Alone though, Disperser just makes for some really neat sounds. Allpass filters are fun in a way that's difficult to quantify… just try it.
Distortion
Essentially a waveshaper with 5 preset shapes. The spread control is a neat control to add per-channel bias (DC offset).
I'm not entirely sure what the dynamics control is doing. It seems like it's taking the envelope of the input signal, and applying it to the output signal. Something like an upwards expander on the output that's sidechained to the input.
Ensemble
Faturator
Faturator seems to be similar to the distortion effect with the i/o sidechained dynamics, except I personally just never could make it sound good.
The 'stereo turbo' knob appears to be a simple haas effect, and the colour knob a pre-emphasis filter.
I'm just not a fan of this one when Distortion offers more colours and more parameters for modulation.
Frequency Shifter Plugin
Filter
Here lies one of the most disappointing corners of Phase Plant. It's a simple filter/single-band-EQ without any fun filter emulations, drive, oscillation or… anything cool.
There are two other types of filters available, but compared to other synths on the market the selection is quite disappointing.
Then again, this isn't a subtractive synth that depends heavily on filters to sound good. It could be argued that such a selection of filters isn't necessary, but filters are fun and especially so when there's an easily accessible modulation system available.
You can, of course, abuse other effects and modulation to get a filter sound close to some analog emulation if you wanted. It's just a bit more work.
Flanger
Take a signal, clone it, delay the clone and change the delay time. Here you get even more with modulations of the modulation of the delay time of the clone. Offset and Motion controls adjust the modulation (and offset) of the delay modulation signal, and you get the typical delay/depth/rate controls.
Spread appears to change the phase of the modulation per channel and you can feedback into the delay.
Using Flanger and the simplest of generators you can create some really cool morphing sounds. I'm glad kHs gave some love to the undervalued flanger.
(note: you can modulate the modulators that modulate the modulated delay! Try an LFO on the motion control and sit back to enjoy the variation in your sound that will keep you interested for an entire song. That offset control is made for modulation!)
Formant Filter
Vowel sounds! Woo.
Basically two filters setup to boost and resonate at a given frequency that mimics the sound of a spoken human vowel.
The interface is pleasantly easy to use and recognize what's occurring, and modulation is assignable for X/Y without hassle.
A more interesting feature is that you can click ‘Lows' or ‘Highs' to chop up the spectrum below or above the filters. Stacking these in lanes with the low/highs turned off can make for some interesting results.
Utilized with an Envelope, potentially tied to an LFO or two, Formant Filter opens itself up to creating some fun voice-like sounds and deep growling basses. A lot of modern music is based around formant-filtered basses, and Phase Plant makes it surprisingly easy to get started.
Frequency Shifter
Pitch shifters maintain harmonic relationships, Frequency Shifters do not.
Frequency Shifter is about as simple as it gets, and thankfully it shows the actual shifted distance. I personally rarely use frequency shifters, but they've become a major part of the sound design world recently. For those that want it, I suspect the simplicity will be appreciated.
Gain
Gain, duh.
Glad it's here, and that it's easy to use.
Gate
Gates are usually not very complex, but Phase Plant's gate is curiously useful.
You get the normal controls: threshold, attack, release, hold, range, hysteresis (tolerance knob) and look-ahead. Cool. Notably the attack sounds very good for a gate.
There's an invert control that makes the gate keep low level signals and kill higher amplitude signals. Extremely useful for adding subtle effects to a patch that don't stand out too much. Combine it with an identical gate in another lane, but not inverted. Now you can have effects that are amplitude dependent without relying on modulation. I love using gate for these sort of ‘levels of sound'
Once again the sidechain is super easy to use.
It's surprising to me that an abnormally specced gate is in a synthesizer, and even more surprising how much fun I have using it.
Though… that unscaled threshold still annoys me.
Haas
Delay one channel. Makes things sound wider. Turns your signal into a comb filter in mono.
