Native Instruments delivers a crushing blow with its new plugin pack

By Ben Rogerson
published

The Crush Pack is full of filthy flavours

Native Instruments has followed up its Mod Pack of plugins with the Crush Pack, which offers bitcrushing, stompbox-style distortion, ring modulation, amplitude modulation, frequency shifting and other effects.

These are spread across three plugins: Bite, a bitcrusher and sample rate reducer; Dirt, which deals with distortion; and Freak, a multimode modulator. The plugins’ capabilities are demonstrated by 234 presets.

Bite is designed to deliver ‘80s-style digital crunch - think early hip-hop and dance music - while Dirt is based on a range of stompboxes and includes signal routing, blending and wavefolding options. Freak, meanwhile, gives you three modulation types, and covers everything from retro radio lo-fi effects to AM, ring mod and frequency-shifting techniques.

The Effects Series - Crush Pack is available now for PC and Mac in VST/AU/AAX formats and costs $69/£59/€69. Owners of the Mod Pack, meanwhile, can have it for $44/£37/€44. Find out more on the Native Instruments (opens in new tab) website.

Ben Rogerson
Ben Rogerson

I’m the Deputy Editor of MusicRadar, having worked on the site since its launch in 2007. I previously spent eight years working on our sister magazine, Computer Music. I’ve been playing the piano, gigging in bands and failing to finish tracks at home for more than 30 years, 24 of which I’ve also spent writing about music and the ever-changing technology used to make it.