Big Tick Rainbow
Plug-in Folder
Reviews : Software: ALL
+ Decimate
Formats: Mac and PC VST
I'll have to hold my hand up and admit that I have a minor fixation with distortion effects. There are dozens of VST distortion plug-ins available, and I think I must have tried them all at one time or another. Some claim to emulate overdriven analogue hardware, while others talk in shamelessly digital terms about bit reduction, aliasing and various other things I don't understand. Frankly, it's all the same to me. If it's a plug-in that makes stuff noisy, I'm interested.
+Decimate is a plug-in that's capable of making stuff very noisy indeed, and doing so in an extremely pleasing way. It's been developed by Tom Erbe, a man probably best-known as the brains behind every Mac user's favourite freeware audio-mangler Sound Hack. Both are available for free download from www.soundhack.com. +Decimate works best as an insert effect, and is childishly easy to use. The first of two sliders allows you to reduce the bit depth of the processed audio, from 32 down to 1 bits. Fewer bits means more distortion, and at the lowest settings the sound is frighteningly harsh.
The second slider controls the amount of a process called 'averaging' to be applied. Averaging seems to have the effect of rounding off the rough edges, and at medium settings can warm up the mayhem considerably. With both sliders set to their extremes, the input sound is barely recognisable, and some fascinating special-effects noises can be generated from even the most mundane source material.
+Decimate is available in versions for Windows, Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X, and is the first in a promised series of free VST plug-ins from this source. If the quality of subsequent efforts matches this, there'll soon be more reasons to be grateful to Mr Erbe! Paul Sellars 
www.soundhack.com
Big Tick Rainbow
Formats: PC VST and stand-alone
Developed by Big Tick software for PC only, Rainbow is currently at version 2.2, and can be run either as a VST Instrument or as a stand-alone soft synth. It offers quite a variety of synthesis types including FM, AM, additive, and subtractive, and features up to four identical oscillators per voice, and up to 24-voice polyphony depending on CPU power.
Each oscillator has a choice of four waveforms or noise, along with its own envelope generator and overall level control, and you can also modify the wave shapes themselves in a variety of ways including rectification and variable distortion. Since oscillators can be used as LFOs or FM modifiers as well as audio sources, there is also a separate slider to set the amount reaching the main audio mix output. Alongside the main oscillator controls, a further set of four sliders allows you to frequency-modulate any oscillator using any combination of the other three, or itself -- self-modulation is a useful way to create very low harmonics for deep bass sounds. Four buttons beneath these allow amplitude modulation using the same sources. AM multiplies the two oscillators together; if one of them is in LFO mode you can achieve simple tremolo effects, while higher frequencies create sum and difference harmonics.
The combined output from the four oscillators is then passed through one or two resonant filters in series, and then fed into a left/right pair of delay lines, each with LFO control and cross-feedback, to add stereo chorus effects. A further Pitch section provides another generator to control the global pitch envelope, along with buttons for Portamento (glide), Mono/Poly, and Finger mode. The Because so many plug-ins default to stereo operation, it's easy to forget that there are sound creative reasons why you might want to use them in mono. Most sequencers will provide some way of mono-ising the output of a stereo effect, but they don't always make it easy. In Cubase, for instance, you can't do this to the output of a Send effect, but you could always use the same plug-in as an insert in a Group Channel and pan both halves of the Group Channel centrally. In both Logic and Cubase, you can achieve the same effect by putting a mono plug-in in series following a stereo plug-in. If you have an amp simulator such as Amp Farm, you can fake very tightly double-tracked guitars from a single recorded guitar part. Copy the part and pass it through two instances of the plug-in with different amp settings, and pan them left and right. Mike Senior
latter is very useful for bass lines, allowing staccato notes to emerge normally but activating glide when a second note is played while a first is held. There's also a step sequencer holding up to 16 steps, which you can either sync to the host application or run separately.
Plug-in Tips
If you don't have a harmonic enhancer plug-in such as Aphex's Aural Exciter, you can often press distortion and amp-simulation effects into service instead (turn off any cabinet or speaker emulation if you're using the latter, since this cuts out most frequencies above 3kHz or so). At low levels of distortion, these can produce second- and third-order harmonics which are quite similar to those generated by enhancers.
