Top 5 Friday | Filters

Top 5 Friday - Best Filter Plugins (VST / AU)

5. PSP Audioware PSP stompFilter

It’s the moving, animated filter that takes its inspiration from guitar stompboxes. StompFilter is a filter, sure, but the idea behind this one is that it’s paired with an LFO, creating rhythmic movement in your track. Actually, stompFilter isn’t just triggered by an LFO, it can also be triggered by the envelope of the sound going through it – auto-wah style – or both the envelope and its internal LFO.

That filter itself is one from a choice of low-, band- or high-pass models, there’s also adjustable LFO randomness, soft saturation and an output limiter. stompFilter is a steal at just £55.50 / $69.

4. Soundtoys FilterFreak

This one’s a dual filter, designed to be animated. Whether you’re cranking two low-pass filters, a low- and a high-, or any other combination of the two, FilterFreak’s LFO will make them come alive. The filters themselves are well-modelled and analogue-style, as you’d expect from Soundtoys, thanks to their habit of bringing the responses of hardware gear into the modern age.

FilterFreak really comes alive when you open the Rhythm Editor. This lets you move the filters with far more complex LFO patterns, effectively varying the rate over time to make wobs and other patterns. It’s a classic, but at £145 / $149, it’s not getting any younger…

3. Cableguys FilterShaper 3

There’s another version of FilterShaper, which runs as a shaper in Cableguys’ ShaperBox plugin, but here we’re talking about the big daddy – and FilterShaper Core comes with this when you buy it anyway. FilterShaper 3 hands you two filters, each with cutoff, resonance and drive. You also get control over two LFOs and an envelope follower, which you can link to the filter parameters or global ones.

Of course, being Cableguys, there’s a hell of a lot of editing capability for the LFOs themselves. You can click and drag nodes to create practically any shape you like, and running things from calm standard LFO waves to insane animated wob patterns and loads more. It’s £59.95 / $74.00.

2. iZotope Mobius Filter

Not your usual filter-and-go plugin, Mobius Filter actually uses many parallel filters that move at the same time. The result is a sort of barber pole effect but for filtering, making us think that a filter cutoff is forever rising or falling. In many ways, this effect sounds like flanging, but technically it’s a filter plugin, so get off our case, alright?

The result is an effect that will whip up risers or flange-style tones in seconds. It’s run off constant LFO movement by default, but there’s an X/Y control that lets you take control of the sweeps yourself. All this flanging – erm, filtering – is yours for just £45 / $49. Not bad.

1. Vengeance Sound Philta XL

Standing at just £40 / $55 tall, Philta XL gives you two filters that can work individually or together to carve space out of your channels. Each of the filters can be set individually to between 12 and 96 dB slopes, and there’s adjustable input and output gain for the entire plugin as well.

For modulation, you can get your hands on two LFOs and two envelope followers for auto-wah. There’s filter saturation, ring modulation, and an output limiter. It’s practically everything you could ever want from a filter plugin, and you get it all for a cheap and cheerful price.