textures using a combination of granulators, resonators and diffusion delays. The plugin is kitted out with four separate granular engines, each with its own set of controls, that can be blended via an X/Y pad. Once again, there's intelligent randomisation to play with, along with a neat Trajectory Mode that modulates the position of the target on the pad.

Probably the most powerful tool in the set is Amalgame, a multi-effects plugin and 'sound design playground' designed to streamline the creation of complex signal processing chains.

Stacked with a library of 23 individual effects spanning reverbs, delays, filters, distortion, modulation and more exotic options, Amalgame can chain up to six effects, each equipped with an XY pad for two-dimensional control.

Both X and Y axes can be modulated using dedicated tempo-synced sequencers with adjustable rate, length, and direction, so there's real potential here to create complex and evolving textures with a combination of effects.

We've had tons of fun with the ones that we've picked up - this is a fantastic set of creatively inspiring tools that really has no business being free. If you're able to contribute, we urge you to pay a fair price for the plugins you download.

Head over to the Inear Display website to find out more.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: Given the endless bombardment of new plugins, plugin packages and seemingly inescapable plugin subscriptions you might think most DAWs had no onboard plugins at all. But the stock plugin offering in most DAWs is surprisingly good and getting better all the time.

So, we thought we’d take a look at a few classic sounds and show you how to make them with stock plugins. Our DAW of choice is Logic Pro, which has a pretty good selection of stock plugins.

That said, the techniques demonstrated are universal and should be achievable with the provided plugins of most DAWs.

1. Cut-off Reverbs

A great effect that you’ll find in everything from the Prodigy to Skrillex and beyond is the chopped or manipulated reverb. Delivering a more aggressive and tailored ending than a traditional gated reverb, you can achieve this effect with any stock reverb. There are two approaches.

The first and more old-school approach is to set up the reverb as an insert and bounce your sound, including reverb, as audio, then edit the ending to taste. Here we want to add the effect to a block sound on the 4th quarter note. We’re using a long reverb (10 sec decay) and we’ve trimmed this right back so it just overlaps the start of the next bar.

Our second option, and a bit more flexible, is to automate the reverb wet mix level. So, we’re still using the reverb as an insert, but simply blending it in as required. This is a quicker option, and means we can continue to tweak the reverb and blend to taste as the mix progresses.

Finally, if you want to get a bit more creative with the reverb, automation allows us to create a more complex cut up effect. Here we’ve added more automation to the wet mix of the reverb, so the reverb tail works in sync with the bass part below.

2. Screaming Dubstep Bass

Although a modern soft synth plugin might deliver a classic screaming dubstep bass, it doesn’t take too long to build this type of sound from scratch and you can do it with stock plugins. All you need to get started is a virtual analogue synth instrument. Here we’re using Logic Pro ES2, with a single sawtooth oscillator and playback mode set to mono.

The grit for the sound comes from a combination of distortion and a resonant high pass filter. Place the filter first adding medium resonance and steep slope (48dB/octave is ideal). For the distortion some kind of clipper works well - here we’re using Bitcrusher. Increase the drive until you get the required dirty sound - we’ve set this pretty high then reduced the clip level.

If you now play some notes and adjust the high pass cutoff upwards you should hear the basic sound. To finesse this sound we can add some chorus and a short reverb. Here we’ve set the chorus mix quite low, meanwhile for the reverb use a chamber style setting with a medium decay (1.0s), adjusting the mix blend quite low.

The final stage is to automate the high-pass filter cutoff. Fast rising cutoff changes on the note attack work really well and you can then position the cutoff to emphasise the frequency. Once you have these automation moves written, go back and tweak any of the other settings to finesse the overall sound.

3. Formant Shifting

In our final example we’re looking at formant shifting. Popular with all sorts of contemporary artists including Billie Eilish, Cashmere Cat and Jacob Collier, formant shifting changes the resonant frequencies and hence timbre of a sound and is particularly effective for changing the character of vocals - making them sound older or younger - without changing the fundamental frequency.

There is undoubtedly some excellent commercially available software for formant shifting, with Celemony Melodyne at the top of the tree. Even so, formant shifting is available in most DAWs in some form, you just have to know where to look. In Logic Pro, Vocal Transformer is a real time plugin that is great for quick and more extreme changes. For more surgical changes Flex Pitch is the tool, and you’ll find formant editing in the flex options of many other DAWs.

So, how can we use this on a track? There are two popular techniques. First up, we can use it for distinctive harmonies like Billie Eilish’s Bury A Friend. Here we want to process the whole harmony track or tracks, shifting the formants either up or down slightly (200 to 300 cents is usually enough). This works very well if the lead vocalist has also sung the harmonies as it creates more timbral variation.

A more focused option is to use formant changes on specific words or phrases of the lead vocal. This works well on contemporary pop genres (Cashmere Cat is a good example), and is much easier if you have a Flex Pitch style editor. Here we’ve left most of the vocal as it is, and on a few selected words adjusted just the formant amount.

PLUGIN WEEEK 2026: Heartthrob, crooner and fashion renegade - is there anything Harry Styles can’t do? Apparently not. As demonstrated with his recent hit, Aperture, Styles has become a keen embracer of the sonics of minimal electronic music.

It’s a track that is moody and atmospheric, yet driving and bouncy, all while leaving enough room for Harry’s vocals to shine.

Eschewing traditional instrumentation, Styles' Aperture has more in common texturally with something like Nathan Fake - The Sky Was Pink (James Holden Remix), combining sculpted white noise, atmospheric chords, lofi synthesised beats and heavyweight bass.

One might also compare it to the experimental electronic work of performance artist Laurie Anderson with its processed vocals and repeated voice nuggets.

It’s certainly a far cry from Harry’s more traditional work as part of pop icons One Direction, yet crucially, its electronic elements sit tastefully in the mix with Styles’ vocal remaining at the center.

The combination of Harry’s familiar voice and unusual electronic backing saw the song become a huge hit with fans, who no doubt appreciate the track’s unorthodox production even if they’re not fans of the minimal classics that seemingly inspired it

If you’d like to join Harry in this minimal madness you’re in luck - the effects heard in Aperture can be achieved easily with even straightforward soft synths. So let’s break down the track to find out how it weaves its synthetic magic.

1. Pumping organ chords

The foundation of Aperture is its synth-based, organ-like chord progression, which ducks in volume on each beat much like Eric Prydz’ Call On Me.

To create something similar, we can begin with the Arturia Jup-8 V’s Combo Organ preset. Here’s how it sounds playing a I - V - ii chord progression.

This organ preset doesn’t have the smeared, dreamy quality of the Aperture synth, so let’s smooth it out a bit by changing VCO-2 to a sawtooth, dropping it down an octave, reducing the LFO speed and VCO modulation amount, and also turning down the Envelope 2 to filter cutoff.

This gives us a more atmospheric, wistful sound that’s closer to Aperture.

Next we need to add that sidechain-style pump. We can be sure that this isn’t actually sidechain compression, because the ducking doesn’t match the non-4x4 pattern of the kick drum, so let’s use a volume modulating plugin (in this case Ableton Live’s Auto Pan) to duck the volume on quarter notes.

With the effect applied, we get that driving ducking effect that gives the song part of its propulsive energy.

2. Techno kicks

Aperture’s kicks have a techno feel. However, they don’t follow techno’s standard 4x4 rhythm, instead opting for a pattern reminiscent of another early 21st century dance anthem, M.V.P. - Roc Ya Body (Mic Check 1 2).

Creating a kick pattern like this is straightforward: starting with a Roland TR-909 kick drum sample, we sequence it on the first three beats of the bar, then add kicks on the 12th and fifteenth 1/16th notes.

Because the 16th notes don’t perfectly align with the pure 4x4 of the sidechain-esque pump, it creates an interesting rhythmic interplay with the ducking synth.

3. Evolving plucks

Another element that helps drive the track are rapid 16th-note synth plucks. These have a noise element a little like Kelis’ Acapella, with filter modulation opening and closing the sound to create a sense of development.

We can make a version of this sound by starting out with a PWM-style envelope with multiple unison voices, and a low amount of Detune. A noise oscillator provides the aforementioned noise element.

This sounds kind of messy as-is, but we can make it tighter and more energetic by turning down the decay and sustain on the amplitude envelope. We’re going for a really tight decay time here, which helps give the part a propulsive feel.

The final touch is a band-pass filter that’s modulated by two free-running LFOs, one with a period of a quarter note, the other with a period of 8 bars.

Again, this ducks on quarter notes, so let’s add another Auto Pan effect to get that pumping feel.

4. Bouncy Bass

Big, round and bouncy, a little reminiscent of San Soda’s Juno Love, Aperture’s bassline is a great example of 'less is more' in action. In fact, it’s just the tonic note playing on one octave, then the octave above. Simple, yet extremely effective!

The sound design of this bass is simple too. All you need is a square oscillator with a low-pass filter closing over it with a medium length decay time, and just a little portamento glide.

5. Lo-fi percussion

Taking influence from minimal techno masterpieces like Richie Hawtin AKA Plastiman’s Spastik, Aperture continues to make use of white noise in its percussion department.

Making the lowest of lo-fi hi-hats is a breeze: simply use a single white noise oscillator, and turn down the amplitude envelope’s sustain and decay so that you just get a little burst of noise on each note.

Now, let’s hear how all these elements sound together.

So there you have it, five production techniques employed by Harry Styles when he took the sounds of minimal techno pop-ward.

If you’d like to hear more of the original minimal sound, check out The Sound of Minimal Techno on Spotify.

PLUGIN WEEK 2026: Chances are, most of the music production plugins that you use rely on fairly commonplace logic. Your synthesizers model the flow of electricity through components, while the effects in your chain rely on a recreation of the signal flow-structure of classic outboard gear.

These instruments and effects processors may be useful, but the predictable results can also get a little stale. A compressor compresses. But what if your compressor reacted not to volume - but behaved according to the laws of thermodynamics? Your musical decisions would be quite different then.

A thermodynamic compressor is more than just a hypothetical, though. It’s a very real plugin, and one of a growing selection of instruments, effects and modulation systems that use physics as a basis for their behaviour.

Here are four developers using physics in their plugins - and how you can apply science-based decisions to your own productions for a boost of real-world-inspired creativity.

1. Baby Audio Atoms - "It's a physical instrument that never existed in the real world"

Thanks to increases in computer processing power, physical modelling - the mathematical recreation of instruments in digital form - is becoming ever more popular. By modelling an exciter and resonator, you can whip up all kinds of acoustic instruments, such as violins, pianos and percussion.

But, and this is where it gets interesting, you aren’t restricted to just real-world instruments. You could just as easily model, say, a mass and spring network to create never-before heard sounds.

Atoms from Baby Audio is one such bizzaro-instrument builder.

Although it looks like a typical soft synth from the outside, under the hood it’s modelling not oscillators and filters but bows and springs.

“Think of it as a complex string instrument that might have existed in the real world if a group of scientists decided to make a new kind of instrument,” explains Caspar Bock Soerensen, the CEO of Baby Audio.

Developed in collaboration with Silvin Willemsen, a PhD in the field and co-author of several scientific papers on physical modelling, Atoms behaves like a physical instrument, with real-world properties and constraints. “And just like anything you do on an acoustic guitar or a piano will have a certain ‘sound’ to it,” says Caspar, “Atoms is the same - but still a lot more flexible than a piano or guitar. It's a physical instrument that never existed in the real world.

“There’s an eeriness to the mass spring model that reminds me of the Twin Peaks soundtrack,” says Caspar. This ‘unreal-ness’ comes from the use of physics, specifically the vibrations brought about by the movement of the virtual mass of springs.

“Physical modeling has (an) organic sound because the elements that create the sound are not statically programmed but part of a complex and chaotic network of inter-dependencies,” explains Caspar. “The result is something that sounds more like playing an acoustic instrument, but with the artificial/unreal timbre of a synthesizer."

To get the most out of Atoms, Caspar recommends reaching for it when you want an alternative to basic strings.

“Use it where you'd normally use strings and you'll have beautiful, eerie and alive textures.”

2. Anukari - "Then it does something totally weird and different. That's part of the creative process"

Another instrument that models masses and springs is Anukari, but instead of presenting as a synthesizer with the physics tucked away unseen, as with Atoms, it renders the unreal instrument in a graphic 3D space for you to interact with.

It also lets you build your own instrument structures. Like an Erector Set but one you can play, with Anukari you can assemble springs and masses and then strike them with a variety of resonators like mallets and plectrums, and then capture the vibrations via virtual microphones.

It may sound like a lot, but the visual element makes it easy to understand. If you’re still having trouble getting your head around it, inventor Evan Mezeske recommends that you just start playing around.

“The best way to learn is to find a preset that's interesting to you and start changing stuff,” advises Evan. “Disconnect something, see what happens. Grab something and move it and see what that sounds like.”

If you’re worried that you don’t understand physics, don’t be, says Evan. “I don't think you need to understand physics at all. In a certain way, we all understand physics. You know what happens if you pull a spring back.”

The fact that we all live in the physical world makes what happens in Anukari relatable at a fundamental level. “Even things like the LFO,” continues Evan. “It's modelled as a piston from a car, because I like cars. I grew up in an auto shop. My granddad owned one so I think of rotating pistons in an engine. It’s kind of fun, because if you don't know what a square wave is, you can just watch the animation for the LFO.”

You also don’t have to know what you want going in. Just as you might explore what happens when you bang two pieces of scrap metal together that you find in a junkyard, Anukari lets you experiment with how different physical objects relate to each other sonically.

“Sometimes I want to just mess around and see what happens,” says Evan. “The physics are good for that because there's this unpredictable, emergent nature. You build something and you think you know what it's going to do. Then it does something totally weird and different. That’s part of the creative process.”

To get the most out of Anukari, Evan suggests using it for metallic sounds, bells, and inharmonic sounds.

It’s especially good for pads with a lot of unusual harmonic motion. “With Anakari and the way the physics come out,” says Evan, “introducing a lot of energy into a system will cause it to bend out of shape in weird ways.”

You can also use Anukari as an effect, with your audio signal acting as a resonator through the springs. “I'm primarily a guitarist,” says Evan, explaining how he uses Anukari. “You're creating this resonant structure, you're playing stuff into it and you're hearing how it resonates. When you push it too hard, it distorts. The way that it goes crazy is quite unique.”

3. Unusable Engineering - "You do not need to know chemistry to enjoy fireworks"

There’s a theme that runs throughout physics-inspired plugins: unpredictability. You turn a filter cutoff knob on a traditional synthesizer, you know generally what will happen. But when you hit a mass of springs with a virtual hammer, or push audio through a distortion model based on fluid dynamics, the variables become so great that there’s no way to anticipate everything that can happen. And therein lies the potential for creative inspiration.

“When it comes to physics, I have always been drawn to visualisations of things like turbulence,” says Rasmus Nyåker, the developer behind Unusable Engineering, a software company with a whole stable of physics-powered plugins. “They are chaotic and mesmerising.”

This mesmerising chaos can be found in effects like the fluid-dynamics distortion plugin, Cavitation Fractures, and Spectral Pressure Chamber, a thermodynamic multi-band compressor.

“In all of them,” Rasmus says, “the point was not just to use science as a little visual, but to let the model itself shape the sound in ways that are a bit more organic, strange, and less predictable than the usual effect structures.”

As with Atoms and Anukari, you do not need to understand the physics at play to effectively use Rasmus’ creations.

“I do not think of them as being for people who know physics,” he explains. “I think of them as being for people who enjoy sound, movement, and a bit of uncertainty in the way things react."

In fact, because we all intuitively understand how physical properties behave, Rasmus thinks that physics-based instruments and effects might be easier to grasp than traditional music gear.

“In a lot of plugins,” he says, “you have ten knobs, you turn one, and the sound changes, but you do not really get much sense of why. By adding this simulation layer, you can actually see and hear the reaction at the same time. So even though it is, objectively, a very roundabout way of achieving an effect, I think it can actually be easier to grasp than many more conventional interfaces."

If you’re still not sure what’s happening in his plugins, Rasmus advises you to, “just go nuts. Push things around, break them a bit and see what happens. That is often where the fun starts. A lot of the plugins make the most sense once you stop treating them too carefully.”

Lastly, you don’t need to feel intimidated by the science. Because, as Rasmus notes, “You do not need to know chemistry to enjoy fireworks. The physics are not there to test anyone or make the plugins feel academic. They are there to transform sound and interaction in ways that (are) more surprising, more visual, and often more alive. If the result feels good and inspires you, that is really enough.”

4. Korg Kaoss Physics - "Make some gestures and see what happens"

So far, we’ve looked at using physics to add creativity to instruments and effects, but that’s not the extent of how developers are intertwining the laws of the universe with music production. Another area is modulation, something that Korg has explored with Kaoss Physics.

Originally developed for the hardware Modwave and later applied to Multi/Poly and the ensuing native software versions as well, Kaoss Physics takes the idea of the X/Y control environment (as used in the Kaoss Pad) and applies it to modulation.

Kaoss Physics models a ball that rolls across a virtual surface and bounces off walls.

You can also create dents and bumps on the surface to further affect the motion of the ball, with gravity and friction also playing their part. The ball’s actions generate modulation signals that can then affect parameters in the instruments.

“For all of the interesting complexity behind the scenes, for a user it’s really just a simple game controller,” says Dan Philips, Manager of Product Development at Korg R&D, about how a musician can approach programming with Kaoss Physics.

“The Korg factory sounds already have it set up to do something useful, so you can just play with it and see what happens.”

When asked how Kaoss Physics can enhance creativity, Dan answers that he thinks of it as a gesture amplifier.

“You move your finger on the pad (or launch the ball in the software), and the position, speed, and direction of that motion sends the ball into the Kaoss Physics environment,” he says. “All sorts of things may happen after that, but it’s that initial, human gesture that starts it all.”

