Sugar Bytes Plug-ins

These filters make an appearance in some shape or form in five of the six products under review here. All are available only as downloads from the Sugar Bytes web site, in VST (Windows and Mac) and Audio Units (Mac only) plug-in formats, and are authorised simply by entering a serial number.

Effectrix presents the user with a 32 x 14-cell grid. Each different effect type has its own row in the grid, and the 32 columns represent beats and sub-beats in the incoming audio. Clicking and dragging within the grid creates horizontal bars, indicating that a particular effect is to be applied at a particular point in the measure. So, for instance, you could apply filtering to the first bar, phasing to the second, both together to the third, and bring things to a close in the fourth bar with one of those switching-off-the-turntable slowdowns. Clicking on the name of an effect brings up its parameters for editing, while you can also bypass effects or empty their lanes with single clicks. On top of this, each effect has its own presets and two 32-step sequencers, which are edited in the larger lane below the main grid. You can set different values for each step by ‘painting’ with the mouse.

The grid can be scaled up and down relative to the tempo of the song, so you can use Effectrix to generate anything from slow filter sweeps to furious, broken-up, glitchy rhythm patterns. What’s more, you can create up to 12 different grid and step sequencer setups and assign these to the notes on a MIDI keyboard, allowing you to switch instantly between different patterns, and there are handy copy, paste and randomise functions to make the process as painless as possible.

The range of effects will keep most users busy for a good long time, and covers most of the obvious bases, with a few novelties thrown into the mix, though I can imagine that some people will miss a ‘kill EQ’. The quality of the effects themselves is a little variable. I liked the vinyl effects, the filter and the phaser, while the ‘tonal delay’ mainly produces a metallic ringing sound, which is a bit of an acquired taste. I’m not quite sure how bit-crushers manage to sound so different, but they do, and I didn’t like this one at all — it sounds fizzy and thin, rather than crunchy or brutal.

You can have as many effects active at once as you like, but only one zone can be selected for editing. Most effects have three or four main editable parameters, and each of these can have its own, independent modulation source: envelopes, LFOs, envelope followers and step sequencers are available.

All the Effectrix effects are included, again all with their own presets, but there are several worthwhile additions. These include a three-band EQ that can be used to kill the low or high end, a ring modulator, a vocoder and a ‘karaoke’ effect, which is presumably designed to attenuate vocals. You can have more than one of the same processing module, which allows you to do things like set up a whole range of vinyl scratching effects across the keyboard.

The best thing about both Effectrix and Artillery2 is that they are clearly designed to fulfil a specific brief, and they do so very well. Everything that can possibly be sync’ed to host tempo is, and both of these plug-ins are powerful and very intuitive in use. You don’t even really need a MIDI keyboard to get results from Artillery2: clicking with the mouse on the on-screen notes works pretty well. If you DJ with a program like Ableton Live and use its built-in effects, I don’t think you’ll notice a huge leap in quality when you add these two plug-ins, but you’ll certainly extend the existing possibilities for real-time mayhem. And as the review period wore on, I found myself turning to Artillery2 more and more often in a conventional music-production context, not because it sounds especially unique, but because it enabled me to do things that would have taken four or five times as long using other plug-ins. For example, where similar material recurs several times in a project, Artillery2 makes it child’s play to apply different effects each time and add much-needed variety.

There are lots of plug-ins around that do the same things as Wow, but it’s a very likeable effect nonetheless. The filtering generally sounds rich and smooth, with the resonance control doing exactly what you’d expect, and the envelope follower picks up the dynamics of the source material very well. Everything is supremely easy to set up and manipulate, and the only real down side as far as I’m concerned is the distortion, which sounds horrible, but is thankfully unnecessary.

I must confess that in a typical music-production environment, the point of this plug-in escapes me. If you’re after an effects unit offering filtering and delay, there are hundreds of plug-ins that provide it in much more comprehensive fashion, and I have no idea why you’d want that functionality in a channel strip. Dynamic EQ can certainly be useful, but I personally like to have more control than is available here, and more visual feedback about what it’s doing to my signal. And whilst there’s certainly a place for plug-ins that emulate the warmth and dirt of analogue circuitry, the preamp stage here simply doesn’t sound very good to my ears. I suppose the main thing that Vogue has going for it compared with other channel-strip plug-ins is immediacy; where speed is more important than ultimate sound quality, it might enable you to quickly process a vocal or other lead line to sit against a backing track.

Like most plug-in vocoders, Robotronic works well both with vocals and other sources such as drum loops, though I found I needed to watch the output level carefully with percussive material. There are probably better-specified and smoother-sounding vocoders out there, but again, the emphasis here is on simplicity and ease of use, and I certainly found it quicker to get results here than with something like NI’s Vokator.