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Kilohearts
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Kilohearts are creating a new generation of audio plugins that focus on workflow.

Products by Kilohearts

Latest reviews of Kilohearts products

Phase Plant

Reviewed By FarleyCZ [all]
October 30th, 2023
Version reviewed: 2.1.2 on Windows

Alright. Haven't written a review in a bit, but ... I just have to when it comes to Phaseplant. It's THE new kid on the block, I believe taking the crown from Serum. Hear me out:

Modular approach:

You can pretty much define your synth. Number of oscilators (quite a variety of them in fact), samplers, granulators ... then you can route them to effect lines. In those effect lines you have all the power of their snapin (plugins in plugin) system. Stroke of a genius really, because these snapins can share not only audio, but also MIDI triggers, modulations and automatization assignments with the synth. That opens SO many possibilities. ... oh and have I mentioned that the whole oscilator section has audio-rate modulation? It can do any kind of FM routing you can imagine. Wanna do linear FM from a wavetable OSC? No problem. Wanna do exponential FM from a granular sampler? Easy. Phase modulation by static noise? Not even a drop od sweat. Come on. THIS is synth-nerd heaven.

UI:

I have never seen a synth with more thought-through user interface. If you're used to regular V/A's, there will be a learning curve, yes, but stuff you can do in this thing rivals the likes of Falcon or Reaktor. Even surpasses them in some aspects (wavetable editor for example). Yet it never feels like you've stopped making music and started "coding" the synth. It stays ... fun. Love it.

Sound:

Clean. Stable. No high-end smearing usually heard on other "multipurpose" synths. No problems there. It has the same "aspect" as Serum. It's not warm out of the box. You need to make it warm with a bit of saturation and flutter, but hey. That's actually a plus in my book. Makes it more versatile.

Licensing model:

As a cherry on top, these guys NAILED the whole plugin economy. Let's face it, the market is so saturated by now that just selling plugins is not profitable enough to even live by. Only hanful of people can do it and it's usually for brand loyality reasons. That's why you see all the subscription models popping up. But Kilohearts's subscription is the only subscription I don't mind paying. Here's why:

  1. They give you reward coupons allowing you to buy the plugins and snapins perpetually in the long run. That signals their confidence in bringing more products for the future. Other devs use subscription just to get lazy. (sorry) ...only Kilohearts understood this properly and offered this buyback thing.
  2. When you stop paying, the plugin locks GUIs of all the snapins you don't have license to, but it doesn't cut their sound. So all the presets you have (including your own) still work. That changes subscription from an extortion model to a very sweet offer. You can accept if you want, but it won't screw with your old work if you can't pay at the moment.

!!!EVERYBODY TAKE NOTES!!! This is how you do subscription. They nailed not just the synth itself, but also the sales aspect of it.

And also if you bump into theese guys at a convention, they're awesome to talk to. :) My fav developer at the moment.

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Kilohearts Essentials

Reviewed By Faydit [all]
September 9th, 2022
Version reviewed: 2.0.7.0 on Windows

Good, useful collection of professional, but compact plugins. I have already bought some of them in the past, nice that they now are free. My favorite is Ensemble, a really unique, comparably more vivid chorus with a very unique character, but also the other Essentials sound and work fine, although I have only installed the ones, which I really need, which are about half of them.

Another advantage of this collection is, that you can use the plugins individually but you can also combine them with the help of Snap Heap to your own, personal multi effects plugin or use them in combination with the other Kilohearts Premium plugins.

The installation system also works fine and also allows individual installation or upgrading of specific plugins.

Good concept, good tones.

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Convolver

Reviewed By Fraggle [all]
February 26th, 2022
Version reviewed: 1 on Mac

This is their best plugin - the bundled IR's are useful and the feature set is too. It really opens up Phase plant's sound design possibilities.

They really need to bring several of their older plugins up to the standard of Convolver and Non-linear filter -- I am thinking of stuff like Phaser, comb filter and their resonator effect.

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Nonlinear Filter

Reviewed By Eine Alte Oma [all]
August 23rd, 2021
Version reviewed: 1 on Windows

these filters are garbage. no seriously. they are. but that is what makes this plugin so good. yesterday i was making a shoegazey beat and i used some old sforzando library as a drumkit, because most of my other realdrum plugins are either kinda bad or not really suited for that vibe. anyway that sforzando kit is really polite so i needed a way to add more glue and intensity to the sound. most people would use distortion now, like waveshapers, or even some multiband-stuff. but try to slap nonlinear filter with fuzzy mode on it instead and the crash cymbals will totally crush into the kick and snare. it is just a completely different sound, kinda like distortion, but different. you don't even have to filter away a lot of frequencies to completely transform your stuff. transparent EQs are a thing. analog EQs with subtle warmth are a thing. and complete garbage EQs are also a thing now and it's just perfect.