One of the benefits of working with the environment is how many different parameters can be affected.

“It’s interesting to have a large number of different modulation signals - X and Y positions, distance, and angle - generated from a single system,” Dan notes. “That creates something like a multi-dimensional LFO or envelope, good for creating interactions between sets of parameters.”

Modulating the physics environment with the ball position can open up a lot of interesting possibilities. “For example,” he says, “check out Kaoss Physics in the Modwave sound ‘Biegerish’. The ball is slowly pulled towards the upper right corner, but when it gets there it’s quickly pushed away again. ‘Torus’ changes the X/Y tilt and the bump height as the ball moves around on the surface, creating interesting patterns of motion. ‘Orbit Wander’ changes the position of the dent, leading the ball in circles. ‘Space-Time’ slows time as the ball gets closer to the centre.”

As with the other plugins profiled here, you don’t have to be a physics professor to find the modulation system useful. “Approach it like a game controller,” Dan advises. “You don’t need to program the game; you can just play it! Play the factory sounds, make some gestures, and see what happens. Just have fun with it. Later, if you’re so inclined, you can always dig into the details under the hood.”

Sonic Charge's Synplant 2 is one of the most innovative synth plugins released in recent years, not only thanks to its unique 'genetic' workflow, but also the groundbreaking Genopatch function introduced in version 2.

Genopatch is an AI-powered tool that generates synth patches based on imported audio, analysing a sample to create a similar-sounding patch in Synplant based on its sonic characteristics. As the first synth plugin to introduce this kind of capability, Synplant has been consistently ahead of the curve when it comes to AI-based sound design.

Today, Sonic Charge continues to lead the charge with the introduction of PhenoType, a new feature for Synplant 2 that allows users to generate synth patches from text descriptions. Much like prompt-based song generators like Suno or text-to-sample tools such as Waves' Illugen, PhenoType responds to text descriptions, using these to guide Synplant's sound engine towards a patch that reflects the input.

The process is simple: once you've downloaded and installed the script (which is free for Synplant 2 owners), just open up PhenoType and type in a description of the patch you'd like to create.

This could be anything from simple, well-known sounds ("reese bass", for example) to more complex descriptions that cover multiple timbral characteristics, like "soft ambient pad, slow attack, sweeping resonant filter, strong reverb". (Listen to the example below to hear what PhenoType came up with in response to that prompt.)

Once your description is ready, hit EXE to generate a patch, or alt-click to edit the previous result. The RND button will suggest a random prompt if you're lacking inspiration, and a handy CLR button empties the text field. Each patch will be accompanied by a description beneath that shows how PhenoType would describe the sound its created, and a confidence score that rates how close the results are to the initial description.

Notably, PhenoType isn't built on a large language model, or even marketed as an AI-powered feature. Instead, the algorithmic text parser runs locally in Synplant with no internet connection required. Its specialized neural network works with hundreds of internal tags – along with synonyms and variations – to build its patches, and Sonic Charge advises that simple, natural English will get you the best results.

The company suggests that specific prompts like "a reverb-drenched pad with a slow attack and some modulation" should work well, while more abstract descriptions ("a sound that resembles a busy cafe heard from the street outside") are beyond its abilities. (If the parser doesn't understand your description, it'll generate a random patch instead.)

PhenoType is still in its early stages, and though it performed well at generating basic patches from easily understandable prompts, complex descriptions typically yielded mixed results. Even when PhenoType didn't quite hit the mark in terms of accuracy, though, it usually produced some creatively inspiring and highly usable sounds.

While the text-to-patch concept isn't entirely novel, Sonic Charge is the first established plugin developer to integrate this kind of tech into a well-known software synth – and much like Synplant's GenoPatch feature, PhenoType is another major leap forward from a perpetually innovative developer that continues to surprise us.

"The idea for PhenoType came from working on a new technology for Synplant: an algorithm capable of describing Synplant patches using words and tags," reads a press release from Sonic Charge.

"At some point, we started thinking: If an algorithm can create descriptions from patches, should it not also be possible to run the process in reverse and create patches from descriptions? Once this idea was planted, we simply had to try building it."

Head over to Sonic Charge's website to find out more and download PhenoType. You'll need a Synplant 2 license to download and use PhenoType: the plugin is priced at €149 but a free trial is available.

Universal Audio has announced the release of Topline Vocal Tune, a new native vocal pitch correction plugin that lifts the vocal tuner from the company’s Topline Vocal Suite plugin and makes it available as a standalone tool, competing with the likes of Antares Auto-Tune, Waves Tune, and Slate Digital MetaTune.

UA launched Topline Vocal Suite in 2024 as an all-in-one vocal chain, offering producers analogue-emulating preamps, saturation, compression, EQ and a multi-effects section alongside its vocal tuning capabilities.

Topline Vocal Tune strips that back to the tuning engine alone, which UA says offers “ultra-low-latency” performance, allowing vocalists to perform live through the plugin or monitor pitched vocals without delay while recording.

According to Universal Audio, Topline Vocal Tune can handle everything from transparent and natural-sounding correction to the recognizably hard-tuned effects associated with hip-hop, R&B and pop.

At the core of the plugin is a single Tune control for dialling in correction speed, ranging from subtle to fully hard-tuned. The Natural section adds Elastic and Sustain controls, which are intended to keep a vocal in tune while maintaining the slides, vibrato and tonal character that pitch correction can often mess with.

Topline Vocal Tune's Shift panel features Pitch and Formant controls for conventional pitch- and formant-shifting that can be blended in with a Mix dial, while the MIDI Repitching function lets you input melodies and harmonies through a MIDI keyboard to retune your vocals with your playing.

The plugin's Topline Key Finder detects the key and scale of your session automatically, saving time on set-up, and the Scale Define mode can be used to lock pitch correction to custom scales.

"When singers feel good in their headphones, that's when great takes happen," says Julian Prindle, Senior Product Designer at Universal Audio. "Topline helps artists stay confident and in the moment while giving producers everything they need to shape vocals behind the scenes."

As with the original Topline Vocal Suite, Topline Vocal Tune is native-only, with no Apollo or UAD hardware integration available. It's available for macOS and Windows in VST/VST3/AU/AAX formats.

UAD Topline Vocal Tune is available now, and priced at $99 with an introductory discount of $79. It's also included in the UAD Spark subscription, and there’s a further discount for owners of Topline Vocal Suite.

Find out more on Universal Audio's website.

Arturia has launched its latest synth plugin, Memory V, an emulation of Moog’s lauded Memorymoog polysynth.

Released in 1982, the Memorymoog had six voices, each with the same three-VCO architecture as its mono predecessor the Minimoog. It also packed a 24db low-pass ladder filter per-voice.

As well as generating poly patches, the Memorymoog could operate in mono mode too, where its 18 oscillators could be used to create huge-sounding unison effects.

Arturia’s plugin recreation replicates this original architecture in full, while introducing some modern touches and updated features. Memory V can expand the polyphony from six to 12 voices, also adding modernised modulation, effects and arp sections.

According to Arturia: “Memory V resurrects the analogue majesty of the Memorymoog with breathtaking authenticity. Build towering brass, dense basses, evolving leads, and cinematic pads with the living instability and triple-oscillator depth of a polyphonic classic, augmented for modern production.”

While the Memorymoog boasted an undeniably powerful sound engine, it was not a synth without flaws. The instrument was the last to be released during Moog’s original incarnation before the company fell into bankruptcy. As a result, its MIDI implementation was left somewhat unfinished. The tuning was notoriously unstable too, and the machine is known for being difficult to maintain.

Arturia has included some of these imperfections in its recreation. The plugin includes a ‘vintage dispersion’ parameter, for dialling in what Arturia refers to as “subtle, breathing detuning that sounds alive, not perfect.”

The virtual analogue filters can also be overdriven in a characteristic manner using the per-voice Drive control. According to Arturia: “At low settings it adds subtle harmonic richness; past halfway it introduces the raw, crunchy analogue grit the Memorymoog was notorious for. Combine with a slow filter opening and you have a signature ‘angry Moog’ moment that cuts through any dense mix.”

As with other plugins in Arturia’s V Collection, Memory V’s main UI closely mimics the look and layout of its inspiration, but an assortment of modern extras can be found within the interface’s drop down Advanced tab.

Here, users can access a four-track arpeggiator that allows for multi-layered patterns to be honed and routed to different octaves of the synth keyboard. There’s also a flexible drag-and-drop modulation setup with multiple envelopes, LFOs, randomisation tools and a step-sequenced Voice Modulator.

Memory V also has a three-slot effect engine that can be loaded with a variety of vintage and modern-style processors drawn from Arturia’s existing software suite.

As with other V Collection plugins, the synth also makes use of a top-level Macro system that allows users to modulate and control multiple parameters at once using four editable controls.

Memory V is MPE compatible, and comes loaded with over 300 presets covering basses, pads, leads and a variety of more esoteric sounds.

The synth is available now priced at €/$149. Owners of existing Arturia products can unlock introductory discounts by logging into their accounts.

Head to the Arturia site for more information.

In 2023, plugin developer Minimal Audio got into hot water when it announced that its new synthesizer, Current, would only be available through a subscription. The backlash was immediate and ferocious. Minimal Audio reversed its decision, making the instrument available for outright purchase or via a rent-to-own scheme instead, a decision that was greeted with nearly unanimous praise.

Software subscriptions remain frustratingly common in the music industry. While they can offer easy access to instruments and effects, they can also come bundled with all sorts of additional problems, not least of which is that you never actually own the product you’re paying for.

Rent-to-own, on the other hand, is seen as the more logical alternative. You’re still getting the benefit of access without having to pay the entire amount upfront, but you also get to keep the plugin at the end of the rental period.

However, it’s not always so cut and dry. The saying ‘too good to be true’ exists for a reason, and even though rent-to-own (hereafter RTO) is generally better than a subscription, it is still not without its own pitfalls.

Before we go any further, it could be helpful to define the model.

Rather than pay for a plugin entirely upfront to receive a perpetual license, you lease it from the developer or a third-party reseller and pay it off in monthly instalments. Once you have completed the payments, the leaser then transfers the license to you and you fully own it as you would if you had bought it in one lump sum.

One of the first high-profile RTO agreements was between sample-provider Splice and Xfer Records, the developer of the uber-popular soft synth, Serum. Splice continues to offer RTO options for products, passing your payments on to the developer rather than acting like a bank and buying the license on your behalf.

Third-party retailer Plugin Boutique is also in the RTO business, as are more and developers, such as Ableton, who recently made not only new purchases of Live 12 available in this way but also now upgrades as well.

While RTO is certainly convenient, especially when buying expensive items like DAWs that may be impossible to afford outright, they are not without their dangers, as we shall see…

Here are seven points to keep in mind before entering into an RTO agreement. You might be surprised by some of these.

1. Say goodbye to sale discounts

When you buy a plugin via RTO, it’s true that you generally don’t pay more than the standard list price. You pay in monthly instalments at a rate that is the total price divided by the number of months.

While this is convenient, and may seem like a deal, that total amount will never be lower than list price.

What happens if the plugin goes on sale, such as during November when it’s common practice to offer deep discounts for Black Friday? Nothing happens. You still pay full price.

In other words, when buying RTO, you cannot take advantage of a sale.

“(Developers) make their money by never giving you a sale price,” notes Reddit user 'HooksNHaunts', “Say you pay for a plugin that is $150 but it’s on sale everywhere for $75. You don’t get the sale price. You’re still gonna pay the full $150 through the rent-to-own process.”

'Kirk_Bananahammock', also on Reddit, makes a similar point in a thread called Is Serum's Rent-to-Own on Splice a Scam? “Plugins often go on sale, so you might have paid $100 towards the plugin, only to find the plugin on sale somewhere else at a discount and you could have paid less overall if you had waited.”

Upgrade pricing could also be affected when paying RTO. In general, software companies will grant you a discount on an upgraded version of a plugin when you already own an earlier revision. If you’re still paying it off via RTO, however, you don’t technically own it yet, and so may not be eligible for the upgrade.

Splice, for its part, will allow you to move up to the new version - but you’ll still have to continue paying for the original plugin on top of the latest one, adding time to your payment contract - and disqualifying you from any sales pricing in the meantime.

2. Beware impulse buying

When you only see the monthly payment price and not the total amount, impulse buying can become a real danger. “When people pay for things monthly, the first payment is what they see in their heads (in terms of) what is owed,” musician Jon Salichs tells us, who has experience leasing plugins. “So they might go crazy” buying things they don’t need", he adds. "Why stop at Serum when you could also get Arturia’s Pigments 7, or Current, or Massive X from Native Instruments? Or indeed all of them?”

Splice also offers bundles via RTO, with multiple titles included for a discounted total price. But do you really need both of those plugins or are you pulling the trigger just because the monthly payment is tantalisingly low?

Arturia’s V Collection Pro is $699 new, an eye-wateringly large amount. But when broken down into instalments, it’s only $24.99 per month. But do you really need everything in that package?

“I got a combo so it was more expensive,” explains Jon. “You could, for example, rent-to-own only the latest Ozone instead of getting Ozone and Neutron in a pack for more money. Maybe you don't need everything in that combo. Consider what you need.”

3. Subscription creep can happen here too

In much the same way that’s it’s easy to buy too much at a time, you could also end up with more RTO plans than you can afford to pay.

In the modern landscape of subscriptions being the norm, this is often referred to as ‘subscription creep’. In much the same way that you can end up with too many streamers like Netflix and Amazon Prime, you could find yourself with hundreds of dollars worth of payments per month to companies for RTO instruments and effects. It can all start to add up…

4. You have to be online

Much like with subscriptions, leasing outfits need a way to verify the plugin is authorised to use.

This is generally done online, and often through a third-party app that needs to be open and connected to the internet, such as the Splice app. While remembering to open the application at the beginning of a session can be cumbersome, for some having to be connected to the internet at all is a push too far.

“I personally don't care for the ‘log-in daily’ thing, as sometimes I have my machines offline for several days,” says KVR Audio commenter Shabahbriah.

Some producers opt to work on perpetually offline computers. For them, this system would be impossible.

5. You can't resell your license

While this danger is less common than others, it’s quite possible that even after you finish paying off your license, you’ll be forbidden from reselling it.

Every developer has their own rules about transferring licenses, with many turning into NFRs (Not For Resale) after one ownership change.

This can also be true when buying via RTO, with the license becoming an NFR after completing payment. You may technically own it - but you’re still not free to transfer it to someone else.

In response to the question, “If the developer normally allows for (a) product to be license-transferred, does that still hold?” on KVR, user 'riddim83' discovered that at least one company doesn’t allow resales: “It’s definitely not normal licenses across the board, as D16 (Group) licenses become NFR.”

This will not affect all producers, as many do not resell plugins anyway. Says Jon Salichs, “I've never sold any software. Though there might be a way, I just don't do it.”

6. If a problem arises, who do you deal with?

Any RTO agreement will have to involve some amount of DRM and authentication, and with those additional hoops to jump through, something could go wrong. If you’re leasing directly from the developer, you would reach out to their customer service department (and hopefully they’ll get back to you in a timely manner).

But when dealing with a third-party, who do you contact? the leaser or the plugin company?

This is exactly what happened to Reddit user 'ChildShapedMan' when paying for Serum through Splice. “I went to use Serum today and it came up with the license expired error message,” they wrote. “I followed all of the troubleshooting I could and nothing helped. I've emailed the support team and they are saying they can't see any plan on my account. I have emailed them my receipts and proof of payment for the last two transactions but (I am) currently waiting for their reply…”

Other Redditors had also had issues, and some recommended contacting Xfer Records directly, while others suggested signing in and out of the Splice app and website. While this is admittedly an older issue, with no recent similar comments appearing when performing searches, the fact remains that technology has a way of breaking, and when you’re stuck in the middle of a session with not one but two companies to deal with, it can be frustrating to say the least.

7. If you can't make payments, you're locked out

The biggest and most catastrophic issue is, of course, that, much like with a subscription, if you can’t make payments, you’re forbidden from using the software.

In the middle of a session? Too bad. Finally got the vocalist in the studio after months of waiting? Sucks to be you.

The good news is, however, you’ll able to pick up where you left off with no penalties when you can start making payments again.

“If you pause your membership before you've paid it off you'll lose access to it,” notes Reddit user 'Poop Fandango' "But you don't lose your progress towards paying it off. That will pick up from where you left off if you start paying again.”

However, lack of penalty or no, if you can’t pay, you can’t play. You could, of course, employ an alternative instrument or effect in the session.

“Probably that did happen,” Jon says when asked if he had any trouble in the studio when he paused payments. “But in that case, I (used) an alternative plugin. It wasn't really a problem for me because I know other ways to achieve the same effect. But it might be for someone who doesn’t.”

This solution, of course, won’t work if the software that you’re leasing is not an instrument but a DAW like Bitwig or Ableton Live!

Ultimately, paying for music software through a rent-to-own scheme can admittedly, be a convenient and affordable way to get access to instruments and effects that you might normally not be able to use.

But it makes the most sense for plugins that tend to not go on sale and don’t charge for updates, like Xfer Records’ Serum.

However, you should still use your common sense when signing up and be aware of the prospective pitfalls we’ve highlighted here.

Make sure that you read the terms and conditions and understand what you’re getting into - and what will happen if you can’t continue to pay.

Nothing would be worse than opening up a session, ready to work, and finding that you can’t access an important instrument because your credit card was declined.

Neural DSP has just expanded its plugin range with the Darkglass Ultimate, a comprehensive in-the-box solution for bass guitar players based around a pair of the Finnish bass amp brand’s most-famous preamps and complemented by a bewildering array of effects and features.

For your contemporary bass sound, super-aggro, with “controlled low end and clear articulation”, we have a digital version of the Darklgass Microtubes series B7K Ultra preamp/distortion pedal.

