New Plugin Week With Arturia's Acid V & Baby Audio's Transit
This week there are two new really great VSTs out!
First up, Arturia finally released a 303!
There really haven’t been many 303 plugins lately that have been kept updated, and this one has a great distortion circuit and three easy to use mod envelopes. One catch — unless I’m using it wrong — it appears that MIDI portamento/glide with overlapping notes is not automatic, so it may warrant some automation of the “slide” button on your clip envelopes to get that sound going if you’re used to MIDI programming everything. That glide is half the fun.
This came at the right time as I’m gravitating towards more minimal/spacey/acid techno anyway. Stick some chords under the track with Dune 3 and you’ve pretty much got heaven right there.
303s are also great for tracks where you don’t want to do a lot of composition. My usual problem is I introduce too much melodic variation or too many instruments, and then I end up never uploading my tracks because everything sounds nice in short clips but the whole song ends up a mess. Slower evolutions are better. For music to be properly hypnotic, it needs to both be repetitive and also have interesting timbral variation - something that the 303 just has in spades. Planning out song structure in advance is also important, perhaps there are only a few themes with some transitions between them. Hmm, I wonder if there’s going to be something about that in the back half of this blog post?
Acid V also sounds particularly good with different VST instances/presets playing the same notes panned left and right. The various presets have a lot of timbral variation and the distortion circuit helps a great bit - with options like Germanium and Tube distortions, there’s a lot here and they all mesh very well with the 303’s sound. I’m likely to turn off built-in effects and use my own delays, but the ones here are very good — including the delay and the Juno-6 chorus. I do find with the rather basic waveforms, the phaser and flanger don’t have a lot to bite into — a reason why I’ve never really been into phasers and flangers with analog monosynths. Speaking of hardware monosynths though, this does blend very well with them. MORE SYNTHS! YESSSSSSSSSS.
Now, since I was talking about compositions and effects and transitions, the one thing that would help immensely help making some long repetitive and spacey tracks would be some better transition-making tools…. and then boom, Baby Audio announces Transit just a few days later!
While I hadn’t been using their effects plugins too much before, Baby Audio recently hit it out of the park with a really nice SH-101 emulation that I wrote about recently - there are definitely a plugin vendor to watch along with Aberrant DSP.
Transit is essentially one big button that maps to 8 different effects, which can be easily automated via clip or track automation.
All the various effects can be reordered, swapped out, turned off, or randomized. It’s the same general idea as the somewhat cliched “Endless Smile” Trance effect but much more flexible.
Some of the presets can sound a bit washed out when turned to 100, but in general it encourages experimentation and ignoring presets altogether.
Now I’m off to make some extremely long sets that nobody is going to want to listen to! Hooray!
The general theme here is that easier to use tools are better - because they encourage experimentation and you’ll use them more. (I try to do that in my software projects as well).
Perhaps I’ll share some pics of the “studio” at night a bit later — it’s up to three lava lamps now, not counting the laser projectors! (I’m quite serious).