Ladder Filter
The venerable Moog Ladder Filter. The DSP for this is described all over the internet, and I can't say that this sounds particularly unique.
I'm not saying that it isn't a unique implementation, it very well may be, but it doesn't sound particularly unique to me.
It's nice that they have at least one emulated filter though. (The Diode mode does sound pretty cool though)
Limiter
4 controls, and once again a threshold/input level control that isn't scaled.
It's alright for low gain reduction limiting, but…
It does an incredible job when you really push it. I was quite surprised when I decided to just abuse it with 20dB+ of gain reduction on simple patches and there was nastiness. More complex patches started to show its limitations (hah). Not many synths come with limiters and I can say that I'm not only not disappointed with Phase Plant's limiter, but I'm surprisingly impressed by it.
I'll have to spend some time with it in Multipass.
Phase Distortion
Phase distortion as an effect is a unique addition. The idea is essentially like an all-pass filter that works relative to harmonics rather than to a fixed filter corner. I would guess that it's some sort of modulation of the signal by a saturated version of itself? Maybe?
As interesting as it is, I rarely found use for it. You're basically forced to limit the bandwidth of your signal post-phase distortion with the tone knob, and most of the parameters sound strange when modulated.
I did experiment with the sidechain to see if that helped any, and it still didn't yield particularly musical results.
I would suspect that phase distortion would be a key to getting more ‘analog-like signals' with offset harmonics, but I just wasn't able to utilize this effect for that purpose successfully.
Phaser
Allpass filters, but modulated. There's no cool bonuses here, and it's a bit sad that there's no control for the number of filters.
Pitch Shifter
Oh hey, a pretty decent sounding pitch shifter.
The jitter effect is really neat. It's a modulation on the pitch shifting that gives you a flanger-like/unison-like sound.
Controlling grain size is fun, especially with modulation. A neat trick I've enjoyed using is an envelope on the grain size (pitch shifter set to an octave), so that you get this gentle peak of a vibrato-like effect. It almost feels like a singer's voice straining a bit when they really push their range. Toss on a Formant Filter and have something pretty neat.
Resonator
Resonators are cool. Phase Plant's resonator is cool. Two types of resonance (harmonic sequences/shapes) combined with the modulation system is fun.
I do wish that the timber was a continuously variable parameter. That would add another dimension to the versatility of the resonator.
I also feel somewhat limited with only 3 parallel effects lanes for the resonator. Some impressive physical modeling can be done with parallel resonator banks, but that's not easily achievable in Phase Plant.
Reverb
I can't stand the reverb. It has that metallic, non-diffuse character that sounds amateurish. It might be OK for some very dense sounds, but anything percussive or simple… the reverb just sounds nasty.
Maybe you like that grainy ‘filtered delays' sound, then you'll be happy. If you're expected a dense, diffuse and modulated reverb then… sorry.
Reverser
Buffer-based delay reversing. Signal is split into buffers of a given size, delayed by that buffer sized, then reversed.
The crossfade parameter is useful, particularly when used with modulation. Try it with an envelope or MIDI Note to give your reversed delay a more smooth character as the sound develops or as you move around the keyboard.
Ring Mod
Signal * Carrier.
It's really cool how much control that you are given over the carrier, and the 4 carriers your get (Low-passed Noise, Bandpassed Noise, Self and Sine).
It does appear that the display doesn't work correctly for the sideband or self modulators though? Maybe it's intentional, but if so then it's confusing.
Slice EQ
Stereo
Mid/side control and a balance control that's improperly named 'pan'.
There's a neat meter that shows you both the width and the 'center' of the stereo spread as well.
Tape Stop
Trance Gate
It would be a good bit cooler if you could control an arpeggiator from it as well, but since it's an effect on the output, not the input, you're stuck with just a gate. A cool gate, but just a gate.
There are 8 different gate patches available, but you can't modulate patch selection (or sequence point on/off status). Meh.