Modern rock and metal bassists will have a field day with that. And for a more old-school analogue tube amp sound, there is the Vintage Ultra, which, if you remember the hardware pedal, you’ll recognise for its “warmer, more rounded” and a sound that had full-throated thump and growl.

Neural DSP has digitalised these Darkglass Electronics preamp pedals before. Remember its “algorithmically perfect” Darkglass Ultra plugin?

Well, there’s good news for anyone who owns that – the Darkglass Ultimate plugin is available as a free update. But the Darkglass Ultimate is a little different. This time Neural DSP is promising everything you need in one package, effects, cab sims, et cetera, all with bassists in full control over their entire signal chain.

“With Darkglass Ultimate, we’re expanding the Darkglass sound into something more comprehensive,” says François Barrillon, lead product manager of plugins at Neural DSP. “For many players, that sound has been a reliable starting point – something they shape around and build on. This release brings more of that process into the same place, so you can experiment, refine, and carry a sound further without stepping outside of it – while preserving the clarity, power, and character that define Darkglass.”

Those two preamp/distortions are joined by a quartet of pre-effects: compressor, auto-wah, octaver, and fuzz. You can had chorus and delay pedals in post.

And this being a Neural DSP production you’ve got ample EQing options courtesy of a 9-band graphic equalizer voiced for bass guitar.

There is the DG210C 2x10 and DG810ES 8x10 cabinet simulations, complete with free microphone placement tools, plus all kinds of tools, metronome, tuner, transposer, and presets to get your started.

“Darkglass Ultimate represents how we continue to build on what players already know and love,” says Douglas Castro, CEO and co-founder of Neural DSP. “We’ve taken the core Darkglass tones and expanded them into a more complete setup, bringing more of the signal chain within a single environment and making the process of shaping and developing a sound more fluid – so players can spend less time managing their tone and more time creating with it.”

Darkglass Ultimate is available now at a sale price of €59.50 (rising to regular price €119 after 6 May), and remember it’s a free update for Darkglass Ultra users.

See Neural DSP for more details.

SYNTH WEEK 2026: With the physical constraints of hardware - as well as the cost, weight, size and how much power they use - removed, it's safe to say that today's modern synth plugin designers have got it easy compared to Bob Moog, Tom Oberheim, Dave Smith, Wolfgang Palm, and the rest of the pantheon of synth-building legends.

And while the old classics were borne of their ability to strike a perfect balance between capability and practicality, there are no such rules to obey today. Yesterday's synth heroes worked in the physical world, discovering and sourcing new components and getting them all in one place to work together reliably.

Today's designers of modern software synths face no such constraints. Once they have a computer model for an oscillator, a filter, or an envelope, they can cram as many of these models as you like into a synth without adding any expense or impracticality.

Their only limit is the power of the user's CPU and, these days, that's not much of a limit at all!

And so with all this power, reliability and innovation we're in the midst of something of a golden age for synths where, for just a couple-of-hundred quid/dollars/euros, you can purchase the most powerful, flexible, and gob-smackingly impressive instruments ever created, creating a market for uber-synths all aiming out outgun each other.

These are synths that are both able to emulate practically any other and produce new sounds that are all their own.

Which only begs the question which is best? And which should you splash your hard-earned cash on?

Let's find out...

Arturia Pigments (Tested with v6)

Arturia is an old hand at this game, having quickly focused its attentions on creating computer models of hard-to-find hardware, realising the market for the aspiring synth nerd who dreamed of finally owning their own rack of card-carrying classics.

As its collection of synths and plugins grew, so did its repository of algorithms, so, when it turned its attention to creating its own original soft-synth, the company had a vast back catalogue of know-how and code to draw from.

The result of all this know-how is Pigments. Now on version 7 - we performed our test here originally with version 6.

Pigments is a monster synth that features a multi-engine design that allows a range of different sound generators, filters and FX processors to be combined within a patch. It's the best of Arturia… In one synth.

It features three sound generation engines. One of these is a 'Utility' engine with two noise generators and a single analogue-style oscillator, perfect for use as a sub-oscillator or drone. The other two generator slots can load any one of five different synthesis models. These are:

• Analogue provides the three-oscillator setup found on many classic synths, with common waveforms, frequency modulation and oscillator sync.
• Wavetable is a powerful and versatile wavetable engine replete with large library of wavetables and the ability to import custom wavetables.
• Sample can host up to six sample articulations, and can operate as a classic sampler or be switched into a granular mode.
• Harmonic is an approachable implementation of additive synthesis.
• Modal is a physical modelling engine based on Karplus-Strong synthesis.

This selection may not cover every synthesis technology ever, but it's more than enough to give Pigments an exceptionally varied voice.

More options are available in the filter section, which offers two slots that can be arranged in series or parallel.

There's a large choice of filter models available to load into these, with various flavours of low-pass, band-pass and high-pass models, along with a collection of more specialized filters such as comb, formant and cluster filters and some filters taken directly from Arturia's instrument collection (Minimoog, MS-20, Jupiter 8, and more).

The filters feed to an FX section featuring two insert effects busses and one send effects bus, with each bus able to host three effect processors.

As with the filters, there's a range of standard effects – reverbs, delays, and what-have-you – alongside processors taken from Arturia's other products – a Juno-6 chorus or BL-20 flanger, for example. Like we said – it's a greatest hits mash-up!

All of this is backed up with an intuitive and powerful modulation system that provides three each of envelopes, LFOs, function curves, random generators and modulation combinators. These are easy to assign via drag-and-drop – the technique favoured by all the synths we're looking at – with each mapping also available as a destination for other modulators to modulate.

Pigments also boasts a powerful arpeggiator/pattern sequencer packed with enough generative, polyrhythmic and randomisation features to keep even the most experimental producer happy.

Pleasingly, as well as driving Pigments, the arpeggiator/sequencer can also output MIDI, and so can be used to sequence other synths.

Summing up

Pigments is good-looking, easy-to-use, and sounds fantastic. It can at times get greedy for system resources but this all depends on the patch – the Analogue and Sample engines are very efficient, but fire up a Harmonic engine or two and the demands can rise sharply, especially if setting the engine to generate a large number of partials.

The synth comes with a huge library of patches, samples and wavetables, and can run standalone or as a plugin.

Verdict

Flexibility: 4

Ease-of-Use: 4

Sound: 5

Value: 4

Sound examples

Price: €199

Contact: arturia.com

Arturia Pigments review

Kilohearts Phase Plant

Not one you may have considered but well worth your time, Kilohearts' series of 'Snapin' plugins are a collection of processors that, individually, perform a single, focused task, but which can also be combined in complex ways within one of the company's three host plugins.

For effects there's Snap Heap and Multipass, and for instruments there's Phase Plant, which is what's of specific interest to us here.

The Snapin system makes Phase Plant by far the most flexible and modular synth in this roundup. An initial patch starts as a completely blank slate, and is divided into three sections: The Generator section is the hosting area for the main synth components, such as oscillators, filters and amps). The Lanes section provides three busses for hosting additional effects and processors, and which can be routing destinations for output modules within the Generator area.

Finally, the Modulators section allows any selection of envelopes, LFOs, and other modulation sources to be loaded and then assigned to any of the multitude of modulatable parameters within the patch.

Creating patches is simply a case of clicking in one of the sections and choosing Snapins from the list of compatible options that's shown.

And, by virtue of 'building' the synth yourself you'll find it perhaps the most easy to understand (while offering predictable) results. There are no 'what's that bit' or 'why is that there'… Everything is here in the chain because you put it there, making it great for learning about sound design and synthesis.

The Generator section is where sound generators, filters, and amplifiers are loaded. These are always arranged into groups, with a group needing at least one sound generator Snapin and one output Snapin for routing the sound to the Lanes section.

There are five sound generator models available, each with a self-explanatory name: Analogue, Granular, Noise, Sampler and Wavetable. To these you can add a couple of types of filter, a distortion processor, two flavours of amp envelope, and a few mixing and routing processors.

Synths can therefore be very simple with very clear design and predictable responses. Or – with the capacity to host up to 32 Snapins, and the ability to route audio signals between Snapins and groups – the Generator section ultimately allows for some phenomenally complex instruments and patches to be created.

Each of the three Lanes can load any processing Snapin installed on the system. There are additional filters, dynamics processors, distortion processors, reverb, ring modulation, EQ... the list is huge.

The Modulators section is similarly generous, with a wide choice of different realtime, automatic and utility modulators with which to add control and variation to a patch.

Summing up

For all its flexibility Phase Plant's innate 'building block' simplicity is sure to delight and teach you a thing or two in the process. Despite its open-ended and immensely versatile architecture, Phase Plant is remarkably easy to use, once you have grasped its concept. And all of this power is delivered without placing a massive strain on the host system.

Visualisations are detailed, informative and attractive, signal routing is logical and easy, and managing modulators remains intuitive and simple.

Verdict

Flexibility: 5

Ease-of-Use: 4

Sound: 4

Value: 4

Sound examples

Price: $199

Contact: kilohearts.com

Kilohearts Phase Plant review

Native Instruments Massive X

Massive quickly became a go-to in the early days of DnB and Dubstep, packing powerful, bone crushing leads and basses and forging a new route for sound designers. Massive X, as you would expect, takes that sound, complexity and capability to the next level.

At first glance its fixed pair of wavetable oscillators seem a trifle primitive compared to the other synths in this roundup, but while most wavetable synths can only traverse a wavetable's frames and, perhaps, apply wavetable folding (akin to adjusting the pulse width of a square wave), Massive X's oscillators offer a choice of 10 different methods for interpreting and working with the loaded wavetable, each resulting in significantly different sonic outcomes.

The combination of which – in the face of simpler fare elsewhere – makes Massive (in both original and X form) a bit of a law unto itself, especially as it uses a proprietary wavetable format, and so, while there's certainly plenty of options on board, there's no scope for working with your own custom tables.

Massive X also features a dual noise generator replete with a wide selection of noise samples, a single filter stage offering a choice of nine different models, three slots for hosting a choice of 12 sound processor models, and three slots for hosting any of nine effect models.

All of which combine to give it its distinctive 'slab of sound'.

But what really unleashes Massive X's sound design power is its open-ended routing system. In essence, and with few limitations, each of the synth's components can be patched to any other, in any order you like, via a simple graphical interface.

Massive X provides 17 modulation sources in total. One of these is hard-wired as the amp envelope, while a further eight slots can load any of the synth's two envelope and two LFO models.

The remaining modulation sources have dedicated uses: three are pattern sequencers for creating repeating loops of modulation values, four are advanced keyboard tracking curves, and one is a pseudo-random generator.

Summing up

All told, Massive X is a bit of a beast. Mapping is easy enough, using a click-and-drag method similar to all of the synths we're looking at, however, in Massive X's case, there are tighter limits on the number of modulators that can be applied to each parameter and, once mapped, there isn't much visual feedback about what each modulator is actually doing.

Meanwhile, sonically, Massive X lives up to its name, and is one of the less processor-hogging of the bunch. It is impressively flexible too, but accessing its full potential feels less intuitive and more 'tweak it and try' than with the other synths in our roundup.

Verdict

Flexibility: 4

Ease-of-Use: 2

Sound: 4

Value: 4

Sound examples

Price: £179 (available with 50% discount at time of writing)

Contact: native-instruments.com

Native Instruments Massive X review

Vital Audio Vital

Freeware and open-source music-making software has something of a chequered history, with many promising projects descending into abandonware before reaching maturity.

Thankfully, that's not the case with Vital.

The synth itself is free – just create an account and download the software – while the Plus and Pro editions pack in additional presets and wavetables (amongst other things).

And in the latest update the synth is now available for both Intel and Apple Silicon on Mac.

Like Massive X, Vital is built around wavetable oscillators, of which it has three. The Basic edition comes with only 25 wavetables, but (unlike Massive X) it's easy to import custom wavetables, and the synth even features a capable wavetable editor if you want to try your hand at creating your own.

There's also a very basic sample oscillator intended for loading noise or basic waveform samples.

Each oscillator features note-snapping, useful for creating one-note chords that remain in-key, or if you're not the most accurate keyboard player. They also sport an efficient unison engine, a processing slot into which a choice of different filters and shapers can be loaded, and a flexible cross-modulation system for creating sync, FM and ring modulation effects.

Simple routing allows each oscillator to send its signal to either of the two filters, both filters simultaneously, or to bypass the filter stage altogether and route straight to the effects processing stage or directly to the output.

The two filters offer a good choice of different models – classic analogue, ladder, digital, and such – and a useful selection of shapes and slopes for each model. The filter output is sent to a stereo effect bus with a choice of nine processors, including reverb, compressor, delay, EQ, an additional filter, and more. The choice of processors is fixed, but they can be freely re-ordered.

Vital has a large selection of modulators to work with: six DAHDSR envelopes (delay, attack, hold, decay, sustain, release), eight LFOs with fully customisable shapes, four random generators, four macro controllers, and a bunch of realtime and MPE control sources – mod wheel, keyboard tracking, slide, and so on.

As with all the synths we're looking at, mapping modulators to parameters is a simple drag-and-drop, but there's also a dedicated Matrix view from where modulation mappings can be created and managed.

Summing up

Sound-wise, Vital gives little away to its premium-priced competitors, delivering a rich and full-blooded a sound that's on par with the other synths we're looking at. It's also similar from a system usage point of view, able to be very lean with simpler patches but getting rather greedy when things become more complex.

It's remarkable that this powerful synth can be picked up for free, and upped to its full power for so little outlay. There really is no excuse for not grabbing it right away, and making Vital not to be a regular go-to in your production workflow.

Verdict

Flexibility: 3

Ease-of-Use: 3

Sound: 3

Value: 5

Sound examples

Price: $0 (Basic Edition) / $25 (Plus Edition) / $80 (Pro Edition)

Contact: vital.audio

Xfer Records Serum 2

Xfer's long-awaited update to the wildly popular Serum appeared out of the blue back in March 2025. For fans of the original, this new version has definitely been worth the wait, with the synth moving into the territory of Pigments and Phase Plant thanks to a new selection of models that can be loaded into the synth's three sound generator slots.

The wavetable engine of the original Serum is here, of course, with built in unison and two 'Warp' slots into which various signal processors can be loaded. This is much the same as Vital, and is why many view Vital as a freeware equivalent of the original Serum.

But Serum 2 has beefed things up with a choice of Sample, Multisample, Granular and Spectral engines.

The Sample engine is conventional, and similar to Pigments' and Phase Plant's, but the Multisample engine offers far more flexibility than the maximum of six layers/articulations supported by Pigments' Sample engine.

Multisamples are defined in SFZ files, these being text files with a simple syntax that define all aspects of a multisample collection. Although text editing isn't as intuitive as the visual editor you may find in an actual sampler, Serum 2's use of SFZ files makes it possible to define very complex multisamples for use in the synth.

Serum 2's implementation of granular synthesis is fairly conventional and familiar, but the Spectral engine is somewhat more unique. It is conceptually similar to granular synthesis in that it separates the time and frequency dimensions of a sample so each can be manipulated independently, and whilst this gives sonic results that aren't dissimilar to granular synthesis, it is distinct enough to be a worthwhile alternative. In short, both engines turn any sample into a treasure trove of timbres from which to create new patches.

The filter section has two slots that can be arranged in series or parallel, and alongside the extensive collection of conventional and specialized filter models carried over from the original Serum are eleven new models. But, in a further encroachment on Pigments' territory, the majority these are based on classic synth filters such as the Moog Minimoog, Oberheim SEM, EMS Synthi, and EDP Wasp.

For modulation, Serum 2 provides four AHDSR envelopes, eight macro knobs, velocity and keyboard tracking, and six LFOs. These LFOs are quite special, with a choice of freely-drawable waveform, sample-and-hold, an option that tracks two dimensional paths that you draw, and a pair of chaos-based LFOs that produce fascinating non-repeating modulation patterns. Mapping of modulators is done via the same intuitive drag-and-drop system that's common across all of the synth's we're looking at.

Serum 2 features a powerful arpeggiator and a Clip player that stores and plays back predefined patterns and sequences. Each of these has 12 slots for storing patterns, with the active arpeggio or Clip pattern selectable either from the GUI or from a controller keyboard.

Summing up

Serum 2 is a powerful jamming and performance tool as well as a powerful synth. And, as with Pigments, the arpeggiator and Clip players can send their notes as a MIDI output with which to drive other synths.

Some have observed that it's overbearingly demanding on the host system, but we didn't see anything better or worse than with any other synth in the roundup. It's all down to the complexity of the patch, with some being very demanding, and others barely registering on the CPU meter.

All in all, Serum 2 delivers the same rich, rounded and detailed sound as its predecessor, and easily holds its own alongside the other synth's we've gathered here. Our only gripes are that the included patch library seems less generous than some, and the asking price is the highest of the bunch.

Verdict

Flexibility: 4

Ease-of-Use: 3

Sound: 5

Value: 2

Sound examples

Price: $249 ($189 intro price until June 1st)

Contact: xferrecords.com

The Final Verdict

Though each has its strong points, all five of these instruments are immensely impressive. And while each has its own particular range of options and way of doing things, it's remarkable how close they all are in terms of sound quality and sonic versatility – marking and ranking them has not been an easy task!

Below, we've listed the winners in each category.

Coming in on top for flexibility and ease-of-use is Phase Plant, while Pigments and Serum 2 are tied for first place in terms of sound. When it comes to value for money, Vital unsurprisingly snags our top spot.

That said, whether you want the warmth of analogue, the flexibility of digital, the realism of samples, or the fascination of the unconventional, these instruments can do it all.

If you have any of these plugins in your arsenal, you won't struggle to find the right sounds for your productions.

Best For Flexibility: Phase Plant

Best For Ease-of-use: Phase Plant

Best For Sound: Pigments & Serum 2

Best For Value: Vital

SYNTH WEEK 2026: It's likely that we're all guilty of periodically shunning our existing repository of plugins and VIs, and splashing out on a shiny new synth, hoping it’ll provide us with a fresh, inspiring new sound for our latest project.

