Signal Processors

If you are looking for effects and instruments to give your mixes a sideways slant, Cycling '74 might have just the thing...

For all those Pro Tools users who pine for the sound of analogue EQ, URS have recreated the equalisers from three classic mixing desks.

Surround-capable reverbs don't usually come with a price tag of £100. However, nobody seems to have told Voxengo. So just how good is their Pristine Space PC VST plug-in?

As well as more-or-less conventional vocoding and pitch-shifting, DelayDots' new VST plug-in offers effects so bizarre they almost defy description.

Sony's Oxford digital mixers are out of many people's reach, but Pro Tools and Powercore users can now get their hands on the Oxford's sophisticated processing tools.

Antares certainly don't believe in the 'less is more' maxim, if this new filtering effect is anything to go by.

Brief appraisals of another selection of software Plug-ins from Disco DSP, Cutter Music, Kjaerhus Audio and PSP.

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?

As well as a bundle of 50-plus effects plug-ins, Quantum FX provides all the tools you need to design your own.

Version 2 of Celemony's revolutionary pitch- and tempo-shifting software includes new features, better sequencer integration and an improved interface.

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

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.

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.

Native Instruments' flagship modular software synth has now reached version 4, dispensing with the dongle copy-protection that bothered v3 owners, adding many user-friendly features and allowing even greater scope for personalising your patches.

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

Although delay can be one of the most simple studio effects, software delay plug-ins often provide a bewildering array of options. So we take a look at what all the sliders and switches do, and provide advice on how best to use them.

Reverb is vital for most types of modern music production, so it's no surprise to find that many sequencers provide a variety of reverb plug-ins. But what do all those different parameters do?

There are many choices to make when equalising within your sequencer. Which type of EQ is best? How should you set up the different bands? Which controls do you need? We provide some answers...

Following on from our discussion of compression and limiting last month, let's look at how you can use the related processes of gating and expansion within your DAW.

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.