Archive for May, 2012

FabFilter Saturn

In the decade since the release of its first plug-in, One, FabFilter has made an indelible mark on the music production landscape. Saturn is a multiband saturation and distortion unit with the Fab’s famously flexible modulation routing system onboard, and the sort of well-designed, visually assistive interface that we’ve come to expect from the designers [...]

Sonokinetic Vivace

Of all musical genres, fully orchestral, Hollywood-style film music is perhaps one of the most difficult to pull off convincingly. Things have been looking up lately for bedroom-bound Barrys and Zimmers, though, largely thanks to companies like Sonokinetic, that seem hell-bent on providing ammunition for amateur scorists to raise the standard of their productions to [...]

Sonoris Mastering Compressor

Sonoris’ Mastering Compressor is a VST/AU/RTAS plug-in intended to deliver audiophile-standard compression. Every aspect of the design suggests that Sonoris has put clarity and transparency at the top of the priority list, and the developer claims it has completely eliminated the odd harmonic distortion that compressors usually exhibit. “Mastering Compressor represents a technological breakthrough: it’s the [...]

MusicDevelopments RapidComposer

RapidComposer is billed as a ‘music prototyping application’, which means that it’s designed to help you sketch out compositions. From our experience with it over an extended review period, we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s essentially based around an elaborate MIDI editor. Where this MIDI editor differs from that of a standard DAW is [...]

MeldaProduction MAutoDynamicEQ

We’ve reviewed quite a few MeldaProduction plug-ins in the past, and we’ve always come away impressed by their great depth and facility, often combined with multiband functionality. MAutoDynamicEQ is another multibander, but this one joins together two other Melda processors – Dynamic EQ and AutoEqualizer – in a 7-band EQ plug-in. “Having the most important parameters [...]

Eventide 2016 Stereo Room

Eventide’s recently launched Omnipressor plug-in is a full-on native recreation (VST/AU/AAX) of its hardware classic. However, it would seem the company has taken a more focused, less completist route with the 2016 Stereo Reverb plug-in, also a native release. It includes just one algorithm – Stereo Room – from the many reverbs, delays and effects [...]

u-he Diva

Two or three oscillators, multimode filters, dual envelope generators, a couple of LFOs and some effects. You’ve seen it all before – or so you might think. It’s true that we’ve been inundated with virtual analogue synths over the past decade, yet aficionados of vintage synths would have you believe that the beloved classics of [...]

Rob Papen Blade

Has additive synthesis become the hipster darling of the music production world? You might think so, were you to tick off all of the variations on the technology currently available. Developers seem hell-bent on simplifying the technology, bringing users its uniquely rich sounds without the headaches traditionally associated with additive instruments. “Blade entirely sidesteps the concept [...]