My favorite ways to distract myself from pending doom is consumerism, noise, and flashing lights. If you like the same, you may be in the right place!
Plugin Roundup
So a few plugin demos that I’ve tried recently are pretty interesting.
CableGuys Snapback is an very inexpensive plugin for adding pre-percussion effects that occur right before the sample/drums/whatever hit. Automating the main volume setting on the plugin is a nice way to set up builds that don’t sound as heavy handed as risers and things like that, nor as jarring as replacing one drum sample or pattern with another. I am using XLN XO mostly for percussion lately, so this works really well if you drag each drum track stem back to the DAW as an audio track.
Devious Machines Infiltrator 2 is very similar to CableGuys’s ShaperBox, but has a bit more powerful multi-effects. It’s not quite as intuitive, but also features a sequencer that can be used to turn effects on and off, and the sequencer runs separately from the various automation shapes. The multi-effects sound very good. Infiltrator is currently on sale for $97, and I could see it replacing ShaperBox for more aggressive adventures, and maybe still using CableGuys for slower subtle adjustments over a long track.
Devious Machines also has PitchMonster, which while I think most people would use it for vocals, is pretty effective for making monosynths a lot more interesting. It’s easy to input chords and there are a decent amount of knobs to play with, making it unlikely that you are going to get stuck surfing presets. I could see this, coupled with my guitar pedal strategy (below) as basically being the end of looking at VST synth instruments. PitchMonster is currently $74 - I think it works better than vocoder type plugins that I have tried so far, at least for what I do, and is easier to use.
Guitar Pedals, Re-Attached To Synths
My hardware synth setup is fun because I like adjusting knobs, and that’s why nothing I have has any kind of presets. Having lots to play with is important, and sometimes the thing that takes away my energy to make things happen the most is doing a lot inside a computer.
In order to make my sound design a lot more fun and spontaneous, I decided to try attaching them to a series of guitar pedals again, having a lot of unsold things from the last time I tried this.
This time, I decided to do it right - it wasn’t too fun having to add them as external effects in Bitwig, plus I really do like to use multiple different synths at the same time. Every synth needed it’s own pedal chain.
I ended up giving each of the analog synths (4) their own pedalboard - well technically two share a large one. It’s just going to be about 3 or 4 pedals each, and any time I want to rearrange them between synths I can.
Getting guitar pedals to work well with synths is not easy - many don’t work well at all, so I’ll share in a bit which ones are really playing nice and what is new and interesting (with some pictures) pretty soon.
The nice thing about guitar pedals is they take up a lot less space than synths, and if you really want a new thing there are always things going on and new ones to play with. If they don’t work out, you can usually sell them on Reverb for a fair amount and they don’t cost a ton to ship.