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Phase Plant

Reviewed By psilop [all]
May 11th, 2021
Version reviewed: v1.8.15 on Windows

Arguably the most versatile soft synth at the moment. The only downside is that you need to invest into the Khs Snapin pipeline to get the most out of it, but it's absolutely worth it. All of the effects are high quality and the modular nature allows you to do whatever you want. Great UI too. Phase Plant presents limitless sound design possibilities, the day I started using the whole Khs Toolbox was the day I could never live without it again and I mean that very sincerely.

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Kilohearts Ultimate

Reviewed By MrJubbly [all]
April 7th, 2021
Version reviewed: 1.8.16 on Windows

Kilohearts Toolbox ULTIMATE is one of the best audio software purchases I have ever made and I do not say that lightly. I use the effects included within this bundle both as separate VST plugins and also as integrated snapins inside MultiPass and SnapHeap in almost every project I create.

The whole Kilohearts snapin eco-system is one of the very best I have encountered. I am also impressed with how efficient the Kilohearts custom installer and updater operates. It has to be one of the most streamlined and integrated installer and activation methods I have used.

The developer has really impressed me with their clear and functional design aesthetic and operation of their plugins and their excellent signature synthesizer 'Phase Plant' also included in this bundle. Both the synth and the effect snapins combine together so seamlessly and naturally. The sound design possibilities with this Toolbox seem truly endless.

I have also found their active Discord to be very active, friendly and informative, a really great community and as Kilohearts keep building upon their Toolbox with additional effects added to their snapin library, their discount upgrades for new additions to the eco system have also been very reasonably priced.

Overall, Kilohearts have impressed me deeply and I cannot recommend them and this product highly enough. I wish I could go higher, but 5 out of 5 stars will have to do. They certainly have earned it.

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Phase Plant

Reviewed By moonchunk [all]
August 22nd, 2020
Version reviewed: 1.8.5 on Windows

I tried the demo and really think this is a great new synth; even for a person like myself who (because of tired overworked eyes) isn't always able to find my way around a typical full-to-the-brim synthesizer GUI. Kilohearts' subscription model (giving back to the user a great percentage of invested money) the and bundle options are a little higher than I would like, but its okay, if it were easier to grasp (it would be nice if Kilohearts would put a one-page comparison on the website, like NI and Image Line have.) But this synth is extremely easy to get into, in a good way. And the results are inevitably original. The presets one creates tend to become attention grabbing ear candy pretty quickly - I came up with about 5 or so presets that definitely are useable. The fact that it was relatively easy to learn was great. It was a new world - Using waves and wavetables as modulation sources in an unlimited way, something that my old Bitwig license and my Serum demo haven't done to that extent.The closest thing I've experienced with this kind of bizarre creative potential was a feature in Cycle by Amaranth Audio, in which I was able to modulate an entire synth using another synth's created waveform. (Don't ask me how I did it now, it was a non-advertised feature at the bottom of the interface.) Music genres like dubstep haven't been my thing. I guess NI's Massive had an impact on its development. Serum was apparently another significant move towards helping artists of genres like that, and it has its fair share of features that match and even surpass what's in Phase Plant (filters, distortion, certain things in Serum's warping, number of stock wavetables, ability to lock preset fx chains and load new presets over them). And yet Phase Plant is more customizable in genera. It has staggering flexibility, that goes into areas of sound design that I think Serum isn't very well cut out for. VPS Avenger is another synth with a lot of promise, and Falcon is as well. But while the GUI's of those, and the import and workflow requirements for the visually impaired, were prohibitive, Phase Plant is not that difficult to get started with. I watched about 30-45 minutes of tutorials online and needed to follow up for about 30 minutes more to learn how to mess with the wavetable import and editing, which were less obvious than I would have thought, but still pretty straightforward. And the results were exceptionally "moving". One thing that makes me think twice about giving a 5 star review (but there's no other synth with this specific and very useful feature set to my knowledge, so 5 stars it is) is the confusing price structure.

My demo included the ability to modulate fx parameters, which at times was important to the result, and at times not. There is a subscription plan that allows (until otherwise stated) one to use $100 in coupons after 12 months (consecutive or not) of subscribing, which costs about $119.88. That's pretty fair.

Some of the snap ins are probably not that needed, so I'm estimating that in about 2 1/2 years one should own a working system, IF one could add the individual parts at the price they come to in their respective bundles.

