Recording - June 2019 - 60

Reviews by Mike Metlay

Puremagnetik's

Plug-Ins Fun audio tools for the

price of a decent dinner-or a burger a month
In recent months, well-established sound library purveyor
Puremagnetik has taken a fascinating step beyond merely providing new sounds for creators-there's now a growing library of audio
effects plug-ins and virtual instruments as well.
New products are added monthly, and are first made available as
part of Puremagnetik's $8/month Spark subscription service, a big
savings over buying them when they go live for non-subscribers. I'm
taking this opportunity to talk about the ones already available, before
the list gets too long to easily manage!

Born out of art

Micah Frank, the musician who founded Puremagnetik, told
me: "I have been pushing Puremagnetik's message a little more
in the past several months: that we are a company of sound
and music artists rather than engineers. All of the plugins are
actually written in Csound [a music programming language for
creating computer audio-MM], which I also use for my own
compositional work. I'm also trying to convey this with the Puremagnetik music label that we launched this past March. Many
of the tools I create-spectral processors, granular effects-
are actually byproducts from developing my own pieces."
As of this writing, there are 15 plug-ins, each available
for Windows (VST) and macOS (VST and Audio Unit). They
all share a few guiding principles. They're designed to do
things differently than conventional instruments and effects-
the sounds they create are out of the ordinary, encouraging
imaginative uses in the studio and live on stage. They're kept
very simple: each plug-in has a single small screen and only
a few controls and a handful of starter presets; it's easy to
learn what the controls do, but you can spend hours exploring.
Finally, they're all very affordable, so there's a very low cost of
entry to experiment with their possibilities.

Meet the plug-ins

Bluejay: This is actually a tiny synthesizer based around the
"super saw" waveform first popularized by the Roland JP-8000.
A "super saw" is a thick, rich waveform created by piling up a
bunch of detuned copies of a sawtooth wave (in this case, seven
of them). Bluejay lets you choose between a super saw and a
super square wave, with controls for tuning spread, number of
voices, basic envelope shaping, and a built-in reverb. It's quick
work to get everything from exciting tonal stabs to rich pads.
Clonemeld: Recently upgraded to a full stereo version with the
ability to run "all the time" or only when your DAW is rolling,
Clonemeld is described as a "creative delay sampler." You feed
60 RECORDING June 2019

it audio, which is then recorded, delayed, pitch shifted, flipped
backwards, chopped up, and reassembled. Touted as a fun way
to generate compositional ideas, Clonemeld is also great for tiny
tweaks to give randomness and interest to things like drum loops.
Cloud Machine: Combining spectral blurring and resynthesis with a stereo reverb, Cloud Machine smears sound into a
blurred and ringing tone that you can tune up or down with
respect to the input pitch. Definitely on the more experimental
end of things, but tons of fun on rhythm loops.
Eidolon: Billed as a "spectral ensemble machine," Eidolon is
one of my absolute favorites in this collection and has found its
way into a lot of my work already. It's actually four effects in series: a modeled bucket-brigade "ensemble" effect as popularized
on 1970s string machines and early 1980s synthesizers, followed
by a much more subtle and musical spectral blur than what you
get in Cloud Machine, followed in turn by a delay and a tremolo.
It turns non-rhythmic material into pulsating clouds of sound, and
puts a fascinating spin on rhythmic input, especially if you tweak
the tremolo to follow the beat (alas, no DAW sync here).
Foomph: Need a better kick drum? That's what Foomph gives
you. It's designed to synthesize deep bass drum sounds using different generation methods for the attack and sustain, and Puremagnetik claims that the macro controls are set up so "you will
always get a solid drum sound!" I'm not sure I'd go that far, but
you can indeed get anything from clicky beater sounds to longtailed 808 booms... a boon for mixes where the kick is king.
Granule: As its name implies, Granule works with granular
synthesis. It takes audio input and breaks it down into tiny slices
of sound called grains, which are then looped, pitch-shifted,
and delayed, to create ghostly, vaguely tonal echoes that can
be tuned to "sing" with your material. This one demands a lot
of tweaking, but provides cool results for it.
Mimik: Combining up to 2 octaves of pitch shifting with extreme time stretching and compression (from quadruple speed
to quarter speed) independently of one another, Mimik grabs
a small window of the input audio (notice a theme yet?) and
lets you play with its pitch and timing in fascinating ways, from
trippy reverse echo effects to glitchy stuttering. Fabulous on
drums, piano, and synth pads.
Pastfabric: Imagine a tape delay with up to 10 seconds of tape.
Now imagine a gazillion tiny razor blades cutting up that tape
and resplicing it faster than the eye can see, constantly rearranging the last few seconds of your audio and playing back the splices randomly... with spatial spreading and some dying-tape aging
thrown in. On drum loops, it'll make you seasick in a hurry, but
on sustained material, subtle settings can cause static material to
blossom into constantly changing and entrancing textures.
Plektrik: Perhaps the music world's smallest string synth! Using
a basic excited string model with "metal" or "wood" resonance,
running into a ring modulator, overdrive, and doubler, this plug-in
can produce remarkably sweet and musical tones. You can get as
nasty as you want, but start with the ring modulator off and the
overdrive turned down to see how pretty Plektrik can sound.

Recording - June 2019

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