Meanwhile, back in the land of reality, we all know that there's a lot of hard work and graft that goes into creating the right synthetic sound for a track, let alone constructing a good mix.

Often it's best to stick to what you know - and focus on widening your knowledge.

Extending your synthesizer plugin techniques doesn't have to be demanding, but it might require a slight change in your working practice.

So, if you fancy taking your synth sounds to the next dimension, then follow this guide to making the synths in your collection go further - and not being slowed by option paralysis!

1. Tweak a preset

There’s not a producer on the planet that doesn’t load up a synth for the first time and then trawl through the preset patches, but how often do you find something that immediately fits the bill? Maybe you find something cool, then re-shape your track to suit the sound you’ve found. We’re here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be this way!

Don’t fear the preset, but also don’t be afraid of tweaking the basic settings, such as the filter or envelope. You might also find that switching up other elements within the patch drives your work in a better direction

2. Start a new patch

Bored of your usual preset options? Most synths offer a perfectly-placed button on their interface, inviting you to craft a new patch of your own. The benefits and rewards to be found here are huge, as this process will allow you to create a bespoke sound to suit your very own requirements.

Designing a sound from the ground up, is one of the most fulfilling aspects of production, and not something to be feared.

3. Turn off the effects

Find us a plugin synthesizer, and we will find you an included set of effects. Locating the effects page will reveal everything from chorus and delay, to the ubiquitous reverb, and probably more besides. However, these onboard effects may not be as good as the third-party effects, which are specifically designed for purpose, residing within your DAW.

Sure, many of the effects may add something to the preset sound, but don't be afraid to switch these off, and employ your own selections. It’ll also provide greater flexibility in your working.

4. Multi-layer parts in mono

More complex synths often allow multi-timbral usage, meaning that you can load a single instance of a synth, but use it for anything up to 16 different sounds, at one time.

This puts less loading on your computer. However, you don't have to settle for a single channel of sound, thanks to the ability to set up multiple outputs.

Organise these to apply different mix settings for each sound.

Total flexibility in your mix, without the need the load more than one synth plugin.

5. Automate!

How many times have you seen a synth-genius playing live, carefully massaging settings as they play? Extend this philosophy to the ambidextrous world of the DAW, and you can tweak a series of different settings all at the same time, placing them under automated control.

Moreover, this will add a wonderful layer of developing interest to your synth patches, that can make your tunes feel less repetitive.

6. Get yourself templated

Next time you start a project, take a look at a small selection of plugin synths, the ones that you tend to use the most.

If you have a go-to synth for basses, set it up in a template, so that every time you start afresh, you can get cracking with creativity, and not have to continually think about plugging in your usual set of sounds. Not only will it save you time, it will provide a common thread from one track to another, which might be beneficial for an entire project.

7. Arpeggiate

Part of the package that accompanies most plugin synthesisers, is the use of onboard sequencers and arpeggiators. These notes may be preordained, but they don't have to stay that way

If you can utilise the sequencer within the plugin, change the notes and settings to suit the developing rhythm of your track, or alternatively, look at using similarly-equipped plugins residing within your DAW.

8. Modulate

If there is one technique that occupies the very heart of synthesis curiosity, it's modulation.

Some synths can take modulation to extremes, with the ability to modulate every aspect of a synth’s sound, from wave shape to LFO speed and depth.

Experiment fully with the options available within a plugin, and you may find that the odd happy accident drives your creativity in a new direction.

9. It doesn't have to be software…

It doesn't always have to be about plugins! Most DAWs are fully equipped to handle an incoming signal from devices including external synthesizers.

Moreover, they are equipped to handle MIDI, making light work of the ability to patch in a hardware synth.

If this becomes something that you do regularly, pop your hardware device into your template, then it will always be ready to go when creativity takes a hold.

10. Learn, learn, learn!

We get so bombarded by products and deals that we're all guilty of having far too many plugins on our systems, in fact you may have so many - you have forgotten what they all do! (certainly a problem I can vouch for, Ed).

Herein lies one of the biggest problems with production in the current age, but if we take a step back, we could learn a lot from previous synthesis of pioneers.

Next time you load up a synth that truly inspires you, set yourself the goal of really learning how it works - just as previous synth pioneers had to do with their limited set of hardware synths.

Many aspects of software synths may appear to be simple enough - and you may feel you've got a handle on their essentials - but the chances are there are a ton of complexities which remain uncovered, and could provide you with that extra push over the sonic cliff. You could try reverse engineering a preset sound, or better still, create a sound from scratch, and take it in a direction that you wouldn't normally go.

If you find yourself scratching your head, reach for the online manual, and take a bit of time out to scrub up on what a particular parameter does to induce a particular sound. You probably have everything you need for a track within just one synth. Often, it's not even the most expensive.

Jimmy Jam is back. Not only appearing live in Vegas in a showcase of classic tunes alongside his longtime production partner Terry Lewis, but also providing hundreds of drum patterns for EastWest’s new DrumX drum machine plugin, released April 27.

For ‘80s and ‘90s aficionados Jam and Lewis will need no introduction. Starting out as part of Prince’s backing band (before being “let go” by the temperamental superstar) the pair swiftly moved into music production, crafting such classics as Just Be Good To Me for the SOS Band, Change of Heart for Change, Saturday Love for Cherelle and Alexander O’Neal, plus their incomparable work across the decades bejewelling hits for Janet Jackson.

To date, they’ve scored 42 Billboard No 1s and more than 100 gold, platinum, and diamond records. Check the sleeves of beloved albums by Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey, Usher, Boyz II Men and many more, and you’ll find Jam and Lewis in Control.

Meanwhile, EastWest’s DrumX brings together 10 of the most iconic drum machines ever created – including the LinnDrum, TR-808 and TR-909, DR-55, DMX, DrumTraks and SP-12 – all meticulously sampled by the producers and reimagined for modern production by Jimmy Jam himself in an exclusive collaboration with the award-winning virtual instrument developer.

We caught up with the production legend alongside EastWest’s founder, producer and king of the sample library Doug Rogers to talk sampling, AI and what comes next in Jimmy’s illustrious career.

What is it about DrumX that made you want to get involved?

Jimmy Jam: “I liked the concept of going back and doing things the way that I used to do them. In the early days, a lot of the stuff we did started with drum machines and beats. So the idea of having something starting with a drum beat again was very intriguing.

“I think it was not only the ask, but who was doing the asking. What Doug has built is pretty amazing and it was exciting to be a part of.”

And it's not just your sounds? It's got your grooves in there as well?

JJ: “Somebody literally gave me the drum machine and said ‘Go create’. That's what we did for a couple of weeks – just experimenting, learning things about it. There were things that the machine could do that I don't even think the designers knew that it could do. And there were other things where I’d say, ‘You know, man, it'd be great if we could do this…’ and then the next day I'd come back and they'd say, ‘Oh, it's there now.’”

Doug Rogers: “I know we changed things on the quantization.”

JJ: “Yeah, we changed some things where it wasn't quite right. They said, ‘Where do you think it should be?’ And I said, ‘Right here’, and then the next day, there it was. I always like when people are creating software or whatever and include the creatives in the process. I had a great time doing it.”

What were your aims for DrumX? What makes it different?

DR: “Jimmy. [laughs] That makes it different! You’re not gonna be able to get Jimmy to do your drum tracks so that's a great foundation to build any piece of music on – something from a proven hitmaker, that forms the foundation of whatever you’re working on.

“There are a lot of drum machines out there and a lot of people have sampled 808s, 909s, and the rest, but what we have are 10 of the real classic drum machines really deeply sampled, spending a lot of time capturing every nuance. Plus we also wanted to add something so as not to be stuck in the ‘80s and ‘90s – to create something that could be used in modern music.”

So what’s your take on the ‘modern’ sound?

DR: “The thing that’d happened between the ‘80s and ‘90s and now is that people use a lot more distortion. EDM didn't exist in the ‘80s and ‘90s. With DrumX we were running these machines through four levels of tape saturation, using an analogue Studer A820 and then the fifth one with the [Studer] J37 tube, which really sounds great when you push it real hard.

“And Opus – our audio engine – has got hundreds of effects. The default reverb is a simulation of an AMS [RMX16] gated reverb, but you could change the reverb to another 100 different reverbs if you want to do that, just by going into the mixer.

“The thing that I think that was most interesting to me was how musical Jimmy got the drums. He was going for notes, musical notes. I haven't seen that before, I've seen a lot of people using drum machines, but I've never seen somebody honing in to create a piece of music on a drum machine.

“Jimmy was pulling sounds from all those 10 machines and stacking them, tuning them, putting them through effects, adding tape saturation, adding some crush. Just screwing them up as much as possible, but in a very musical way. It's almost like the drum machine became a drum synthesiser, with all of those tools being added together.

JJ: “My thing – with any piece of equipment – is I want it to inspire me. I love it when I turn it on and instantly a song idea comes or a drum idea comes or a melodic thing comes. And that was the thing with DrumX. The more I got into it the more inspired I got.”

Jimmy, what would you say the secret of your drum sound is? Those famous ‘trash can’ snares. When we listen to one of your classic tracks, what are we actually hearing?

JJ: “Well, a lot of it was sound effect-based stuff. It was things piled on top of each other. It wasn't one snare drum, it was a combination of three. And then the AMS. We use the AMS a lot on our records – the non-linear setting on there. It was always combinations of things.

“I loved the records Trevor Horn made and the way that he took sounds that were percussive, not necessarily drum sounds, but glass breaking or trash can lids or whatever. A lot of stuff we did in the early days was Linn Drum, and we used the 808 back in the day, but we took those sounds and then combined them with other things and ran them through an AMS… You could change the complexion of the sound totally.

“I always liked the idea of having a super distorted drum palette then putting something beautiful over the top of it. And I have to give a lot of credit to Steve Hodge, our engineer. These were very ugly sounds but he would find the beauty in them.

“Terry and I came along at a time when drum machines were very new and drummers were, in a lot of cases, kind of scared of them. But I started off as a drummer, and I loved the drum machine because I felt like, ‘wow, I know how to do it!’ I should be able to do this better than anybody because I started off as a drummer, so I never felt threatened by it.

“I never felt threatened about pushing the envelope. Working with Janet Jackson on Control, Janet was so open to whatever we wanted to do. She grew up listening to musicals, movies, so the idea of rhythmic sounds with picture and choreography and those things together – I think she loved the fact that we were doing things so rhythmically aggressive. She loved that.

“Like when she heard the drums in Nasty, she didn't go ‘Oh, that sounds ugly’ or ‘that sounds too aggressive.’ It was like, ‘No, that's really cool’. She embraced those kinds of things and when you work with artists that don't really have limits on what they wanna do, you can do all kinds of different things.

“We wouldn't have come up with those drum programmes and pushed the envelope the way we did – and it's really true of all the artists that we work with – it's really them that's the inspiration. Some things we would push more than others, but Janet always really wanted us to come up with whatever weirdness we could come up with. She was totally into it.”

Like the incredible sounds you got for Scream, with Janet and Michael Jackson together.

JJ: “Yeah, I think we came up with probably six or seven tracks for that. Scream – or what ended up becoming Scream – was the track that he liked the best. But then after we were done with that, he came back and he asked, ‘What about that other track?…’ Tabloid Junkie was another of the ones we did. And the title track, History. I think we ended up doing like five or six on that album. We probably would have worked again with each other at some point because it was a really enjoyable experience.

“But Scream. I think that Janet always felt like that was Michael's track, that she was just a guest on his record. She didn't really feel it was a duet, because it was very much Michael's kind of lyric and where he wanted to go. And also even the key of the song was more Michael's than Janet's. But we love the way it turned out.

“Janet was the inspiration for doing it because we knew that Michael was in love with a song on her Rhythm Nation album, The Knowledge. That used to be his warm-up, so we knew if we gave Scream some of that sonic character then that would be it. And Janet said, ‘I knew that was the one he was gonna pick. I know my brother!’”

Tell us about the process of putting DrumX together.

DR: “We did the DrumX sampling maybe two years ago, before Jimmy came on board. I'm an analogue buff and the best you can do if you're an analogue purist is do as much analogue before you get to that final stage, where it has to be converted to digital. I put the audio down to Pro Tools and direct to tape, so I have the choice between both, and usually, I end up using the tape version because a lot of these sounds benefit from a little bit of harmonic distortion.

“Where tape falls down for me is in the bottom end. The digital bottom end is much more solid and has better bass than analogue. So we use both. We just get the best signal chain we can and then figure out what's going on with the machine, and what settings are there, and make sure we capture every setting that is important. At the end of the day, it all ends up digital, whether you like it or not, because we live in a digital world.”

For your Fab Four project, where you re-created all The Beatles most famous signature sounds, you put together an amazing collection of kit. Do you still have it all?

DR: “Well, I kept the [Studer] J37. But I sold the REDD desk. And I sold the TG12345 because they cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. Once the project wrapped, I just didn't see the need to keep them. And I actually didn't like the TG! I know it's sacrilege to say something like that, but I really didn't like the sound of it.

“To me, it was absolutely amazing that Alan Parsons and Pink Floyd got the sound of Dark Side of the Moon from that console. It was such a credit to them as a team. But I did like the REDD because that was tube-based. I think Abbey Road was the first album that The Beatles used a transistor-based console with the TG. I think right up until then they were using the REDD and the J37, so everything was tube-based and that has a sound – a fatness.

“There's something about a tube that's living and breathing. It never repeats itself. I equate it to being like the ocean. The waves are never the same a second time, you know? There's something about that movement inside a tube. It's unpredictable and it's a sound that people just love. So I kept the best part of it, which was the J37. But someone offered me an insane amount of money for the REDD, so I had to let go of that.”

Jimmy, you were saying earlier you started out playing drums?

JJ: “My dad was a musician, still is a musician, 99 years old, Cornbread Harris. I was a drummer in his band at 12 years old. When I met Terry [Lewis] later that same year, 1973, HE said, ‘I already have a drummer’, who was Jellybean Johnson, who recently passed away, but Terry said, ‘Be a keyboard player because your Dad plays keyboards’. Terry was the one that got me into playing keyboards.

“At home my mom controlled the record player, so everything I heard, whether it was Ray Charles or James Brown… All those things back in the day. All of those combinations of things led to this. I was a DJ as well as a musician. All of those things taught me how to pack a dance floor… or clear a dance floor! Learning other people's songs taught me how to make hit songs, I guess. And then, obviously, going back to Terry. I have had a great partner for over 50 years. All of those things kind of go into it.”

It’s great that these tools are only getting more useful and more powerful but when does music tech cross a line? How do you both feel about the role of AI in music-making?

DR: “I think that Jimmy and I are both on the same page here. In 1987 when I got my first sampler there were no sounds for it. There was nothing, and that just seemed ridiculous to me. It was like having a computer with no software. So we made the very first drum sample CD of all time and put it out. I think it was early ‘88.

“But they said the world was gonna fall apart, that we were destroying music. We were gonna be putting all these people out of business… But actually, the complete opposite happened. Now there are millions of people making music that weren't before because they didn’t have a record contract. Or they didn’t have access to an expensive studio. So I've kind of been through the ‘AI thing’ before, and I saw that it was just a load of crap.

“I'm working with an AI company now, Ace, who are the leader in musician-based AI. Suno, for example, is a consumer product. They’re for the people that just want to type in, ‘Make me a good song’, but there’ll always be real musicians and they want to make music.

“Right now you have to become a rocket scientist just to create a musical passage that sounds real. My whole thing has always been about simplicity and I see AI as really opening that up. So someone can sit down at a keyboard and the software will interpret perfectly what they intended to do in terms of their performance. They won't have to learn all the articulations and all the rest of it that goes with it.”

JJ: “When I think of AI I think about two things: permission and compensation. Permission has always been in place for any sort of copyright, and so it should be for AI. Where AI is taking people's voices or they're taking art without the permission of the person or the people who they’re scraping the information from, they should be compensated.

“So if they're being compensated, and they give permission, then I think that’s good. There needs to be some sort of regulation or some sort of rules in place, but this train has left the station. You can either get on the train, or you're gonna get run over. So learn as much as you can about it and find a way to use it in a way that's respectful, and as a tool to help you create. Then I think AI is a really good thing.”

Do you use AI in the studio?

JJ: “We've always embraced the idea of technology. I won't name the artist, but there was a legendary artist we were working with who's on the older side, and there was a part that they just couldn't get as we were recording.

“Well, now with AI I can take the demo vocalist – who sang it exactly the way we wanted it to be – and I can take the voice of the person that we've been working with, and I can combine those two things together. And now I have him singing it perfectly, the way we want to do it.

“So now the choice is, do I have this older gentleman come back and sing his part, or do I say to him, ‘We can correct this so it's the right timing. Is that OK with you?’ That’s where the permission comes in. They said, ‘Yes, that's perfectly fine’. That’s the problem solved, and this person is being respected. We're not just ‘taking his stuff’”.

DR: “It’s like when sampling first started – sampling records. On the creative side, there were no guardrails in place. Clyde Stubblefield [the origin of the Funky Drummer riff] being a good example. He was the most sampled guy ever and never got a cent for it.”

JJ: “I love sampling because I love the idea of being able to take a song and bring together generations of people. Like Got Till It's Gone for Janet. That started out as a Joni Mitchell sample of Big Yellow Taxi and then I added a drum beat to it.

“Or a song like That's the Way Love Goes which started off as a James Brown Papa Don't Take No Mess sample alongside an Impeach the President sample. Rhythm Nation itself is probably the best example – that's Sly and the Family Stone’s Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin).