Or, does one purchase the Pro Bundle and be done with it. This comes with pretty much everything except Carve EQ and Slice EQ (and probably this is not essential for my workflow since I could parse my sounds and do EQ'ing and modulating after the synth; but there's always the chance that modulating some EQ parameters within the plugin could get interesting...

From my understanding $349 covers the cost of the synth and all the synth-needed plugins EXCEPT the EQ's Faturator and Disperser (premium ones). I've done a list that I think sums it up (if you work for Kilohearts please let me know to correct any errors. If the Pro Bundle was $270 I would have purchased it tonight. On the other hand some are arguing that it would take more than 5 years at $120 per year to cover the whole package. Other synth purchasing decisions were easier to assess. I bought Falcon for about $300 and got a $100 coupon for their soundbanks. And unfortunately thus far I've not decided on doing Kilohearts subscription thing or the Fabrice and Steven thing (I may do one of these and I don't think I should do both, which bugs me), and I usually purchase things when I feel inspired and want to break off something tangible that adds to my creativity.

Lastly let me say that I did not find the filters in Phase Plant to be exceptional, and the distortion wasn't insanely good, and I recognize all that. I still feel that this is a 5 star synth workstation, certainly that will be getting better. I want to support it. I realize that the guys who create presets for synths like Spire and Sylenth are not going to be capable of doing unbelievable work in Phase Plant right off the bat, but you guys should link to at least several exceptional Phase Plant preset makers, one way or the other. I'm not a pro, but if I can learn it in an hour and 10 minutes, this is a missed opportunity. Look at it this way, the average musician-preset creator does what appeals to them and sometimes this overlaps with what is popular. To me it would seem that what would be good for Kilohearts would be to find some preset makers to capture Phase Plant's capabilities while still satisfying the market with usefulness and a good preset pack price point ($20).

Epitaph, er I mean Epilogue - My understanding of pricing options:

NOT IN SLATE ALL ACCESS PASS
Phase Plant $ 169
Kilohearts Equalizers $ 99
kHs ONE $ 19
Ensemble $ 29
Flanger $ 29.

NOT INCLUDED IN PROFESSIONAL OR ULTIMATE
disperser
faturator
carve eq
slice eq
snap heap
khs 1.

ULTIMATE TOOLBOX BUNDLE
Formant Filter
Frequency Shifter
Gate
Haas
Ladder Filter
Phase Distortion
Pitch Shifter
Resonator
Reverser
Ring Mod
Tape Stop
Trance Gate
Transient Shaper.

PRO BUNDLE
3-Band EQ
Bitcrush
Chorus
Comb Filter
Ensemble
Flanger
Formant Filter
Frequency Shifter
Gate
Haas
Ladder Filter
Phase Distortion
Pitch Shifter
Resonator
Reverser
Ring Mod
Tape Stop
Trance Gate
Transient Shaper.

STARTER BUNDLE
Compressor
Distortion
Dynamics
Phaser
Reverb.

FREE WITH PHASE PLANT
3-Band EQ
Chorus
Delay
Gain
Limiter
Stereo.

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Phase Plant

Reviewed By Fraggle [all]
July 23rd, 2020
Version reviewed: 1.8.5 on Mac

About 6 months ago I gave it 3 stars and a long review.

I have been using it for the last 6 weeks and my mind has changed so much I decided to delete the old review and give it 5 stars.

I have dabbled with many synths, but only deeply learned Serum and Zebra 2, and now Phase Plant.

I use Phase plant for fun, as a hobby, I am not selling my patches or music. Thus, I cannot say if it is better or worse for genres of music.

What I can say though is that now I don't use Serum or Zebra 2, because I can do anything I want on this thing.

I got some money so bought ALL the Kilohearts products - at first I thought it was not value for money, but now I know it is, more so, given that all the phase plant FX units can be used externally in your DAW - try Multipass on different channels in your mixer...it's very very good.

The only FX it doesn't have is a granulator, but you can get grain effects by modulating loop points and offset points in the sampler. I have a granulator synth but I have not felt the need to use it. The lack of a true arpeggiator is not missed because I use Cthulhu if I want powerful arpegiation and the pahaseplant LFOs are lovely for making arpeggiator patterns as an alternative (but more limiting) approach to arpeggiation.

I use one instance of phase plant on a MacBook Air 2015 8MB 1.6 Ghz i5.......if I use the POLY function then it is very CPU heavy for my small machine, but for what I do, I cannot hear the benefit of that feature, so it's not stopped me loving this synthesizer.

Well Done Kilohearts.

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