Transient Shaper
The 'Pump' parameter is an interesting addition that creates a bit of a lull in the signal that further emphasizes the attack and release.
The sidechain parameter is even cooler still. You can craft your own sound to adjust the envelope of another. Extremely useful for creating a drum sound, creating an extreme envelope and then applying that through the transient shaper. Much easier than messing with envelopes and offers you some extra control.
- Navigating the interface means interacting with small scroll bars. After 4+ devices anywhere, you'll be interacting with those awful little scrollbars constantly.
- Selection of effects and generators and modulators is rather small compared to competing products. See the conclusion however!
- Adding generators before existing generators is a pain. You have to add it at the bottom, then drag it up. Very annoying.
- Lots of scrolling to deal with even a modest number of modules.
- I dislike the generators automatically routing. I can appreciate that this makes things quicker to use, but removing a module from the signal path is 2 extra steps, and I find myself doing that more often than being happy with the implicit routing.
- In the convert sample editor, it does not appear to be possible to change the ‘source position' of a keyframe. From what I can tell, you need to delete the current keyframe and make a new one, which creates a mess of ghost keyframes. The UI gets cluttered really quick.EDIT: There is a 'source' parameter that can be changed. I was expecting the bar to be draggable with the mouse, but it is not. Oops.
- There's no easy way to transition/fade the edges of frames so that you can remove discontinuities without greatly affecting the current signal. Essentially I'd like a windowing function for the frames.
- You can preview the resulting wavetable via MIDI input, however most converted samples will yield low amplitude wavetables. There really needs to be an ‘auto-normalize' function in the wavetable editor so that you can preview the current sound.
- Likewise a simple gain control would be nice if you wish to keep the inter-frame dynamics intact.
- You can't move an existing keyframe while keeping your view on an existing frame. If I have two keyframes at position 1 and 50, and I want to watch what happens to frame 25 as I move the last keyframe around… too bad. Since the frame selection is automatic between keyframes, I found that I frequently wanted to see what happened to a given frame while I moved around a keyframe.
I've mentioned competition a few times here. Picsart photo studio mod apk. Any sort of modular system with audio-rate modulation or ultra-modular system fits the bill. I know of plenty of things that surpass Phase Plant in functionality. Melda Sound Factory is a superlative example of surpassing Phase Plant's functionality in a large number of facets. Softube Modular is also an incredible system that forces you into the analog workflows.
So why even use Phase Plant? What's the point? Surely you can get better, right?
There's a difficult concept to encapsulate in writing. I think maybe 'homogeneity' is a good word for it? I'm talking about the ease of movement through a UI because simple paradigms are used and reused throughout. Building complexity from a small set of uniform building blocks.
Phase Plant offers that. You get one style of modulation assignment that's attached to the source and destination. You get one style of adding things. The GUI widgets are all very similar. There's a single 3 pane interface and no menu-diving or layer diving.
Filechute v4 5 5 – quick internet file transfer tool. I'm no designer, but I can't come up with a less complicated way of creating software that allows such complexity results.
There's a great deal of value in a product that allows you to reach your goals with the least friction possible, and even better so if there's a bit of opinion thrown in. That's what Phase Plant is.
You get a bunch of stuff in Phase Plant, but more importantly you get someone's idea of how to build complexity from a uniform set of building blocks. It's like buying a LEGO kit where you build something really cool from the core block set, rather than having someone throw every weird type of curvy LEGO brick at you and expecting you to make it yourself.
If you're the type of person that likes to get things done without friction, then Phase Plant is absolutely for you. If you enjoy piecing things together from bare bits and don't mind a variety of interfaces, menus, windows and other context switches… Then Phase Plant may change your mind.
There's a lot of power here, particularly relative to how simple it is. If you don't believe me, then check this out.
I reviewed the KiloHearts Toolbox Professional version here, which is $349 or $9/month usually. I was given this copy for review and did not pay for it.
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