“There are two samples in particular that we used, that I always think about because I ran into the people that did them. Once, I got on a plane and a guy turned around and he said, ‘Are you Jimmy Jam?’ And I said, ‘Yeah’. And it was Gerry Beckley of America and he said, ‘You built me my pool,’ because Someone To Call My Lover, the song we did for Janet, sampled their Ventura Highway. He said ‘If you ever wanna redo any of our stuff, just call me!’”

“Another one was after the Grammys, I was stood in McDonald's by The Staples Centre, waiting in line and a guy came up to me and he said, ‘You bought me my house.’ It was Wayne Garfield, the writer of The Glow of Love for Change that we sampled for Janet’s All For You.

“So we were able to introduce a song to a new generation of people, but we were able to compensate the songwriter that wrote the original song. But at the beginning of sampling? People didn't think twice about it. But once the lawsuits started flying they got serious about getting permission and compensating the artists. AI is that same wild west right now, but it'll get sorted. I'm confident it's all gonna work out.”

And you’ve got a Vegas residency coming up?

JJ: “We're gonna head to Vegas tomorrow. It's Terry and myself and then our kind of our foundational singers are Ruben Studdard for the male singing and Shanice Wilson for the female. And then we'll have a few other folks drop by on different nights to do different things.

“It's kind of like going back to our roots because before we were songwriters or producers, we were just musicians in a local band playing everybody else's hits. So now we go back to just being musicians, but we get to play our own music! We’re doing six shows, at The Venetian, a club called Voltaire. It's about a thousand seats, intimate, every seat is great – really great sound, great lighting, just a really cool place. It's a kind of a trial run. We'll see how it goes.”

Find out more about EastWest DrumX.

SYNTH WEEK 2026: When surveying today's synthesis landscape, to say that we’re spoiled for choice would be a serious understatement.

On the hardware front it's like the 1970s all over again, with historic names such as Moog, Sequential and Oberheim back in action, completely new creations from the likes of Arturia and Dreadbox, many homages to (not to mention copies of) classic instruments of the past, and a resurgence of interest in modular systems.

With none of the physical and financial constraints of hardware - and all the benefits of modern CPU power - there's an even greater diversity when it comes to software synths. Models of classic instruments abound, but there are also many entirely original synths, a good number of which boast capabilities that would have made Don Buchla throw down his soldering iron in despair.

The thing is, despite this vast range of choice, there’s a common thread running through practically all of these instruments, hardware or software. With only a few exceptions, the vast majority essentially follow a subtractive synthesis model, and so present a fundamentally similar set of features and controls. Even those synths that eschew conventional oscillators in favour of some alternative tone generation method are, more often than not, subtractive in every other respect.

This is all well and good – it works! – but do you ever feel it can all get a bit... well... samey? Do you ever wish you could break away from the technical dryness of oscillators and filter types, and approach sound design in a more intuitive, abstract and novel way? Music is all about creative expression, after all, so surely there are ways to conceptualise and craft sounds without worrying about frequencies and cutoffs and cross-modulations and all the rest of it? Indeed there are!

The unconstrained freedom enjoyed by software synth designers means that, every now and then, a new instrument will pop up that flies in the face of convention. Do such instruments open up new and exciting avenues of inspiration and creativity, or are they just distracting gimmicks? To find out, we set aside our Falcons, Pigments and piles of Minimoog emulations, and sought out five instruments that approach synthesis in their own thrillingly singular fashion.

1. Madrona Labs Sumu

Additive synthesis, the conceptual opposite of subtractive synthesis, is theoretically capable of producing acoustic instrument emulations that are indistinguishable from the real thing - and indeed, any other sound you can imagine.

It works on the basis that all sounds consist of layers of sine waves (also known as partials) that combine to create shifting tones and timbres as their relative volume changes over time. The fly in additive's ointment is that a stack of partials (and associated envelopes) large enough to fulfil the theoretical potential is too unwieldy to program and manage, hence its rarity.

The related technique of resynthesis aims to tame these cumbersome complexities by analysing a source sound and creating from it a template or map of sorts that can be used to govern the partials generated by an additive synth engine. But resynthesis never really caught on, either, because in the hardware age, its technical requirements made it very expensive at a time when the cost of samplers - which can easily deliver such realism - was tumbling.

Madrona Labs Sumu, then, is built around an additive engine capable of generating 64 partials per voice, and comes with a companion app, Vutu, that analyses audio to create resynthesis data for loading into the plugin. The synth is modular too, so its different stages can be patched in any way you like. These interconnections carry each partial as a discrete signal, allowing the modules to do their work on a per-partial basis.

Thoughtful interface design and visualisation makes all of this workable. You do not, for instance, have to configure 64 individual envelopes. Rather, Sumu twists a regular ADSR graph into three dimensions, with the Z dimension representing each individual partial. Scaling controls shape the base ADSR values across this Z dimension.

Sumu's modular patching system unlocks a wide vista of sonic possibilities, making it as good at creating deep, solid, percussive bass sounds as it is light, tinkling, evolving pads. The inclusion of Vutu gives Sumu sampler-like capabilities too, allowing patches to be built from audio recordings and snippets. The synth's processing stages are very different to the subtractive architecture of a regular sampler, though, so the creative possibilities are very different too.

There's a distinctly digital flavour to the sound produced by Sumu, but this is richer and smoother than the characteristic coldness of an FM synth, or indeed of other modern additive implementations.

On the downside, with up to eight simultaneous voices each consisting of 64 partials that are, in effect, individually routed and processed, Sumu is exceptionally resource-hungry. Even a powerful machine will struggle to serve up more than a couple of simultaneous instances, so you'll be forever bouncing or freezing your Sumu tracks.

Also, despite clear visualisations, straight-forward controls, and the manual's largely successful efforts to keep things light and approachable, Sumu is inherently complicated, and takes quite some time to get to grips with.

Overall, then, Sumu is a powerful synth with a fulsome sound that delivers an extensive sonic palette that's as distinctive as it is diverse, but if you're looking for an instrument that masks the deeper technicalities of synthesis with a user-friendly interface then Sumu is certainly not for you.

2. MOK Waverazor

The synth engine underlying MOK Waverazor is, perhaps, the most conventional in this roundup: the output of three oscillators (and optional external input) is routed to up to three filters, can be controlled by a wide range of modulators, and can be polished with three effect processors. What makes Waverazor different, and qualifies it for inclusion in this roundup, are its oscillators and user interface.

Conceptually, Waverazor's oscillators are much like any other, producing regular, repeating waveforms to feed to the rest of the synth. However, in Waverazor's case, that waveform can consist of up to 16 segments, each based on any of 162 preset shapes which can be further shaped and distorted via the oscillator's controls. As well as doing a good line in classic synth tones, these oscillators lend the instrument huge potential for creating original and interesting timbres.

Construction of these segmented waveforms is performed in an advanced view where all the synth's other modules and controls are also accessed. The layout of this view is crisp and logical, but with so many modules and options, and few visual cues to help differentiate between them, it is easy to get a bit lost – some module-specific colour-coding and styling would certainly help here!

Conversely, Waverazor's main view is much more approachable and intuitive. Here, Waverazor's plethora of parameters is boiled down into an easy-to-manage collection of nine macro dials, three buttons and two large X/Y pads, each of which can be mapped to up to 16 destination parameters. Additionally, the large central oscilloscope view can also serve as an interactive panel for modifying the oscillator waveform shapes.

Waverazor's voice and character is impressively varied thanks to its clever oscillators and detailed underlying architecture, but it is short a bit of oomph in the lower end of the frequency spectrum and so lacks a certain sonic sumptuousness – nothing that a bit of EQ can't fix, of course.

The synth's generous library of presets can be extensively modified via easy and intuitive controls that are ideal for both sound design and performance, but things become somewhat less intuitive when delving into the advanced view.

3. Native Instruments Reaktor

Native Instruments Reaktor is a deep, complex and powerful environment in which synths, audio processors and other sound-wrangling tools, referred to collectively as 'ensembles', can be created and hosted. (Yes, we know the last significant update to Reaktor was released in 2020, and this is primarily a list of shiny, new synths - but we believe Reaktor still holds up five years on.)

The ability to design custom synths from the ground-up is as unconventional as its possible to get and, for a certain type of nerdy inquisitive mind, can be a hugely satisfying thing to do. Raw synth design isn't everybody's idea of a good time, but this isn't the only reason we've included Reaktor in this roundup – we're also interested in the collection of synth ensembles that it comes with.

There are conventional synths here, such as the basic-yet-satisfying 2-Osc, or the Minimoog-inspired Monark, but many of Reaktor's synths take a more leftfield approach. Some have a familiar appearance but unusual underlying architecture; some are more sonically conventional but feature novel control panels; and some simply defy all explanation (we're looking at you, Gaugear).

If you ever get bored with the bundled synths then hundreds more are available in Native Instruments' Reaktor User Library. Here, alongside some conventional fare, you will find all manner of inventive, experimental and off-the-wall instruments to explore. And, if you are yourself inclined to unleash your inner synth designer, you can upload your own creations to the library so that others can marvel at your genius (or madness!).

Reaktor can also operate as a virtual modular environment into which specially designed ensembles, called Reaktor Blocks, can be loaded and patched together in whatever way you like. This is infinitely more immediate and intuitive than creating a synth from scratch, but still allows your sound design imagination to run wild. It's a lot cheaper than putting together a hardware modular system too!

No matter what you load into it, Reaktor delivers a consistently rich and detailed sound and, given its open-ended nature, its sonic palette and potential for unconventionality is limited only by your imagination.

4. Dawesome Myth

There are loads of synths that use sample-based sound generators, and most of these are happy jumping between basic sample triggering and granular playback, but there are none that come at things in quite the same way as Tracktion's Dawesome Myth.

The synth is based around a pair of 'Iris' sound generators, so called because their circular visualisation looks like the iris of an eye. Dragging or loading a sample into an Iris triggers Myth to analyse that sample, decomposing it into component parts (tonal, noise, transient, etc.) that each has its own colour-coding within the Iris's visualisation.

Below each Iris is a set of 14 "Transformers", these being small draggable discs that influence the sound in different ways. Each has a predictable outcome – adding frequency modulation, making the sound more saw-like or more string-like, and so-on. This masks the deeper synthesis complexities that are happening under the bonnet, thereby allowing you to focus purely on the sound.

The Irises can be crossfaded together or, for a more dramatic result, can be switched to ring modulation mode. Their combined signal is then passed to a series of processing stages, each aimed at a particular purpose: additional oscillators, filters and effects.

Each stage can host multiple modules, chosen from a list of appropriate options, which allows Myth to serve up a whole host of different configurations and architectures. All of this is topped-off with a flexible and easy to manage modulation section for bringing life to the Transformers and modules.

This makes for a very versatile synth that is exceptionally easy to work with, and that delivers beautifully clear and full-bodied timbres. Myth's level of abstraction isn't as far-out as that of Synplant, featured below, but it successfully hides the complexities of its synth engine behind an instinctive and easy to master GUI which lacks nothing in its ability to shape and sculpt sounds. It's a true gem of a synth!

5. Sonic Charge Synplant 2

Although built on familiar two-oscillator subtractive synth foundations, Sonic Charge Synplant's approach to sound design is both unique and, quite literally, organic.

Sounds start life as a seed and, just like an actual seed, this has a genetic makeup that determines the characteristics of whatever will grow from it. The parameters that define a seed's genetics are familiar enough – waveforms, filters, envelopes, cross-modulation, and so-on – but the magic comes from the unfathomable ways in which these parameters influence and impact on each other when the seed grows.

A sound's seed is shown at the centre of Synplant's main view, and is surrounded by a ring divided into 12 segments. Depending on operating mode, these segments can be triggered by base note (I.E. all A notes, all A# notes, all B notes, etc.), a note range, a velocity range, or can simply be a layer within the final sound.

Dragging in a segment causes leafy branches to grow (or recede) within that segment – the longer and leafier the branch, the more the parameters of the seed's gene will interact and evolve, and so the more complex the sound produced by the segment becomes. It's also possible to grow all segments simultaneously. And, just as in real horticulture, if you create a sound that has characteristics you find particularly pleasing, you can capture its evolved DNA as a new seed and then grow new sounds from it.

Synplant also includes Genopatch. This analyses a given snippet of audio and generates from it a selection of seeds that recreate the sample through subtractive synthesis. You can then select one of these seeds as the basis for a new sound, with each seed having the potential to grow into radically different sounds.

It may seem that Synplant's unique approach to synthesis doesn't exactly lend itself to focussed sound design that seeks to create a specific sound. However, if you embrace the concept and, over a few generations, evolve a sound towards what you originally imagined, it's possible to end up with exactly the sound you were looking for without once thinking about frequencies, filters and all the rest of it. There's also a good chance that the sound you evolve will be more interesting than the one you were aiming for, and may itself inspire new musical ideas.

Synplant is by far the most abstract and original synth in this roundup. It sounds amazing, and its concept turns the studio-bound process of sound design into a highly intuitive, fun and relaxing spot of gardening!

Released last year, Orchid is the debut instrument from Telepathic Instruments, a fledgling music tech brand headed up by Kevin Parker, better known as psych-pop icon Tame Impala.

A compact digital polysynth that's described as an "ideas machine" that's "made for chords", Orchid is built around a unique harmony generation system operated via its single-octave keyboard, voicing dials and chord extension buttons.

After several months in beta, Telepathic Instruments has officially launched a companion app for Orchid called Pistil, giving Orchid owners access to the deeper parameters within each of its three synth engines for the first time. Connect to Orchid via USB-C, and you're able to tweak presets and design new patches directly from your computer, or control the plugin from your Orchid.

Pistil's interface also displays a virtual keyboard that provides visual feedback on Orchid's chord generation system, showing the range selected by its Chord and Bass Voicing dials to help you understand the register you're playing in and see how voicing changes determine note placement.

Available as both a standalone app and plugin, Pistil also puts Orchid's synth engines in your DAW, giving musicians that don't own the hardware the chance to experiment with Orchid's sounds, several of which have been designed by Tame Impala himself.

The plugin has two interface modes, Basic and Advanced: the former allows you to switch between Pistil's 70 presets, dial in effects (reverb, delay, tremolo, ensemble, phaser, flanger, chorus and overdrive), tweak the filter cutoff and adjust the level of the dedicated bass synth layer, while the latter gives you detailed control over the plugin's deeper synthesis parameters.

Like Orchid, Pistil features dual synth layers, Treble and Bass, each of which draws on one of its three sound engines, spanning a "warm and organic" virtual analogue subtractive synth, a "bright and metallic" FM synth engine, and a vintage reed piano emulation. The synth engines are equipped with four oscillators, a multimode filter and noise generator, and modulation comes courtesy of 4 LFOs and 4 AHDSR envelopes, routed via an 8-slot mod matrix.

Telepathic Instruments Pistil is available for macOS and Windows in VST3/AU formats. The plugin's priced at $129 standalone, but Orchid owners can grab it for a discounted price of $50.

Find out more on Telepathic Instruments' website.

Set up in 2023 by composer Christian Henson, formerly of Spitfire Audio, The Crow Hill Company is a developer of software instruments and sample libraries based out of Edinburgh.

As well as turning out a stellar series of free instruments under the Vaults banner, Crow Hill has been gradually building up a catalogue of creatively inspiring paid-for libraries with an unexpected edge.

The company’s most recent release was Crystal Piano, a delicate and evocative instrument built from the shimmering sounds of 18 different glass objects, from wine glasses, to beakers, to bowls. (If you thought your DX7 was glassy, get a load of this.)

The next instrument to descend from the top of Crow Hill draws on a decidedly different aesthetic – something, shall we say, a little less clean-sounding. This is the amusingly named The Shit Synth, a stinking collection of 48 “circuit, wave and sample-bent instruments” that share a lo-fi, retro, edgy and “AI-slop-free” aesthetic.

Run through vintage radios, cassette machines and ailing mixers, these broken, busted and otherwise borked noise-making machines are an antidote to the sterile sheen of your DAW’s stock synth plugin, taking inspiration from the way that Henson’s favourite artists (Radiohead, Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada) masterfully deploy “bad sounds, but with good notes put in a good order”.

“Many of the instruments sampled have that all too troubling sound of electronic relics teetering on their last legs,” reads the press release. “A little bit shit but... good shit, if you know what we mean?”

The Shit Synth offers 16 individual instrument presets – covering piano, bass, organ, guitar, strings, beeps, plucks, pads and more – each made up of three layers spanning analogue, digital and sampled sound sources.

Among the synths used in their creation are the Roland JX3P, Prophet VS and the Wersi String-Orchestra, a rare vintage analogue string synth from the ‘70s that, though it doesn’t much sound like a real string section, has a gloriously shitty character all of its own.

The instrument’s interface features a large central dial that controls expression and The Shit Synth’s high- and low-pass filters. On the right-hand side, you’ll find faders to adjust the levels for each preset’s three layers, alongside controls to introduce several effects in keeping with the instrument’s sonically scatological theme: tape emulation, saturation and spring reverb.

There’s also a sidechain compression ducking effect onboard that can be triggered via five lower notes on the keyboard, each linked to a differently-shaped trigger for the compressor.

If you’re looking for something to add a little grit, grime and character to your next musical defecation, then The Shit Synth is certainly worth a sniff – and it’s generously priced, too, at only £29.

Find out more on The Crow Hill Company's website.

Ask anyone what the most irritating musical instrument is, and they’ll probably single out the recorder.

In the hands of an inexperienced player, its harsh and squeaky tones can become a musical torture device, conjuring up painful memories of a classroom full of seven-year-olds attempting to play tuneless renditions of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on top of each other.

Imagine our surprise, then, when software developer Ujam announced that it was releasing a free virtual instrument based on the ear-splitting sounds of this child-sized duct flute… just in time for April Fool’s Day.

Inspired by the off-pitch flute and recorder renditions that have become “a staple of internet culture”, Ujam’s BeautyFlute Pro promises to “take your tracks to a whole other dimension”. (While that’s technically true, we’re not sure if it’s a dimension that we want to visit.) “It looks like a polished instrument, but delivers some very unconventional results,” reads Ujam’s press release.

