Plugin Boutique has published a new video in its Top 5 Friday series, in which Tim Cant takes a look at five plugins under £50 GBP.
This round-up includes Outer Space, Torsion, Decimort 2, TAL-Bassline-101 and Plugin Boutique’s very own Scaler, which I can recommend.
The Roland RE-20 Space Echo is a legendary studio delay unit thanks to its combination of tape and reverb. Back in the 1970s, making a durable tape echo machine was a tall order, but getting the perfect sound in your DAW is a lot easier these days.
AudioThing’s Outer Space is a bang-on copy of the Space Echo, giving you that legendary sound along with its analogue-esque time-warping Doppler delays, alongside control over the virtual tape quality, panning, the type of noise signal and even preamp options.
With its price tag of £49.96, Outer Space is a no-brainer for analogue delays to add spoons of spice to any track.
Actually now on version 2, Torsion is the little synth that can, and it really can!
Instead of stacking itself to the rafters with billions of oscillators, Torsion provides some relatively simple options for sound sources, and then sends them through a wave transformer, frequency shifter, filter FM and delay to enrich the sound in unusual ways.
From there on out, there’s distortion, filtering and loads of modulation, from envelopes, LFOs and Sinvibes’ own ‘Chaos Oscillator’, which is a two-dimensional signal that gives you more interesting results.
Torsion is a measly £34.96 to you, but watch out Windows-lovers, this one’s Audio Units only.
You love bitcrushing? Who doesn’t?! D16 Group’s incredible take on early digital audio systems is incredibly hard to beat for both its sound and its control set – and what’s more, it’ll only set you back 39 clams!
The main Resampler control degrades the signal both in bit depth and sample rate, and is sometimes all you need to get that dirty, crunchy, old-school sound. But if you want to go deeper, Decimort 2’s got you covered – there’s Jitter and Frequency Deviation, DC Offset, Frequency Shifting, and then a filter and an Image Filter to smooth it out in a musical way – it’s a laundry list of what makes bitcrushing awesome.
2. TAL-Bassline-101 – Togu Audio Line
Roland’s SH-101 was a simple synth, but that might be the reason it changed the history of electronic music. TAL’s virtual version is just as simple, and so is the price: ringing up to only £46 pounds.
It’s been calibrated and tuned to match the dev’s own unit, giving you the classic acid sound with little to no effort. There’s retro oscillators, filtering, upgraded envelopes, and an updated arpeggiator/sequencer section to get those burbling bass lines cranked out!
Scaler was already a great tool to crack the code of music theory, but it’s just got a lot better with its version 1.5 upgrade. This plugin can detect the key you’re playing in, lets you choose and audition chord progressions, and will suggest the missing parts of the musical puzzle. When you’ve got a sequence of chords you love, just drag it out into your DAW to get the MIDI into your project.
Version 1.5 now adds a fretboard display, a parallel harmony function, and even an arpeggiator, making it a one-stop shop for all your electronic composition needs. If that’s not convinced you to get Scaler already, how about the price? £39.95.
Download the free trial versions of these plugins from Plugin Boutique and see how you like them!
More information: Plugin Boutique
