Groove tools

UPDATE! This is an update to the evolution review  I posted a while back.  What it is Wave alchemy seems to have a thing for drum samples, and their their  revolution  kontakt library focused on vintage drum machines has long been popular with producers. This was followed up by the Evolution drum library, which is focused on more modern drum sounds. Wave Alchemy mentioned there an update quite a while ago, but instead of calling it 1.1 they renamed the product to Drumvolution , which is a free update to registered users (thanks!). What you get Evolution is a kontakt library, so you´ll need kontakt (player) to use the product. The library comes with a pre-compiled sample pool  with both clean and tape processed versions, but you can't import your own samples. The library is however Native Instruments NKS compatible. What it does The library comes with over 28 000 samples (and 400 presets) based on various acoustic and electronic sound sources and covers a wide ra

Delay plugins If you´re anything like me you probably have at least 10+ delay plugins in your plugin folder. A delay is a very simple concept so do we really need more than a few? Today I´m trying a bunch of different delays to try to answer the eternal question. How many delays does a man really need? How I tested I took a guitar solo snippet a put it through a bunch of different delays, and then normalized the output volume. The purpose was to see if there´s any real difference, so I used whatever tone shaping features available to subtly tweak the tone without going into a special FX territory. Check out the audio examples and my findings at the end of this post. Delay features revisited I´ll be mentioning these features throughout the test, so I just thought I´d go over these quickly to avoid repetition Auto ducking Auto ducking allows you to "duck" the wet delay signal whenever the dry audio is playing, This will clear up your dry signal from av avoid muddy

Saturation plugins You can never have enough saturation plugins, or can you? Today I´m  testing a few of them just to see how much variety we can expect and if we really need all of them.  I took all of the plugin on a spin for both guitar and bass, and you´ll find the related playlist at the end of this post.  Saturator X  IK-Multimedia makes the excellent T-racks range of plugins, which includes  Saturator X . This plugin is versatile overall and covers a lot of ground. My only issue with the GUI would be the omission of a mix button, but it has an auto-gain feature which is great. Saturation can add to the overall volume, which makes it difficult to compare before/after results so an auto-gain feature is very handy. The results were quite subtle when driven lightly, but quickly turned into a more distorted and brighter sound when pushed hard. This isn't a bad thing though and I can see this one becoming a go-to when I´m going for some edge. Elysia Karacter

Bass enhancers I´ve had a bunch of bass enhancers in my toolbox for a while, but never really gave them much thought. These type of processer can however be very useful so I decided to try them all out to se what I´m been missing out on. The line up: Waves RBass Waves MaxxBass Waves Lo-Air PSP Mixbass BX_subsynth I also decided to through in a saturation in the form of  Waves Vitaminic plus a sample using the Cubase stock EQ to see if I could achieve similar results with them. Test setup All the channels were normalized to about the same audio level using a metering plugin, but the perceived loudness, as you´ll see, still varies a lot. I used a small DI bass-loop to test the various plugins, and more or less just called up the default preset on the plugin and tried to push the level until I hit the same audio level as the other plugins (again using metering). I tested them on both electric bass and an electric guitar, see audio samples below. Audio examples are avail