You can create many classic synth sounds using Rainbow, and in the six available banks of 32 presets you can find analogue leads, powerful basses, lush or glassy FM pads, pianos, bells, and arpeggiated sequences. Overall sound quality is very good, and the only down side is a higher than normal CPU overhead -- at more than double that of NI's Pro 52 or Steinberg's Model E, it pays to watch your polyphony or go monophonic. For me, the beauty of Rainbow is its combination of waveform distortion, FM, AM, and analogue synthesis, which lets it produce many sounds quite unlike other soft synths. I spent a long time creating patches, simply because there were so many new directions to explore. Martin Walker
70 Euros.
www.chez.com/rainbowvst
PSP PianoVerb
Formats: Mac and PC VST
Is it my imagination, or are free plug-ins getting better and better? Not so very long ago, it was rare to find one that was capable of producing any kind of really professional-sounding results. Sure, there were some nice little gadgets around for spitting out noise and distortion but, generally speaking, the kinds of plug-ins you needed to add a nice, polished sparkle to your mixes would cost you money. Usually quite a lot of money.
Well, the times certainly appear to be a-changing. Those nice people at Professional Sound Projects (www.PSPaudioware.com), probably best known for their highly-regarded MixPack bundle, have just released a new freeware VST plug-in which, in terms of sheer sound quality, could easily match certain commercial products I might mention. PSP's PianoVerb, available for both Mac and PC, is a novel variation on a conventional reverb effect. While most reverbs work by attempting to simulate the acoustic properties of different rooms and halls, PianoVerb instead models a particular kind of reverberant behaviour exhibited by tuned piano strings. Twelve 'string operators' are used, each tuned to a different interval, covering a range of between 55 and 103.8 Hz. There are controls for transposing and detuning this 'string system' as required.
In use, PianoVerb is capable of producing a wide range of effects. With the string system tuned to the higher registers, and with the Decay and Damping controls set high and low respectively, a variety of strange metallic, harp-like tones can be produced. Used as an insert effect, with the original signal mixed out altogether, PianoVerb can generate some very effective 'ambient' washes of sound. With the string system transposed down a couple of octaves, however, and with more cautious settings for the Mix and Decay knobs, PianoVerb is also capable of producing some surprisingly convincing 'normal' reverb sounds. Some of these tend more towards springs than concert halls, but with a bit of tweaking you can find artificial 'room' sounds that are really very usable in the context of a mix -- more so than some conventional reverb plug-ins I've heard.
All things considered, it's basically impossible to fault PianoVerb. It's an original idea, well implemented, and it sounds excellent. Moreover, it's available now for free download from the PSP web site. What are you waiting for? Quick, before they change their minds! Paul Sellars
www.pspaudioware.com
Stylus is billed as the first virtual instrument to use Spectrasonics' Groove Control technology, and provides a huge library of 'virtual vinyl' loops along with an interface designed to allow maximum control over them. Atmosphere is dedicated to pad sounds, while Trilogy is a bass synth providing electric, acoustic and synth basses. A comprehensive range of playing styles is incorporated along with a new 'True Staccato' technology, which is claimed to provide more realistic articulation of repeated notes.
The only third-party virtual synth that will currently run on Digidesign's TDM cards is the Access Virus, which is claimed in its software incarnation to sound identical to the keyboard. Now Access have announced that they will be making their synthesis technology available to those with VST-based setups through the planned development of plug-ins for TC Works' PowerCore card, although no detailed product announcements have been made. Meanwhile, the TDM Virus itself has been upgraded, and the latest Virus Indigo version supports Digidesign's new HD systems, runs at up to 96kHz, and adds a third oscillator plus new effects algorithms.
With so many plug-ins available you might think that there were no new effects left to discover, but Software Technology are determined to prove you wrong! The latest product from the makers of Vaz Modular is Anarchy Effects, a bundle of five weird and wonderful plug-ins. Spectral Autopan is a multi-band auto-panner, Harmonic Adder is a resonator and Length Separator allows you to treat and pan the transient elements of a signal differently from its sustained tones. Convoluter "applies a convolution matrix to the spectral representation of the input signal," thus "bending the sound along the continuum between pure sine tones and pure noise," while Corkscrew "mixes together multiple pitch-shifts of the input signal, increasing or decreasing their pitches in parallel, and fading them in/out at the extremes of their range. This creates the illusion of a sound that seems to continually rise or fall, but doesn't actually change in average pitch." The Anarchy Effects bundle is available now for PC platforms in VST 2 format, and is priced at £25.52.
Plug-in News
Spectrasonics chose the recent NAMM show to launch their first foray into virtual instruments. Three separate plug-ins have been announced so far, each boasting a new 3Gb sample library dedicated to a particular family of sounds. Each also has its own distinct sample-replay engine, with controls tailored to the type of sounds being produced. This makes operation more like a synth than a sampler, with the ability to layer two sounds, each with their own filter and envelope settings. There are three instruments, each available in Mac and PC VST, RTAS and MAS versions.
www.spectrasonics.net
www.tcworks.de
www.software-technology.com
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Sound On Sound : Est. 1985