Capturing the shrill and discordant sound of a poorly-played recorder, BeautyFlute is equipped with multiple, equally distressing velocity layers, and even features three unique recorder models: Vanilla, Diva and Sisters, an ensemble mode.

You also get a choice of three levels of “Emoçion” – Delulu, Tantrum, and Drunk – which adjust the level of note-off samples for added realism, and three Ambience settings for the onboard reverb.

“There are songs that just can’t be left alone the way they were released. I felt they needed a ‘flute with ’tude’ to bring out their true emotional potential,” said Ujam’s “Head of Recorder Recording” Derek von Krogh. “This may be the most important contribution I’ve made to music.”

We’ve seen our fair share of pranks pulled by music tech companies on April Fool’s Day, but BeautyFlute Pro is up there with the best of them – and while it may be a joke, the plugin is 100% real, and you can download it now from Ujam’s website. (What you do with it after that, we’re not entirely sure.)

BeautyFlute Pro is compatible with macOS and Windows and available in VST/VST3/AU/AAX formats.

XLN Audio has announced the release of DB-30 Drum Butter, a sibling to the much-loved RC-20 Retro Color plugin that's designed to bring "identity and awesomeness" to drums.

Inspired by the fundamental idea that "drums should be fun", DB-30 is equipped with six independent effects modules that XLN Audio promises can add punch and character to any drum part.

At the start of the chain, Boom Shack is a dual module that introduces both low-end weight (the boom) with a sub-bass boost and top-end texture (the shack) via 18 different types of noise that can be layered across your snares and hi-hats.

Shift is a pitch- and formant-shifting module that can be helpfully targeted at either the transient or sustain portions of a signal, while Space is a reverb module equipped with numerous reverb types covering everything from natural drum rooms to vintage hardware units.

The Compress module does what you'd expect, bringing punch, energy and dynamic control to your drum parts via six compressor modes (Punch, Warm, Glue, Gentle, Smack and OTT) that have been optimized for drum processing. Saturate delivers six styles of saturation, including emulations of tube amps, four-track tape machines and analogue consoles.

Finally, the More module puts a finishing touch on things by placing a waveshaper and a clipper on the output stage. Both More and Boom Shack are fixed in place at either end of the chain, but the other four modules can be reordered to achieve different sounds – think putting the reverb before the compressor for creative pumping effects.

Below the individual modules is DB-30's Master Section, which gives you access to high- and low-pass filters, transient shaping and global control over input and output levels.

XLN Audio's RC-20 Retro Color plugin is a hugely popular plugin that makes it quick and easy to introduce lo-fi character and vintage-style warmth to any sound source. With DB-30, XLN Audio is hoping to bring the same kind of "instant magic" to drum processing, throwing a little fun and inspiration into an aspect of the mixing process that can sometimes feel like a chore.

“Just like when you get a new distortion pedal it makes you want to play guitar, I wanted that same feeling for DB-30," says XLN Audio's Design Lead Staffan Ösp.

"Some people love getting lost in surgical adjustments, but I like to be given opportunities to explore. There’s something much more fun about Big Knobs and x-faders that blend two different things. It has led to a lot of (joyful) distraction in the development process.”

XLN Audio DB-30 Drum Butter is available for macOS and Windows in VST3/AU/AAX formats. It's currently priced at $99, but the price goes up to $129 on April 30.

Find out more on XLN Audio's website.

Electro-Harmonix has teamed up with MixWave to present six of its most-loved classic guitar effects pedals as guitar plugins.

Available now for the introductory price of $109, the EHX Classics Bundle comprises three versions of the ubiquitous Big Muff fuzz pedal, plus the Andy Summers-approved Electric Mistress Flanger/Filter/Matrix, the Deluxe Memory Man Echo/Chorus/Vibrato, and the warbling Come As Your Are electric guitar tones of the EH4800 Small Clone chorus pedal.

You can, of course, buy each of the four plugins (the Muffs are all in one) separately. These are presently being offered at a discount rate of $39 each, regular price $79 for the Muffs, $69 for the rest.

For many players, these sounds will need little introduction. They have been pedalboard staples for decades. But if you’re approaching Electro-Harmonix sounds from the DAW side rather than the hardware side, they might be a unfamiliar, so here’s what you are getting.

The Big Muff plugin bundle features the original Big Muff Pi, the Ram’s Head Big Muff, and the Russian variant. The latter is what you want for “darker, heavier” tones, which is to say that it has a more aggressive character, more low-end oomph.

The Ram’s Head is the Muff many Pink Floyd fans would hear and instantly think of David Gilmour, with its smoother fuzz sound a more gentile proposition. The Big Muff Pi? It’s the Big Muff Pi, so it’ll give you that dreamy saturation, the sustain that has this weird violin quality on single note melodies.

The Deluxe Memory Man plugin keeps the 500ms delay time of the original unit. It is one of the most iconic analogue delay pedals of all time, a BBD-driven unit used by a who’s who of players but notably the Edge, Robert Smith, Ed O’Brien, and so on.

MixWave says this digital version was created using “component-level modeling, faithfully recreating the behaviour of its bucket-brigade delay line, modulation circuitry, and analogue signal path”.

Where the Deluxe Memory Man was, there was often an Electric Mistress, too, providing movement to your tone, that could be subtle, or like a jet, or by using the Filter Matrix you can turn it into a static comb filter and use it to tease out all kinds of captivating textures that can make a single chord something transcendent.

Finally, the Small Clone presents you with the most simple take on chorusing you will find. There is a switch for Depth, and a Rate knob, and yet that is all you need to get going. The circuit does the rest. Simple, but then, in the hands of Kurt Cobain, it helped change popular music for good.

The Electro-Harmonix Classics Bundle is available now, see Electro-Harmonix or MixWave for more.

While the Amazon Big Spring Sale is currently in full swing, to be totally honest, it’s not really the place to be for music-makers. If you’re looking for cheap accessories to pick up or consumer tech for your home, then admittedly, there’s some good stuff there, but actual gear for music production? Fuhgeddaboudit.

Instead, I think you should go check out the Universal Audio Winter Mix Tape deal on their official site, which, rumour has it, will be ending very soon. You can bag 10 out of 51 UA plugins for just $99 all-in, which is an absolute steal considering what’s on offer. It’s doubly great because you can pick stuff that’s missing from your current collection, so you don’t have to inadvertently buy any plugins you don’t really need.

I frequently use UA plugins in my own productions, so I’ve picked out three of what I think are the best plugins available in the sale. The rest you’ll have to pick yourself! First up is one of my currently most used channel strips, the API Vision Channel Strip Collection. It consists of mic pre, low and high pass filters, a gate/expander, compressor/limiter, and an incredibly powerful EQ, essentially all the mixing tools you need in one screen. I’m a particularly big fan of the EQ section, and once you get around the slightly weird dual knobs, you will easily find yourself boosting frequencies by 9dB yet finding they sound absolutely amazing.

The Empirical Labs EL8 Distressor Compressor is another must-have in the sale. I use it a lot on drums, whether I’m slamming a snare or using it to parallel compress the entire bus. It’s one of the most recommended bits of outboard gear for any studio, so having the power of it in your DAW can be a real boon to your productions. It works great on other sources too, like guitars and vocals, working equally well whether you’re just taming the peaks or crushing a signal into oblivion.

Finally, it might seem dull on the surface, but I love the SSL 4000 E Channel Strip. The workflow is super simple to use, and the lack of visual feedback means you listen with your ears and not your eyes when adjusting the sounds. Like the API, it features a pre, filters, gate, compressor, and EQ sections, but it is slightly easier to use at first. You might think, ‘not another channel strip’, but having a variety of flavours of EQ at your disposal is a really neat way of adding some variety to your mixes without drastically changing your workflow.

Shop more sales

• Save up to 35% on live sound at Sweetwater
• Over 25,000 deals at Musician’s Friend
• Save 15% on Spark Neo at Positive Grid

With two decades of software releases behind it, UVI is a name familiar to many in the music production world. Though they're probably best known for the do-it-all, uber-soft-synth Falcon, the company also makes some stellar audio effects, like Tape Suite and Shade.

UVI's debut effects plugin was Sparkverb, an algorithmic reverb released in 2014 that the company recently gave a significant update in the form of Sparkverb 1.5. And though it's typically priced at $79, you can grab Sparkverb for nothing over at KVR Audio right now by signing up for a free membership.

Capable of delivering everything from "natural-sounding spaces to infinite shimmering ambiences", Sparkverb is a versatile and CPU-friendly reverb that will come in useful across a variety of contexts, and it's got a few tricks up its sleeve too.

At the centre of Sparkverb's interface is a handy spectral editor that can be used to sculpt the reverb's frequency content, but if you hit the Preset Voyager button up in the top-right corner, this will be replaced by a constellation of coloured icons that represents all of the plugin's factory and user presets, arranged according to similarity.

This exploratory approach to preset browsing allows you to morph between multiple presets by voyaging through the cloud with your cursor – it's a nice way to land on unexpected combinations that you may never have stumbled on otherwise. There are also Randomize and Mutate functions that are useful for the same thing, and you're able to lock any of Sparkverb's parameters in place while experimenting to control the chaos.

Along with standard controls for Size, Shape, Modulation, Width and Diffusion, Sparkverb offers frequency-dependent decay shaping via high- and low-frequency multipliers, with adjustable crossover points and switchable filtering modes for those bands.

Sparkverb also offers a choice of three distinct reverb algorithms: Bright is an airy and precise tone with more presence in the top-end, Dark has a more natural and tonally subdued sound, and Lo-fi introduces characterful artifacts that resemble vintage hardware.

In our review of Sparkverb, we described the plugin as a "serious all-rounder, capable of invoking all manner of virtual spaces, from tight ambiences to concert halls and vast 'deep space'-style effects. As well as sounding fantastic, it's one of the most immediately creative reverb plugins we've come across to date."

If you're on the hunt for a flexible workhorse reverb to augment your DAW's stock tools or even add to an existing collection, then you could do much worse than Sparkverb – I have it loaded up on a reverb bus in my default Ableton Live template, and it's never let me down.

If you already have an account with KVR, this is a no-brainer of a download, and even if you don't, it's still worth getting involved, as long as you're happy to provide an email address. Don't hang about though: the giveaway ends on April 12th.

UVI Sparkverb 1.5 is available for macOS and Windows in VST/VST3/AAX/AU formats.

Head over to KVR Audio's website to download UVI Sparkverb 1.5.

Check out a demo video below with Venus Theory.

Since going into preliminary insolvency back in January, the future of Native Instruments has been far from certain, but CEO Nick Williams has promised that business at the company and its numerous subsidiaries will "continue as usual" during this restructuring process.

In that spirit, iZotope – the Boston-based software developer acquired by NI in 2023 – has announced the release of Tonal Balance Control 3, the next generation of its referencing plugin and mastering tool that allows you to compare your track's frequency balance, dynamics and stereo width against that of any other track.

Tonal Balance Control works by measuring the tonal balance and energy distribution of your mix and visualizing this against a reference target. The plugin features a library of targets based on the sonic profile of specific genres – so you're able to see how your electropop banger compares tonally to the average electropop track, for example – but more useful is the ability to reference your track against the target curve of a specific track of your choosing.

This can be achieved by uploading audio files to the plugin, but new in Tonal Balance Control 3 is the ability to capture a target curve directly from your DAW timeline.

What's more, the software is now available as a standalone app that's capable of receiving and analyzing audio from elsewhere on your computer. This means you can easily route reference tracks from Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube into Tonal Balance Control to create customized targets based on the sonic profile of tracks from your favourite artists, without having to download the songs first.

Targets captured in Tonal Balance Control 3 can be pulled up in iZotope's Neutron and Ozone mixing and mastering software, enabling you to use them with Ozone's Mastering Assistant to sonically match your own track to that of your reference.

Tonal Balance Control 3 also features an expanded target library that provides references for a longer list of genres, including dubstep, drum & bass, hyperpop and more, and multiple targets can now be blended together to create hybrid genre combinations.

Whereas its predecessor was a dedicated metering tool, Tonal Balance Control 3 boasts a built-in EQ overlaid on its metering window that enables you to correct the tonal balance of your track from within the plugin itself. You're also able to remotely connect to other iZotope plugins like Ozone to control their EQ from Tonal Balance Control.

Also new in Tonal Balance Control 3 are three dedicated meters for comparing the dynamics, stereo width and vocal balance of your track to the reference target, and a Leveled View that allows for more visually intuitive tone-shaping.

iZotope's Tonal Balance Control 3 is priced at $129/€139/£119.

Find out more on iZotope's website.

Is the new MacBook Neo powerful enough to be used for music production? That’s the question that’s been on the minds of bargain-hunting beatmakers since this $/£599 laptop was announced earlier this month, and with the machine now in the hands of customers, we’re starting to get some answers.

The headline is that, yes, you can indeed run music software on the MacBook Neo, and if your processor and RAM demands aren’t particularly intense, you should be able to do so pretty successfully.

Producer L Dre is one of several YouTubers who have been taking the machine for a spin. In his video, we see him firing up Ableton Live and making a beat using multiple instances of Arturia’s Analog Lab plugin.

“Who would have thought we'd be having full Ableton running on an iPhone chip? That's kind of crazy,” he says, as he layers up the synths. In fact, he manages to get at least 14 tracks running with no issues, and there are more than 20 Analog Labs doing their thing before the machine metaphorically falls over.

Given that the MacBook Neo does indeed contain an ‘iPhone chip’ – the A18 Pro from the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max – and contains just a potentially limiting 8GB of RAM, that’s pretty impressive.

How does the machine fare when running Apple’s own Logic Pro DAW, though? I’m a Music Mogul has been testing that particular combination, running a variety of the software’s more power-hungry features and then stacking up the tracks to find out where it tops out.

Unsurprisingly, the Mastering Assistant, Stem Splitter and Chord analysis features all took longer to do their thing on the Neo than the M5 Pro MacBook Pro that was being used for comparison purposes – significantly longer in the case of Stem Splitter – but they got there in the end. The difference in session export times, meanwhile, was negligible.

But what of those maximum track counts? Impressively, the MacBook Neo managed to play back around 150 tracks of audio and MIDI without falling over. That’s significantly fewer than the 920 that the M5 Pro laptop could deal with, but it’s worth asking yourself how many tracks you actually need?

The MacBook Neo’s limitations did become a little more apparent when running a multi-gigabyte Kontakt sampler instrument – around 20 of these could be stacked up, compared to 170 on the M5 Pro – and the processor-intensive Serum 2 soft synth plugin also pushed the budget laptop’s capabilities. It still managed to run 30 instances of the same preset while playing back a MIDI file, though, which will be more than enough for a lot of people.

In fact, the bottom line appears to be that, if you want an affordable laptop to start making music on, the MacBook Neo is going to do you just fine. Yes, it’s nowhere near as powerful as a MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro processor but, as I’m a Music Mogul points out, he’s been comparing a $5k laptop to a $599 one, so what did you expect?

Roland has announced its first step into the world of generative AI with Melody Flip, a software application designed to inspire new melodic ideas.

The phrase ‘generative AI’ is an understandable red flag for a lot of music makers. It brings to mind a tidal wave of AI slop and tech CEOs who fundamentally misunderstand the appeal of creativity.

However, Roland is at pains to present Melody Flip as a musician-friendly application of the technology, describing it as embodying “Roland’s vision of technology as a partner that coexists with the creative process.”

The application itself is a tool designed to analyse existing audio, presenting users with information on its various musical attributes, as well as generating a variety of musical ‘options’ that can be used to build on and develop the original source material.

“In recent years, AI and other emerging technologies have advanced rapidly in music production,” Roland says in its announcement. “Roland’s view is that these tools should not replace the artist, but instead amplify them, supporting a workflow where human intent, taste, and creativity remain at the core, with technology acting as a partner or co-creator, rather than a main creator.“

Melody Flip has been developed using technology derived from Sony’s Computer Science Laboratories’ research into AI-assisted music. Users upload an audio file, which the software then analyses to assess its ‘musical DNA’, including aspects such as key, BPM, structure, mood, genre and chord progression.

It then uses this information to suggest melodic ideas, using what Roland describes a “curated library of about 300 creative palettes (predefined musical styles and tonal directions)”.

Users are then free to edit and rework these ideas as needed, in Roland's words, "treating the technology like an active collaborator."

Despite its name, Melody Flip can generate more than just melodic lines, also producing chord progressions, bass and drum parts. These can be exported as both audio and MIDI for use elsewhere.

Melody Flip is developed for both Mac and PC, running as a plugin that can be used within your DAW of choice.

“Roland has always been committed to supporting the evolution of music culture through electronic musical instruments and production tools,” says Roland CEO and Representative Director Masahiro Minowa.

“Melody Flip represents a significant step forward in the era of responsibly developed AI, introducing a future in which technology and people work together and elevate creativity. As we move forward, Roland will continue to expand the boundaries of musical expression with innovative products and services that amplify creators’ instincts and connect human sensitivity with the full potential of technology.”

Like other Roland software products Melody Flip will be available via Roland Cloud. There’s no word as yet on the software’s price, but a free trial will launch in May.

For more on Roland Cloud, head to the official website.

Baby Audio has released its “most advanced synthesizer to date”, Grainferno, which promises to create playable synth tones from any sampled sound.

As with other granular plugins, Grainferno works by breaking recorded audio down into very small sections, known as grains, and shaping its sound through the manner in which it plays these back. What sets Grainferno apart from other granular synths, according to its developer, is the ability to generate grains at speeds that cross into the audible range.

According to Baby Audio, “at these rates, grains stop behaving like texture and start acting like oscillators, turning any audio file into a playable synth voice with the sonic fingerprint of the original audio.”

