Never has there been a better time to be an in-the-box producer than 2026. Modern processors are lightning-fast, DAWs are more powerful than they’ve ever been, and the sheer breadth and variety of soft synths, virtual instruments and audio effects on the market is something to behold.
We can’t go a few hours without a new plugin popping up in our inbox, and with the recent surge in AI-based vibe coding tools making software development more accessible than ever, the floodgates have well and truly opened.
That’s all well and good, but faced with this deluge of digital audio tools, it’s hard to figure out which plugins have the potential to supercharge your creativity, and which simply aren’t worth the megabytes.
That’s where we come in. Each week, we comb through the latest plugins to single out the instruments and effects that you need to know about. Without further ado, here are five new releases that deserve a place in your plugin folder.
1. Phase Fiasco Kazu
Formats: VST3, AU | Platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux | Price: $29 | Find out more
We’re already big fans of Phase Fiasco’s Tape Fiasco – a super-glitchy, idiosyncratic multi-effects processor that’s without a doubt one of the best free plugins we’ve covered this year – so were more than a little psyched to learn that its creator had cooked up something even more ambitious.
Kazu takes the concept behind Tape Fiasco – glitchy multi-effects with modulation, sequencing and performance capabilities – and turns it all the way up to 11, delivering an immensely creative sound design tool that’s also remarkably good value at only $29.
Kazu is equipped with 57 effects across eight categories, its collection spanning stutter, granular and modulation effects, time-stretching, pitch-shifting, and vocoding, and multiple styles of filter, distortion, delay, reverb and compression. You also get some more unconventional options, including several spectral effects and a Speak & Spell-esque voice-changer. (As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a major update coming soon bringing 13 new effects.)
These alone would be worth the price of admission, but this smorgasbord of sound-manglers is joined by a deep, flexible modulation and sequencing system that brings those effects to life, alongside generative and randomization options that mean your next happy accident is only a click away. It looks the part, too, its cyberpunk glitch-art aesthetic and ASCII-style macro-linked XY performance pad looking straight out of Blade Runner 2049.
Dollar for dollar, this is the best value in a plugin we’ve seen in a long time. If you buy one piece of music software this month, make it this one.
2. UAD Empirical Labs FATSO Tape Simulator
Formats: VST3, AU, AAX | Platforms: macOS, Windows | Price: $79 | Find out more
If there’s one style of plugin we can’t get enough of, it’s a tape emulator. Whether they’re mimicking the charmingly nostalgic lo-fi sound of a Tascam four-track or the toasty analogue polish of a Studer A800, tape emulation tools can do all sorts of subtle but special things to digital audio. They're a cheap and cheerful way to bring a bit of ‘oomph’ to sterile soft synths, feeble drum loops or even an entire mix, and they’re a damn sight easier than working with the real thing.
It must be our lucky day, as the folks over at Universal Audio have added another tape emulator to their ever-expanding stable of native plugins, making the Empirical Labs FATSO Tape Simulator (originally released in 2009) available for those that don’t own UA hardware.
Technically, FATSO isn’t a tape emulation plugin – it’s an emulation of an emulation, recreating Empirical Labs’ venerable Full Analogue Tape Simulator and Optimiser (FATSO) in software. Squeezing saturation, distortion and compression into a single piece of hardware, FATSO is a one-stop shop for reproducing the character, warmth and glue associated with magnetic tape, valve preamps, vintage transformers and analogue compressors.
Developed in partnership with Empirical Labs’ Dave Derr, UA’s software version arrives in two plugins, FATSO Jr and FATSO Sr. The former faithfully reproduces the controls of the original hardware and its ear-pleasing analogue-style saturation, while the latter adds more options, including variable transformer saturation, sidechain filtering, and extra compressor parameters.
3. Song Athletics Song Keys
Formats: VST3, AU | Platforms: macOS, Windows | Price: £29 | Find out more
Launched in 2023, Song Athletics is an audio brand headed up by Will Evans, former CEO of Spitfire Audio. The company has since made its mark with a series of top-quality sample packs and virtual instruments, some of them given away for free.
The latest plugin from Song Athletics promises to put all of your essential keys in a single go-to VST, bringing together eight meticulously multi-sampled bread-and-butter tones under one roof.
You get two acoustic pianos, a Bösendorfer 225 grand and an Eavestaff Pianett upright, and a single electric piano, a Rhodes MKI Stage 73. These are joined by two analogue synths: the much-loved Roland SH-101 and the legendary Juno-106, which has been used to record two characterful pads and a bright, punchy lead sound. There are a handful of built-in effects onboard too.
Perfect for those days that you simply cannot be bothered to dig through the 41,000-strong Omnisphere 3 library for two hours hunting for the right preset, Song Keys serves up a curated set of reliable and familiar sounds for keyboard players that want to stop scrolling and start playing.
4. Emergence Audio Envoy
Formats: Kontakt 8.1+ | Platforms: macOS, Windows | Price: $149 | Find out more
If you’re an in-the-box beatmaker that’s curious about experimenting with analogue drum machines but the likes of Hexdrums and Analog Rytm are out of your price range, then Emergence Audio might have the next best thing.
Envoy is a Kontakt instrument built on a vast library of 600 percussion sources made using analogue percussion synthesizers and Eurorack, with ten round robins per source and 273 presets. These aren’t your bog-standard kicks, snares and hi-hats, however: Envoy’s library is made up of abstract, textural and cinematic sounds suited for use in film and television scoring, ambient and experimental electronic music.
Just as important as Envoy’s sounds is the way that the instrument lets you sequence and manipulate them.
Designed from the ground up to produce rhythmic patterns animated by movement, instability and variation, Envoy is equipped with two independent sequencers that can run together or at different rates, each one containing up to 32 steps with per-step velocity, pitch, length, pan, and filtering. Switch on Envoy’s Flux Randomizer, and probabilistic randomization will be applied to these parameters to create evolving, unpredictable sequences that can be tweaked even further using its seven effects modules.
5. Cableguys TimeStop
Formats: VST/AU/AAX | Platforms: macOS, Windows | Price: $16 | Find out more
Cableguys is on a mission to take time-tested production tricks – sidechain compression, for example – and make them fast, fun and easy to achieve. The company’s latest plugin, TimeStop, does exactly that with the classic tape-stop effect. Often used as a transition between sections or as an outro, the tape-stop mimics the sound of a tape or vinyl record rapidly slowing down in both pitch and tempo.
There are a handful of ways to add a tape-stop to your track: you can achieve it in Ableton Live using only stock plugins by bouncing the relevant portion of a track to audio, dropping it in an instance of Sampler and automating the pitch bend. Though it's not exactly a time-consuming process, it’s admittedly a bit of a faff.
TapeStop streamlines this process by sitting on the original track and slowing down incoming audio via its central Pitch knob. To get the tape-stop effect, just load up an instance of the plugin, record or automate a well-timed knob-twist, and voila. There’s also a handy stop button with adjustable timing, and two additional tape-stop modes: Modern drops the pitch without slowing down the timing, and Loop adds in a stutter effect for DJ-style fills and transitions.
