Supermassive
Price: FREE!
Valhalla's previous plugins have been covered here before – and its Shimmer reverb is my go-to reverb plugin for sound design purposes with post-16 students. Its latest (and free) time-based product is, as the name suggests, designed to create other-worldly textures. It uses a combination of reverbs and delays that interact with each other to create lush textures and soundscapes.
The delay time can be stretched to a massive two seconds, and the sound can be ‘warped’ to add some modulation and movement within the sound. The sounds it creates are almost complex enough to be instruments in their own right. The simple interface hides a lot of power. Oh… and did I mention that it's free?
Logic Pro X 10.5
Price: Free for existing users or £199 (1-19 copies); £99 (20+ copies)
Logic Pro X is one of the biggest names in DAWs and, although version 10 (X) has been around since 2013, Apple has been doing ‘point’ upgrades since then that are featured as ‘major’ upgrades from other DAWs. Apple quietly launched version 10.5 recently and it's clear that it has one target audience in mind. The majority of the latest updates are aimed at musicians who prefer the clip-based design of Ableton and Bitwig.
Users can access this and load sounds and samples and trigger them in a non-linear fashion to allow for music creation. This is a major departure for Logic and opens the software to a wider market. In addition, the samplers have had a major overhaul and the ancient EXS24 has finally been replaced with a sleek new model. At the time of writing, 10.5 was still a bit buggy – hopefully 10.5.1 will remedy some of the glitches.
Vocal Compressor
Price: Є 39
As the name suggests, this product is aimed at vocal production. What it doesn't tell you, is that it is in fact three compressors that can be run in series to create a better vocal sound. The first of these is called ‘Peaks’, which handles all the spikes in the vocal performance to create a smoother signal. The next in the chain is ‘Balance’; a parallel compressor that maintains the original attack of the sound while bringing up the quieter decay. The final plugin is called ‘Flavour’, and this applies some tape saturation colour to the signal to create a nice, warm vocal sound.
Although this sounds complex, in operation it's actually quite easy. So if you are looking for some additional compressors to complement your school or college studios – at Є 39 (c. £34.80) you can't go wrong with these.
BBC Symphony Orchestra: Discover
Price: £49 (or FREE!)
When Spitfire Audio announced that it was creating a sample library of the BBC Symphony Orchestra I thought ‘great… but I'll never be able to afford it’. But there was a small caveat in the original press release, in which Spitfire Audio stated that this was ‘just the beginning’. It has now become clear what it meant. It started with the pro version, but has now launched two lighter versions.
The Discover version is a much smaller library, only around 300MB, but it still features a range of great orchestral sounds and could be perfect for increasing the quality of student coursework submissions over the stock sounds in some other software. And, if you're prepared to fill in a survey and wait two weeks – it's totally free!