Users can drag and drop samples into Grainferno’s sample visualiser in WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3 or Ogg Vorbis file formats, or draw on a varied pool of 378 audio files. The synth uses a dual sample engine that can load two source files simultaneously and allows users to freely morph between them.

The granular engine features a variety of controls for manipulating and modulating grain playback. There’s also a multimode filter, compressor and ‘blur’ effect for further refining the granular output.

This, according to the developer, makes Grainferno capable of creating “entirely new textures, enabling synth-like tonal instruments, lush evolving atmospheres and volatile digital noise.”

Along with the granular engine itself, Grainferno features a drag-and-drop modulation system, with available sources including envelopes, LFOs, randomisation tools and various expression inputs. The synth also allows for cross modulation between these modulators.

Grainferno features an extensive effects section with six modules that can apply a variety of processes, from filtering and compression to reverb and delay, analogue-style modulation effects, multimode saturation and more.

For users that don’t want to get into the nitty gritty of granular synthesis, Grainferno has a Play View UI option that strips back the controls to just sample selection and a group of four macros. The synth also has 300+ presets for users to get stuck into.

Grainferno is out now, priced at $129, but currently available at an introductory price of $79. Head to the Baby Audio site for more information.

The very term ‘saturation’ sometimes feels like it has a negative value attached to it. Throughout recording history, technology has sought to deliver the cleanest signal possible, so why for the love of Joe Meek would you want to turn a clean signal into a distorted one?

It turns out, the answer is relatively simple. As human beings living in an organic world, we quite like impurity and a measure of chaos - and that's where sensible use of saturation can bring an awful lot to the musical table, whether it's individual instrumentation, as well as an entire mix.

The term distortion is very closely linked to saturation, but while they are subtly different, one could not have existed without the other.

If we go back around 100 years, the predominant music of the era was jazz, and particularly big bands. Electric guitar amplification was not particularly advanced, and would now be probably described as ‘lo-fi’.

Guitarists would often turn up their equipment as high as they could go (we don’t think ’11’ was a thing back then), in an attempt to compete with the loud acoustics of a large band. This would lead to equipment overdriving or speaker cones failing, with the resulting sound being something close to the guitar distortion that we know today.

With the advance of electronics, distortion pedals began appearing in 1962, and by the 70s, they were both commonplace and an essential part of a guitarist’s rig. This gave guitarists ultimate control over their distorted sound, without the need to destroy an amplifier on a weekly basis!

But why should guitarists have all the fun? With the rise of synthesisers in the 70s and 80s, synthesists and producers realised that they could get some pretty gnarly tones by attaching the same distortion pedals to synthesizers.

Nothing exemplifies this more than the acid house era of dance music, from the late 80s and early 90s.

It was this period where the now-legendary Roland TB-303 was repurposed from a humble bassline machine to the must-have device for the genre. It turns out, whacking up the resonance on the 303 filter produced an amazing sound through a distortion pedal. Club-avoiding guitarists, however, were largely non-plussed

So what exactly is saturation, and what does it bring to the production table?

By and large, saturation is designed to be more subtle than distortion, often with a penchant for mimicking good old-fashioned analog equipment. You remember our previous point about clean signals? We rest our case!

Saturation excites and distorts certain frequencies and harmonics in the signal, depending on your chosen plugin. What's more, we can trace the saturation story back to the late 90s.

Back then, CDs were the predominant format, and many musicians and producers were reporting that the overall sound of the digital signal chain was a little cold and sterile.

Couple this with the emergence of one of the first rack-mounted units to offer a one-stop mastering solution - the TC Electronics Finalizer - and basic mastering saturation became commonplace.

TC Electronics described this saturation as 'Digital Radiance Generation', or DRG for short.

DRG applied second harmonic distortion to a mix, designed to mimic analog equipment and specifically analog tape, so it's no surprise that it was quite a hit.

However, over-using it could quickly destroy a mix, forcing mix engineers to pay close attention.

Fast forward to the current DAW age, and we are now flush with a plethora of different saturation plugins, with many being very highly regarded and offering bespoke solutions, depending on your production requirements.

One of the big boons of plugins, is that you can use them as many times as you like, and while it is probably a bad idea to sprinkle saturation on every instrument in your mix, there are definitely places where employment can pay dividends.

If you find yourself recording an electric bass part directly via your audio interface, you could choose to use amplifier simulators to colour the signal. This could be regarded as a form of saturation, but you could also go all-in and just apply a saturation plugin to warm up the signal.

One of the most highly regarded in the current market is Decapitator from Soundtoys. Not only is it flexible, but it can go from incredibly subtle to total extreme very quickly.

When applying saturation, it is always really important to listen objectively. The moment you feel the signal is getting too aggressive, it's time to back off, and that may not necessarily be exclusively down to the saturation amount control.

Just about all plugins will be equipped with a Wet/Dry see-saw control, and adjusting this can scale an extremely saturated sound to help it blend in more nicely.

Of course, this principle could also apply to sampled bass sounds, which may be a little too clean for your mix. It's also a concept which could be applied to drums, specifically if you are working with samples within your DAW.

It's a common complaint that many drum samples are just too clean, so it could be very useful to add a little saturated colour to your drum track. The only problem is, the drums themselves often sound great with saturation, but the hi-hat and cymbals can react less favourably…

A sensible solution requires the creation of 2 drum tracks, both with accompanying MIDI parts. You can then mute all of the drums on one channel, muting all of the metallic instruments on the other. This leaves the path clear to saturating the drum elements on their own, with no effect on the cymbals and hats.

Before you get lost in instrument saturation heaven (or hell, if that's your preference) be aware that some instruments do not embrace saturation so readily, particularly instruments with a more acoustic persuasion, such as acoustic pianos, string sections or brass and woodwinds. There's no harm in trying, but don't be surprised if saturation does little to improve the sound.

With a slight sense of history repeating itself, we have to revert to TC’s DRG concept, and discuss how beneficial subtle saturation can be to an entire mix.

Mastering suites, such as iZotope’s Ozone, offer a number of saturation solutions, designed to be used during the mastering phase. These include tools to excite upper frequencies, and elements for inducing the sound of vintage tape.

But if you want a little more control, one company that personifies the application of saturation to mimic analog is Universal Audio. It has produced an array of exemplary plugins which are perfect for subtle saturation across your mix.

If you are nervous about over-applying saturation, take a look at the Verve Analog Machines plugin, which is available in two forms; the first is an entry-level Essentials version, offering four saturation models, while the upper-level version provides 10 models.

The idea is simple - apply across your mix, and adjust the tone and amount controls to suit your production. The included models range drastically from subtle, through to downright dirty, so it's important to be objective.

For even more control, UA’s emulation of the Ampex ATR-102 Mastering Tape Recorder is stunning. This plugin can induce everything from saturation through to hiss and even wow and flutter. It just depends how extreme you want to go!

One final thought. We've mentioned on several occasions that you need to be objective about your saturation exploits, and be careful not to overuse. You can easily destroy a mix by being a little overzealous.

If you find yourself regularly creating or delivering stems of your mix, be aware that many saturation plugins induce noise.

If you deliver half a dozen stems and they all have noise on them, when all the stems are played back together, that's going to be quite a racket. It’s probably best to defeat the noise element as much as you can, in this setting, so that your music doesn't get drowned out by hiss.

We spent many years trying to get rid of tape hiss and noise, so you don't want to end up back where we all started.

Arturia has released an update to its FX Collection, adding two new plugins and a trio of recent releases to the bundle.

The headline addition for FX Collection 6 is Efx Ambient, the next instalment in Arturia’s range of modern, creative effects, joining the granular Efx Fragments, Efx Motions effects shaper and Efx Refract unison effect.

Described by Arturia as a ‘dreamlike processor’, Efx Ambient is a plugin that combines elements of pitch-shifting, distortion and spatial processing, specialising in soundscapes and washed-out textures. This has six modes, named Reflect, Woven, Siren, Organist, Codec and Sunken, each of which is designed to generate a different form of ambience.

According to Arturia, these can create “novel, emotive textures through six expertly designed modes, using state-of-the-art spectral processing, and Feedback Delay Networks rendered usable by macros.”

On the surface level its controls are incredibly simple. Along with the list of modes, its basic UI has just Tone and Space parameters, which can be adjusted using an X/Y control surface, along with Dry/Wet mix. As is typical of Arturia plugins, an expanded Advanced view hides a variety of controls that allow for deeper shaping of the effect.

Here, users can access deeper controls for the plugin’s two main modules, along with a modulation section with a function generator LFO, as well as sequencer, envelope follower, macro and randomisation tools.

The second new addition is Pitch Shifter-910, a take on the classic Eventide H910 Harmonizer, which was launched in the mid-1970s and was known for being the first digital studio effect processor, used on countless releases across rock, pop and dance music.

The H910 was particularly popular for vocal production, due to its ability to create harmonies using pitch shifts set to specific musical intervals. The effect can also sound great on guitars, synths and drums.

Arturia’s take has both vintage and modern pitchshifting engines as well as a dedicated delay section that can be used to create pitched repeats. It also has a dual mono mode, which recreates the classic studio trick of using two H910s to have shifted versions of an audio signal panned hard left and right.

The remaining three FX Collection additions are Mix Drums, Tape J-37 and Bus Transient.

Mix Drums was first released last year, and was one of our favourite software releases of 2025. It is a multi-band processor that combines elements of saturation, compression, EQ and reverb, all specifically designed to finesse drums and percussion.

Designed in collaboration with producer Emre Ramazanoglu, Mix Drums' phase-coherent design ensures that parallel processing combining dry, distorted and compressed signals won't present any problems at the output, avoiding the phase issues that can occur when multiple signal paths are misaligned.

There's also automated gain staging at the input, along with a signal path clipper at the output stage, designed to boost perceived loudness and tame peak levels without introducing unwanted harshness and distortion.

Tape J-37 is modelled on the classic Studer J37 tape machine, and aims to impart the colouration and harmonic distortion that original machine is renowned for. It has four colour character modes to choose from. The advanced controls include EQ, delay, wow and flutter parameters.

Finally, Bus Transient is a transient shaper that offers control over attack and sustain stages across three adjustable frequency bands.

These five additions bring the full FX Collection package up to a total of 39 plugins, also featuring a variety of compressors, filters, delays, reverbs, distortions and more.

Along with the new plugins, FX Collection 6 also updates 24 other plugins, introducing 134 new presets in the process.

Although less established than its V Collection synth bundle, for our money the FX Collection is shaping up as the strongest part of Arturia’s software range. Considering both the breadth of tools on offer and the general ease-of-use that comes with its well-designed UIs, the FX Collection is one of the most appealing plugin bundles on the market right now.

For the first time, Arturia is also launching an ‘Intro’ version of its FX Collection, containing six ‘essential’ effects priced at $/€99. This includes the Plate-140 reverb, Tape-201 delay and Tape Mello-Fi tape emulation, along with Efx Fragments, Efx Motions and Mix Drums.

Naturally, this truncated selection is far less comprehensive than the full FX Collection – and what makes these six specific plugins more essential than, say, compressors or filters remains to be seen – but it’s still a good price point for a varied selection of impressive effects.

As for the full FX Collection 6, that’s out now priced at $/€499. Head to the Arturia site for more info.

UJAM – the plugin company co-founded by Hans Zimmer and Pharrell – has unveiled a new multi-effects plugin designed for creative vocal manipulation.

Voxcraft's interface features six individual effects modules running along the bottom – Dynamics, Character, Filter, Delay, Reverb, and Chop – alongside a core vocal processing section up top. The top panel gives you access to pitch-shifting, formant-shifting and a unison effect, along with a pitch correction control that can be linked to a scale of your choice.

The plugin's lower panel houses six categories of effect, each equipped with six different modes to choose from; effects can be switched on or off, but their order in the vocal chain is fixed. The Dynamics module combines multi-band compression and gating to help you shape the dynamics of a vocal take, with modes ranging from gentle volume control and levelling to OTT-style, exaggerated compression.

Character introduces various styles of distortion, from vintage fuzz and vinyl crackle to overtly digital bitcrushing, and the Filter module gives you access to six filter modes covering expected options (low-pass, high-pass) and more creative effects like phase-shifting and comb filtering.

The Delay section offers ping-pong, granular and stereo modes, and the Reverb delivers authentic room and hall-sized spaces alongside reverse and gated reverbs, a plate reverb emulation and an ambient-leaning Infinity mode. Finally, the Chop module introduces all manner of glitchy, stuttery chaos, from randomized slicing and dicing to a trance gate effect.

Joining these six modules are a handful of nice-to-haves at the very bottom of the menu – controls for EQ, double-tracking and auto-gain – plus input gain, output gain and a Mix slider. Voxcraft arrives with 100 presets with which to get started, and there's a randomization control for instantly creating new presets with fully randomized parameters.

Each of Voxcraft's modules has one central knob for dialling in the effect, along with one or two additional controls for fine-tuning. There's not a whole lot of tweakability on offer here, but UJAM says Voxcraft is intended to be fast, intuitive and failsafe; it's not designed for detailed sound-shaping, but more of a quick-and-dirty tool for throwing on a vocal and taking it somewhere completely different without stacking multiple plugins or diving through menus. The price reflects this: at the introductory discount of $39, it's miles cheaper than similar plugins like Universal Audio's Topline Vocal Suite.

Producer, songwriter and Olivia Rodrigo collaborator Jam City is evidently a fan: in UJAM's press release, he described Voxcraft as "truly transformative for vocals and effective on other audio sources too", adding: “I’ll be having fun with this for a long time to come.”

UJAM Voxcraft is available now for macOS and Windows in VST/VST3/AU/AAX formats. There's a free trial available if you want to give it a spin.

Find out more on UJAM's website.

Electronic musician and Ableton Live co-creator Robert Henke has shared a free Max for Live device that puts a stereo spin on Live's existing Filter Delay device and adds some nifty feedback routing.

Filter Delay features three stereo delay lines, each of which can be set to 16th-notes, dotted 16ths, 16th triplets, or 32nd-notes – this value can then be multiplied by up to 32 using the adjacent Time control, producing delay times of up to 2 bars in length. A Global Delay Time control on the left-hand side adjusts all three delay lines simultaneously.

Each delay runs through a band-pass filter, with controls for centre Frequency and Width joined by a Global Frequency control that can be used to modulate the filters across all three delays at once. Alongside the typical feedback routing you'd find in a standard delay, you're also given the option to combine all the outputs and feed them back into all the inputs, if you're feeling particularly chaotic.

Alongside the feedback routing, Filter Delays introduces some interesting stereo capabilities absent from the OG Filter Delay. The Pan control dials in panning before the signal hits each delay's input – and between the values of 50 and -50, that's all it does.

Once you push it beyond those values towards 99 and -99, though, the Pan control folds back a polarity-flipped version of the signal into the other channel, and dialled up to the maximum, this means the signal is centrally panned but out of phase across both channels. This can be used to produce some creative stereo effects, especially when combined with the Channel Swap control, which switches the left and right output of each delay line.

"I wrote the original Filter Delay for Live 1, released in 2001," Henke writes on his website. "Recently, I rediscovered it and wanted to add a few more options that were missing in the Ableton device. This led me to create a new version in Max4Live.

"The Ableton Filter Delay was one of the first devices I developed, partly inspired by the filtered delays in my Lexicon PCM 80. Back then, CPU limitations were a major concern, so the original effect only includes three mono delays and less flexible feedback routing."

Whether you're someone that uses Filter Delay on a regular basis, or relies on the recently updated Delay device instead, we see no good reason not to download this updated version of a classic Live effect. You'll need either Ableton Live Suite or the Max for Live add-on with Standard to run Filter Delays. Henke says it's only been tested with Live Suite 12, but it may work with earlier versions.

Find out more on Robert Henke's website.

Read our 2024 interview with Robert Henke.

Another day, another generously-priced software emulation of a vintage synth from California-based developer Cherry Audio.

Just a few months on from the release of Mercury-8, the company’s take on the beloved Roland Jupiter-8, Cherry Audio has unveiled SH-MAX, a new plugin that brings together elements of three more classic Roland synthesizers in a single instrument.

A series of vintage analogue monosynths released throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, Roland’s SH series kicked off with the SH-1000 in 1973 – Roland’s first synthesizer – and culminated in the beloved SH-101 in 1982. Cherry Audio’s SH-MAX looks between these two milestones for inspiration, capturing the “bold sound” of the SH-5 while bringing in unique features from two other SH-branded instruments, the SH-7 and SH-3A.

SH-MAX recreates the distinctive architecture of the SH-5 with dual oscillators, tempo-syncable LFOs and ADSR envelopes, and its dual-parallel multimode and bandpass filter sections and a flexible five-channel mixer are joined by ring mod and sample & hold functionality. This is complemented by features from the SH-7 – autobend, duophony, and filter FM – and an additive-style, divide-down oscillator lifted from the SH-3A.

Cherry Audio has nabbed a few more elements from other Roland instruments, including a Touch effect inspired by the SH-2000 that lets you assign up to four parameters from a choice of 47 destinations to an external controller with poly aftertouch, and an old-school four-channel step sequencer based on the Model 104 from Roland’s System 100. You also get Drift and Slop controls for the oscillators, filters, amp and envelope generators, designed to introduce analogue-style vintage character.

Unlike its hardware ancestors, SH-MAX can be 16-voice polyphonic if you want it to be, but you can also take advantage of monophonic, duophonic and unison modes. There’s a veritable buffet of effects onboard, spanning compression, reverb, distortion, delay, flanger, lo-fi, tape echo and more, all of which can be modulated and combined in four independent effects chains: one for each of the synth’s three signal paths, and one global master effects layer.

Cherry Audio says that SH-MAX is capable of producing “everything from massive leads and thick basses to lush pads and exceptional sound effects”, and the synth is packed with more than 300 presets to help you get started right out of the box.

