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Top 5 Friday | Best Drum Machines

Top 5 Friday | Drum Machines (VST / AU) 5. Plugin Boutique BigKick Yes, we’re naturally a bit biased towards this one, but BigKick is a drum machine plugin par excellence. It may only do one type of drum, but that drum is the one that’s in every electronic music track ever, and this vertical monster does it to death! Choose two samples and operate their decay time, and then dial in dynamics controls with Attach, Hold and Decay, set the pitch mod depth and curve type, as well as the

Top 5 Friday | Best Bitcrusher Plugins

Top 5 Friday | Best Bitcrushers (VST/AU) 5. kiloHearts Bitcrush Snapin This might just be a tiny little device with six controls to degrade your signal quality, but sometimes that’s all you want. The Bitcrush Snapin has the standard Rate and Bits controls, and they’re flanked by two converter quality controls, a Dither and a Mix control. No filter though. At £17 / $19, the Bitcrush Snapin is actually designed as a part of a larger ecosystem. Whether you’re using kiloHearts’ Multipas

Top 5 Friday | Best Vocoder Plugins

Top 5 Friday | Best Vocoder Plugins (VST/AU) 5.  XILS Lab XILS V+ Modelled off Roland’s classic VP330 vocoder hardware, the XILS virtual vocoder brings you classic features and some modern additions as well, for when you simply need to talk some smack in a robotic voice. Of course, if you want to make a vocoder, it’s got to be at least partly a synth, and the original Roland hardware was famous for both its string sounds and its emulation of the human voice, which gave access to epi

Top 5 Friday | Best Limiter Plugins

Top 5 Friday | Best Limiter Plugins (VST / AU) 5. Sonnox Inflator V3 Sonnox are a dependable name in the classic plugin stakes, and their Inflator limiter has been squashing tracks for years without complaining or breaking up. Coming from the world of traditional mixing and mastering engineering, the Sonnox approach is all about the analogue style, as demonstrated by the four main controls here. You get Output and Input faders to set your intended reduction, and then Curve and Effec

3 Tips to Improve Your Workflow | Swift Series

Whether you’re in a bedroom or a state of the art recording studio, having an established workflow is paramount to working efficiently when you’re producing music. By defining what techniques work for you and developing a reliable set of tools, you can streamline the music production process to help you finish more tracks, quicker. Workflow in the Digital Domain When creating music in the digital domain, it is common to be recording, producing, mixing and mastering entire tracks by you

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. Th

Top 5 Friday | Best De-Esser Plugins

Top 5 De-Esser Plugins (VST / AU) 5. Softube Weiss Deess With two bands of de-essing, modelled off a respected hardware processor, this one is for every hardware-head out there who absolutely demands analogue-style de-essing. Those circuit modelled deharashed tracks don’t come cheap though, knocking your wallet for £170. The compression algorithms used in Weiss Deess were taken from Softube’s Weiss DS1 Mk3 compressor plugin, and you also get advanced controls such as latency and sid

Top 5 Friday | Freaky Synths

Top 5 Friday - Freaky Synths (VST / AU) 5. Sinevibes Torsion Once you’ve got your head around the flat, graphical interface, this Mac-only plugin might appear to be more of the same – three oscillators routed into a filter. But Torsion’s oscillators actually work in a different way to many other synths: you start off with some pretty simple waveforms, which are then twisted up to become more complex, meaning that there’s a huge range of tone possible before the signal even hits that fi

Top 5 Friday | Digital EQs

Top 5 Friday - Digital EQ Plugins (VST / AU) 5. Photosounder SplineEQ It’s the EQ that every graphic designer wishes they could use as well. SplineEQ gives you Bezier splines to set the curvature for each band, so you can dial in unusual curves – asymmetrical ones, extra steep ones, and other weird shapes. As well as settings for each curve, SplineEQ lets you affect the entire plot at once, with controls for scaling gain and transposing to move the entire frequency set up and down.

Top 5 Friday | LoFi Plugins

Top Five LoFi Plugins (VST / AU) 5. Beatskillz That Thing This thing is a plugin called That Thing, which is a collaboration between Beatskillz and AudioThing. This lo-fi processor aims to recreate the sounds of classic gear as a multi-effect, with lots of particular and idiosyncratic effects to choose from. In That Thing, you get a choice of analogue-modelled chorus effects, plus vinyl, tape and tube recreation, to phatten up and give some character to individual tracks or buses.

Top 5 Friday | FREE Instrument Plugins

Top 5 Friday -  FREE Instrument Plugins 5. TAL TAL-Noisemaker With its two oscillators, two LFOs, ADSR, envelope editor, filter, frequency modulation, and four effects, Noisemaker is a pretty run-of-the-mill synth, but it’s exactly what makes this one so accessible and probably our favourite synth to whip up sounds with no fussing. One of the best touches in TAL-Noisemaker is how some panels can be folded down when you don’t need them, making it a to-the-point, straightforward synth

Top 5 Best Future Synth VSTi Plugins 2019

Futuristic Synths 5. Sugar Bytes Aparillo This plugin synth brings its digital stylings to more than one platform, being available both as a traditional plugin and on iOS. Aparillo gets its tones from FM synthesis, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it, with abstract symbols used to represent controls. The thing that really blasts Aparillo off into space, though, is the Orbiter panel. This is a visual modulation editor that arranges those symbols around a centre, where they ca

Top 5 Friday | Drum Synths

Your Guide to the Best Drum Synths (VST / AU) 5. iZotope BreakTweaker The second collaboration between iZotope and electronic supremo BT (the first being StutterEdit), BreakTweaker lets you program drum sounds, sequence rhythms with them, and then run wild, rawr!!! The sequencer lets you draw in patterns and run each lane at a different length, and even timing. You can select which MIDI note will play back each sound for one-shot play, or just run everything from the sequencer. B

Top 5 Friday | Creative Samplers To Spark Inspiration (VST / AU)

Your guide to the top 5 samplers to try when you need some creative inspiration (VST / AU) 5. Glitchmachines Palindrome Fade and morph between four samples with this pathfinding instrument. Each sample layer has granular controls over its playback, sure, but it’s what the connections between them that make Palindrome so interesting. You draw 16 points across the grid to animate morphing between each of the four samples – although there are path presets for instant action, too. Each

Top Compressor Plugins | Plugin Boutique

Best compressor plugins to make your tracks sound professional. Compressors are just one of the many tools in a music producers’ arsenal, useful for a range of applications including controlling level, emphasising elements or applying polish and glue to a mix. Here, we’re examining the compressor plugins that are on the market today, identifying their strengths and weaknesses and highlighting eight of the very best for achieving a cohesive and professional sound. How to choose a compre

Top 5 Friday | Delay and Echo Plugins

Top 5 Friday - Delay and Echo Plugins  In this week's Top 5 Friday, producer Tim Cant explores five of the most popular delay plugins available on Plugin Boutique. They are...   5. SphereDelay (WA Production) This one’s a solid, four-mode delay that’s easy to reach for and won’t hurt your budget, coming in at £45 RRP. Those four modes – Mono, Stereo, and two Ping Pong varieties – give you plenty of starting points to build a delay sound quickly and simply. Next, you can cr