Plug-ins

This Voice Modeler plug-in is designed to change the character of a recorded vocal, adding breathiness, chest resonance and 'growl', and allowing you to modify inflection and vibrato.

The biggest music technology manufacturer in the world has stuck to hardware — until now. Do Yamaha's first plug-in processors have what it takes to compete with the big names in Mac and Windows software?

Sound Toys claim that their new plug-in captures the sound of an analogue filter in digital form. We put it to the test...

We check out two more useful plug-ins, one for Powercore and one for PC VST/Direct X.

Novation's V-Station plug-in provided a software version of their hardware K-Station — now there's a software version of their mid-'90s hardware monophonic analogue bass synths, the BassStation and BassStation Rack...

Convolving reverbs are coming down in price as more manufacturers make their own. We check out Emagic's new plug-in, which is one of the more affordable ones around, but still allows you to create your own reverbs from favourite spaces.

There's already a decent range of products providing digital emulations of vintage guitar amps, but iZotope's Direct X plug-in goes a lot further, offering no fewer than seven processing modules, and is intended to model every kind of distortion you'll ever need.

Another crop of stimulating and essential plug-ins to whet your appetite...

TC's plug-in powerhouse is now available as an external Firewire-connected rack unit.

Just as Access's hardware Virus synth was followed by the snazzy Virus Indigo, so the TDM plug-in version for Pro Tools has benefited from an upgrade to Indigo status, making it more infectious than ever...

This Adobe Premiere plug-in has now been ported to two different real-time plug-in formats: VST (for Mac OS 9, OS X and Windows) and Apple's new Audio Unit standard (for OS X).

Formats: Creamware SFP

TC Works were in at the start of the software plug-in explosion back in 1998. We check out their latest update to the Native Bundle suite.

We check out Wave Arts Power Couple • Nomad Factory Liquid Bundle • Digitalfishphones Fish Fillets • Professional Sound Projects PSP84.

The latest plug-in for the TC Powercore card allows you to extract frequency responses from commercial tracks and apply them to your own mixes.

This plug-in produces essentially the same results as its analogue rackmount counterparts, so if you already know and like the BBE process, you should take no convincing.

Voxengo's Curve EQ is a 'linear phase spline equaliser' with a 2048-point filter kernel, which lets you draw highly complex responses using its graphic interface.

Although most major MIDI + Audio sequencing applications include bundled EQ, dynamics and reverb plug-ins, they don't always sound too great, so many users are on the lookout for alternatives, like these two from Wave Arts.

WaveMachine Labs' sophisticated DirectX plug-in allows you to replace the sounds of individual drums with samples, while keeping the human feel of a performance.

R3 comprises a five-band, fully parametric EQ design plus switchable-slope, variable-frequency high and low-pass filters.

Dominion is a 'signal modelling device' similar in concept to SPL's highly regarded Transient Designer dynamics processor, embodying characteristics of both compressors and expanders, yet without being either a compressor or an expander in the normal sense.