The plugins are great for sound designers and mix engineer who want to employ some creative texturizing and psychoacoustics to their sound. The Celestial Buss Processor provides a welcome layer of analog richness to single tracks as well as full mixes. The Dimension and Texture controls are where it’s at! Try for yourself, because Celestial is free until February 14. What are you waiting for? Check out the official demo to see and hear Celestial in action.

https://youtu.be/m87ohQZDtf8

Acustica Audio is well known for developing high quality emulations of real hardware, but the latest offering came out of left field… The Celestial Buss Processor comes in two plugins two-plugin mixing suite, consisting of the Texture Mix Processor and a Psychoacoustic Buss Processor. It seems that the plugin is loosely based on the recently released Fusion stereo buss  processor by Solid State Logic. The software is compatible with all VST, VST3, AU, and AAX plugin hosts on PC and Mac.

ChordPotion is a composition and performance tool. It can turn any chord progression into new riffs and melodies instantly! The basic concept is simple: You play your chords in your DAW, send them to ChordPotion, and ChordPotion generates new notes for you that are played on your favorite synth. You can also export the generated notes as standard MIDI files and edit them later on.

The plug-in contains four parallel sequencers. You can create and edit your own sequences from scratch or load one of the many factory patterns to build your own chord transformers.

https://youtu.be/iSxJ5x7EImI

Cableguy’s new CrushShaper plug-in is not your average bitcrusher. It comes with a multiband enhancer and vintage Lo-Fi effects. Just like the other components in Shaperbox 2, it’s driven by freely drawable LFOs and flexible envelope followers, so it’s easy to come up with unique distortion patterns and downsampled grooves in seconds.

CrushShaper offers 3 different Bitcrush styles:

• Crunchgives you fuzz, grind and grit
• Bitsreduces the audio resolution to lovely 8-bit sound and below
• Resampleis for introducing digital overtones and lo-fi retro sound

Each style can be animated with the built-in LFO and envelope follower, as well as filtered, layered and mixed with the original sound. CrushShaper is the perfect tool for creating crisp lo-fi melodies and retro video game FX alike. There are many great presets, that you can use as is or use as starting off point for further exploration.

CrushShaper is available for PC and Mac. It runs in the new ShaperBox 2 multi-effect plugin, so you can buy CrushShaper alone or as part of the ShaperBox 2 bundle. Good news for those of us, who already own the ShaperBox 2 bundle: CrushShaper is free of charge! Everyone else can grab it from Plugin Boutique for $44 USD.

https://youtu.be/0CfW-9s8Z_U

Accusonus released a new AI-based plug-in for electronic musicians, producers and DJs. Accusonus Rhythmiq allows you to re-shape your loops in real time and improvise with them while performing live. It’s like that cool producer friend, who takes what you came up with and plays around with it.

What sets Rhythmiq apart is, that it analyzes and understands your beats (for the most part) and instantly allows you to create new variations of it. All you need is turn one knob – which is midi mappable – and you can generate pattern variations, for instantly playable breaks, fills and build-ups. When producing, there’s so much to control – you don’t want another plugin with a hundred different buttons. Sometimes it’s great that you can make spontaneous decisions and stay in the flow. When you enable the A.I. Beat Assistant and let it perform in real-time, it’s not completely random though! Obviously you can tell it how much variability you want for arrangement, silence or reverses.

The whole layout is pretty straightforward, so after I checked out the presets, it was time to explore…

Instant Game Over!

Let’s drop classic drum breaks into Accusonus Rhythmiq. How about the Amen Break? Let’s tweak a few of the parameters in the beat assistant and hit play. You instantly have a recognizable but unique and evolving sound bed for your next Jungle or Drum’n’Bass track! No more micro-chopping breaks or trying to filter out the kick, so you can use the break as a top layer. Simply load it into Rhythmiq, let it process the break to extract stems and tweak the beat assistant to your liking.  

 https://youtu.be/eqM4MDmBjbI

Spitfire Audio is offering their new BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover VST as a free download. Only catch is that you have to fill out a questionnaire on their website. A new tactic I haven’t seen before is, that they make you wait if you want it for free, which I think is fair enough, considering the quality that Spitfire Audio regularly releases. Once you complete the questionnaire, you have to wait fourteen days for the delivery of the download link.

BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover is Spitfire’s super-affordable orchestra VST. It is based on the same recordings that are used for their BBC Symphony Orchestra Professional library, which costs a whopping $999 and most likely not something you really need for your beats. Amazingly BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover comes in at around 200 MB while containing 35 instruments with 47 articulations and one mixed-signal patch!