In our review of Cherry Audio’s SH-MAX, we said the plugin “offers power, warmth, charm and usability in a highly convincing virtual analogue reproduction with real heart and soul”. “It's hard to overstate exactly how good this thing sounds,” the review continues. “It's deep and detailed, and has a unique sense of warmth, which you could clearly mistake for being real analogue, if it wasn't for the presence of a computer screen and a mouse!”

Available for macOS and Windows in AU/VST/VST3/AAX formats, Cherry Audio’s SH-MAX is priced at $59.

Find out more on Cherry Audio’s website or check out a walkthrough video below.

Fractal Audio Systems, the brand behind the Axe-Fx range of amp modellers, is moving into the guitar plugins market with the ICONS series, with its first drop inspired by golden era Fender amps.

The Fullerton Collection comprises 36 guitar amp models in total, plus effects imported from Fractal’s Axe-Fx.

“Deluxes, Bassguys, Double-Verbs, Vibrato Verbs, Supers, Princetones, Champlifiers...” You can guess from these pseudonyms that all the classics are present and correct, and the user interface is faithful to the plug-in-and-play appeal of these classic amps.

Whether chicken-head dials a la the vintage tweed set, or the ‘witch hat’ skirted knobs of later years, they are recreated here on the ICONS GUI.

Expect the same level of sonic detail and behaviour as you would from Fractal’s hardware units.

Fractal says it takes a component-level approach to engineering these analogue circuits as a digital replica, analysing and copying the response of “the preamp, tone stack, cathode follower, power supply, power amp, phase inverter, amp/speaker interaction” and so on down the list.

We don’t need to know all of the mathematics and science behind these endeavours, only that Fractal promises that “each model sounds, feels, and responds just like the real thing at any setting”.

Fractal’s ICONS series amp models are paired with custom-engineered DynaCab HD models; you can pair these virtual cabinets with a mic, move the mic position and monitor the sound in the real-time. There are 11 microphones to choose from, 13 DynaCabs in total.

Plugins might not push the air about the room but they certainly take some of the pain out of miking up an amp – you can experiment at pace.

Players can upload their own or third-party IRs and you have two slots to mix and blend. The ICONS cabinet section also includes a stereo room simulator, virtual mic preamp, and master high-cut and low-cut filters.

“Even with all of this power, ICONS stays fast and intuitive, with a simple interface that lets you dial in without distraction,” says Fractal. “Amps and effects have familiar controls, plus a few carefully chosen extras, while a modern preset manager, complete with tags, favourites, and metadata, keeps you organised and focussed on creative…

“With support for automation, MIDI control, and essential tools like a built in tuner, ICONS is designed to fit seamlessly into modern recording and performance workflows.”

The ICONS Fullerton Collection is offered in four individual volumes or as a set, available now at an introductory price of $299 (regular price $396), all of which can be run as a standalone app or in your DAW.

See Fractal Audio Systems for more details.

LALAL.AI is a browser-based, AI-powered stem separation platform launched in 2020 that has since expanded to encompass a range of tools that covers voice cloning and reverb removal, alongside desktop and mobile apps for stem separation.

Today, LALAL.AI launches its first plugin, bringing its stem separation technology into your DAW for the first time.

Based on a newly-developed AI model designed to run locally on "virtually any hardware", LALAL.AI's Stem Separator plugin is currently only capable of splitting audio into two stems, vocals and instrumental tracks, but we're told that multi-stem splitting for six separate instruments is on the way.

The plugin's Lyra model also offers reduced quality compared to LALAL.AI's more advanced Andromeda model, which is currently only available via its online platform.

In a press release, LALAL.AI says its plugin is designed to "stop tab jumping and repetitive uploading" and help music-makers "stick to what they're there for: making music".

“Isolating vocals or making a purely instrumental track can happen as fluidly as a producer or artist does any other task inside their preferred software,” LALAL.AI co-founder Nik Pogorsky said.

“Professionals are already adopting tools like LALAL.AI because they solve key problems for them. We’ve simply put that tool right where they need it, in their workstation, so that they can get more creative without getting dragged out of their flow.”

We tested LALAL.AI's stem separation in a recent round-up of the best stem separation tools, which compared the stem-splitting capabilities of DAWs like Logic Pro and Ableton Live with a range of browser-based tools and plugins such as LANDR Stems.

LALAL.AI performed well, coming in third place behind Steinberg SpectraLayers Pro 12 and Logic Pro 11.2, though we tested the service's Andromeda model, not the Lyra model utilized in the new VST plugin.

LALAL.AI's Stem Separator is compatible with macOS, Windows and Linux. It's currently only available as a VST3 plugin but an AU version is in beta. The plugin is only available to subscribers of LALAL.AI's Pro tier, which costs $15/month.

Find out more on LALAL.AI's website.

Created by developer Jonas Eriksson, Tape Fiasco is one of the most impressive free plugins we've come across in months. Easily as versatile as many paid-for tools, it's an experimental, glitchy multi-effect with a unique but slightly mystifying UI that's designed to encourage happy accidents.

Tape Fiasco brings together three time-based effects in a single plugin: a granular time-stretcher, a glitchy, rhythmic stutter effect and a tape-style varispeed function. Each of these modules can be used independently or chained up with the others via configurable signal routing.

Tape Fiasco's interface is based around multiple blocks that graphically represent specific parameters – though it's not exactly what we'd call intuitive, it certainly is visually impressive, and there's a guide on Eriksson's website that explains how it all works.

The plugin's Stretch effect records incoming audio into a buffer and plays it back using overlapping grains, offering control over playback speed, grain size, pitch, tempo and stereo spread, with options for randomization and reversing, so there's a whole lot of flexibility here for creating granular soundscapes.

Tape Fiasco's tempo-synced Stutter module captures slices of audio and repeats them rhythmically – it's a classic effect that you'll have heard before in glitch and IDM, but there's a huge amount of control available over timing, pitch and dynamics, along with rhythmic and probability-based variation. There's also a multimode filter built into the Stutter module with with formant and comb modes alongside the conventional resonant low- and high-pass.

Lastly we have the Varispeed effect, which simulates the sound of a tape machine varying in playback speed. Once again, there's a lot more versatility on offer here than you might expect: tape-modelled wow/flutter, a DJ-style scratch effect, two flavours of distortion and a compressor thrown in for good measure.

Alongside its three modules, Tape Fiasco is equipped with an envelope follower that uses an incoming signal to modulate its effect parameters.

All of that adds up to a powerful effects processor that can be utilized across multiple contexts, whether you're adventuring into experimental sound design or just looking for a way to add a little sonic flavour to a vocal line or guitar riff.

Tape Fiasco is available in VST3/AU formats for macOS and VST3 for Windows, but it's only been tested on Ableton Live 12.2 with macOS Sequoia 15.1.

Head over to Jonas Eriksson's website to download Tape Fiasco.

What is it?

When Neural DSP announced it had teamed up with John Mayer for a plugin, two worlds that probably couldn’t have been further apart were suddenly thrust together. On the one side, there are vintage tube amps, analogue pedals, and boutique single coil pickups. On the other, it’s 1s, 0s, and a pair of studio headphones.

It’s a mind-blowing thing when a guitarist famous for using bespoke Dumble amps announces a digital version of their rig, and with Neural DSP Archetype: John Mayer X, suddenly, there’s a guitar plugin that may satisfy even the most rigorous of tube amp tone defenders. I can’t have been the only person questioning whether this was the event that was finally going to make me put down my tube amp and go for a full modelling rig.

The plugin models three of John’s favourite guitar amps, with the vibrato channel of his 1964 Fender Vibroverb, a Dumble Steel String Singer #002, and the Two-Rock John Mayer Signature Prototype ‘Signature #83’. His pedals are also present and accounted for, with approximations of a clean boost, Klon Centaur, Ibanez Tube Screamer, and Marshall Bluesbreaker making up the overdrive section.

A filter pedal based on the EHX Q-Tron is available alongside a short, analogue delay for slapback sounds in front of the amp. The 'Gravity Tank' effect combines harmonic tremolo and spring reverb, and you also get an EQ and compressor modelled on units he uses in the studio. At the end of the chain, there's another delay pedal and a reverb pedal, giving you plenty of options for tone tweaking.

Specs

• Launch price: €199
• Type: Amp and FX modelling plugin (hosted or standalone)
• System requirements: MacOS 13 Ventura or higher/Windows 10 or higher, AMD Quad Core R52200G/Intel Core i3/Mac Silicon M1 or higher, 1GB storage space, 8GB RAM
• Formats: VST2, VST3, AU, AAX
• Contact: Neural DSP

Usability

Usability rating: ★★★★½

The Neural DSP John Mayer plugin is arranged very similarly to every other Neural plugin, so if you’ve used one before, you’ll feel right at home. The signal chain is accessible via the top of the window, starting with the ‘pre-fx’ that features a boost, filter, two overdrive pedals, and a delay effect. The harmonic tremolo and spring reverb is next, titled the ‘Gravity Tank’ and interestingly placed before the guitar amp section.

The following section houses the window to select from John’s amps, and even more interestingly, an option to run all three at the same time. The visual shows all of the amps on one stage, and they get blacked-out accordingly depending on which setup you select. With the blend option selected, there’s no option to adjust the cabinet settings however, you can only do this with a single amp type selected.

Each amp has its own control scheme, differentiated by individual designs for each control set. Bright and Mid switches are available alongside the usual EQ controls, with two input types on the Dumble, while the Two-Rock amp features a Bright switch, two EQ types, and a Presence control.

These controls are scaled down from the actual amps Mayer uses, so if any super-fans were looking for exact recreations, they might be slightly disappointed here. Personally, I don't think it hampers the usability of the amps all that much.

Opening up the cab window, it’s the usual fare for a Neural plugin. You can change microphone types with 11 different options, as well as the ability to load a third-party impulse response if you wish. With dynamic mics, condenser microphones, and ribbon microphones available to be selected, each cabinet allows for the placement of these in any way you see fit, adjusting their position on the speaker as well as the distance away from the cabinet. You can also flip the phase between the two mics if you want to create some purposefully thinner tones.

Next up, we have the EQ and compressor section. It’s a wide, four-band EQ that covers lows, low mids, high mids, and highs. You also get additional low and high cut options to tweak things further.

The compressor offers a simple two-knob layout which will be familiar to any guitarist who’s used one on their pedalboard, with knobs marked Input and Output for simplicity. The final section of the app features a Dream Delay and studio reverb, with the delay able to switch between ping pong and regular tones, while the reverb can be set to hall or plate.

There are 18 presets from the man himself, and a full 40 artists have contributed their own presets to the plugin, which is the most I’ve seen in any Neural DSP product. The preset browser finally has a Favourites option, something I’ve been crying-out for over many years using Neural plugins, with presets featuring tags for descriptions and a useful ‘recent’ section to quickly recall your last used settings.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★½

With a single-coil-equipped Telecaster plugged into my Universal Audio audio interface, I start by clicking through the Mayer presets to see what sounds are available. It’s no surprise to find that these are mainly made up of clean and low/mid-gain sounds, with some specific presets for Gravity, and a tone from the Dead & Company celebratory concerts. If you’re looking for a plethora of song-specific sounds however there aren’t all that many, with the bulk made up of more general-purpose tones.

They respond well to volume knob adjustments, allowing me to clean up the dirtier tones before applying more gain when I want to start playing lead, just like the man himself does. As you might expect, there’s plenty of blues-lead-friendly stuff here, whether you want notes that ring out for days or those edge-of-breakup tones that respond to your picking dynamics.

If you’re not a blues player, there are still plenty of great sounds to dig into here. The quality of the trio of amps is such that you can get bright Fender jangle that can be pushed into a harsher breakup from the Smooth Operator, a more mid-focused tone from the Headroom Hero, or more low-end from the Signature 83. It’s surprisingly versatile, and of course while there’s no high-gain, the combination of boost pedal and two overdrives means things can get pretty saturated when you need.

There’s a lot of fun to be had in the Pre-FX section, and I particularly enjoyed the Justa Boost pedal, which just makes everything sound better and has a switch to add even more gain. The overdrive section does what you’d expect, and the trio of Klon, Bluesbreaker, and Tube Screamer style sounds means you can coax a lot of different tones out of it. The Antelope Filter modelled on the EHX Q-Tron is a load of fun, and the Millipede Delay in front of the amp is great for classic slapback sounds, adding a nice bit of thickness to the tone without being immediately obvious.

I found it a bit of a shame then that you can’t place the spring reverb and harmonic tremolo of the Gravity Tank after the amp. The lack of signal chain maneuverability is something present on all the Neural DSP plugins, but I personally prefer my reverb after my amp. As something of a tone tweaker who spends a lot of time playing guitar ‘in-the-box’, I would love to see the same flexibility you get on the Quad Cortex present in the plugins too.

Verdict

The Neural DSP John Mayer plugin is a triumph in many ways, but mainly in that it’s managed to bring the two opposing worlds of tube amp purists and modelling aficionados to a single, incredibly good-sounding place. It delivers damn good guitar tones quickly and easily, with enough variety to keep players of all kinds entertained.

For those who like to tweak, the lack of signal chain agility could be a limiting factor. It would be nice to be able to move elements back and forth at will for deeper experimentation, and with the three amp setup, I would’ve liked the flexibility of customizing the cabinets of each for super deep editing. I imagine those players are in the minority however, and the ability to instantly get your hands on some of the greatest guitar tones of the modern era will more than make up for the lack of flexibility.

MusicRadar verdict: At the core of the Neural DSP Archetype: John Mayer X plugin are brilliant guitar tones, and I love that you don’t have to be a Mayer mega-fan to enjoy what’s on offer here. Despite not being much of a fan myself, I never felt like an outsider using his signature plugin, because the core sounds are fantastic, no matter what your preferred playing style or genre.

Also try

Hands-on videos

Guitar World

Danish Pete

Rabea Massad

NAMM 2026: Ever been tempted by the look of Reason’s Rack of virtual analogue gear, but can’t find space in your heart for another DAW? Well today might be your lucky day, as the Reason Rack is now available as a standalone purchase or subscription for the first time.

Launched in 2000, Reason was one of the first wave of DAWs. Building on the success of Propellerhead Software’s iconic soft synth ReBirth, Reason brought an old-school studio workflow into the software realm, with a faux-analogue design that set it apart from the more digital look of Logic or Cubase.

Over the past 25 years, Reason has been through a lot of changes. Originally a MIDI-only, self-contained application, subsequent updates have seen the workflow expand to add audio recording, Rack Extensions and eventually full VST plugin support.

One thing that has remained constant, however, has been Reason’s distinctive Rack. Modelled on a real-world rack of studio hardware, the Rack is where users load and edit instruments and effects, routing devices through the use of virtual patch cables.

The Rack and its impressive crop of native devices has always been Reason’s strongest suit. With the launch of Reason 11 in 2019, Propellerhead – simultaneously rebranded as Reason Studios – introduced the Reason Rack plugin, which allowed it to be used as a plugin within third-party DAWs for the first time.

Earlier this month, it was announced that Reason Studios had been acquired by AI mastering specialist LANDR. It seems the new owner is wasting no time in making a few changes.

As well as being sold alongside the full DAW, the Reason Rack is now available on its own in plugin form priced at $199. That price gets you the plugin in VST3/AU/AAX formats, including access to 66 instruments and effects from Reason’s stock devices.

Those devices include more than 30 virtual instruments, including highlights such as the Objekt modelling synth, Polytone virtual analogue and Mimic sampler. The rest of the list is made up of effects, MIDI sequencers and generators, and utilities. In all it’s a pretty comprehensive line-up.

As well as being available for standalone purchase, users can also now subscribe to the Reason Rack on its own, priced at £/$99 per-year or £/$11.99 per-month. Reason Studios has also dropped the price of the full DAW, which can now be had for £/$299.

Finally, those that want to go ‘all-in’ can subscribe to Reason+, which includes access to the full DAW, plus extras including a plugin bundle, unlimited distribution via LANDR, unlimited stem separation and unlimited AI mastering.

Reason+ is priced at £/$169 per-year or £/$19.99 per-month.

“Artists have been clear about wanting more flexibility, features and value,” said LANDR CEO Pascal Pilon. “These changes are designed to deliver on those needs while preserving the creative workflow that makes Reason unique.”

Head to the Reason site for more info.

NAMM 2026: Released in 1980, the TR-808 might be remembered as the device that (eventually) became Roland’s first classic programmable drum machine, but rhythmic scholars will tell you that, two years previously, the company released the CR-78.

This analogue beast offered not only a decent selection of built-in rhythms, but also the option to create four variations of your own, giving it an extra level of flexibility.

The machine itself may have had a relatively low profile, but its sound became well-known thanks to the CR-78’s use on hits such as I Can’t Go For That (Hall & Oates), Vienna (Ultravox) and, most notably, Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight.

Now the CR-78 has become the latest instrument from the Roland archives to join the company’s plugin roster, which is available via the Roland Cloud. And not only is it designed to bring the sound of the original hardware to your DAW, but it’s also been enhanced with modern sequencing features, individual sound mixing and tuning, tempo sync, drag-and-drop audio/MIDI support and various other things.

This isn’t the first CR-78 plugin we’ve seen - vintage emulation king Cherry Audio had its own stab at it in 2024 - but, obviously, having the Roland name on it adds to the allure.

As you’d expect, Roland has gone for an interface that closely resembles the original hardware - you can choose between the wood panel and black vinyl covering variations - and there are direct access controls for rhythm patterns, instrument sounds, shuffle, fills, volume balance, fade-in/fade-out, and more.

There’s also a detailed Pattern view where you can fine-tune your rhythms and sounds, and mixer controls can be found on the Kit screen.

If you have a Roland Cloud Ultimate membership, you’ll have access to the CR-78 already, and the Lifetime Key is currently on sale for $49 (regular price $199). It runs on PC and Mac in VST/AU/AAX formats.

Find out more on the Roland website.