I wanted to do some creative filter sweeping across my mix. I realised that I didn't own a good quality versatile filter. None of the bundled stuff with Cubase 4 would go as far as I wanted or was flexible enough.
Having newly discovered Tone2, I remembered something about filters on their website. Downloaded demos of BiFilter2 and Filterbank3, also tried Fabfilter Volcano as I'd heard good things about that and I knew of the excellent Sonalksis TBK which is far too simple for what I'm looking for at this time.
So what is important for me.
1 Sound (No compromise) 2 Stability (No compromise – If it's buggy it doesn't get on my system) 3 Performance (I rarely compromise on this) 4 GUI and ease of use 5 Features and Functionality 6 Price
It soon became apparent after playing with these two for about an hour that I wanted them both. I won't say too much about Filterbank here as this is not the right place, but use this if you want to get rhythmic with your filtering. It has envelope control, step sequencer control, delay and 2 filters as well as a 2 oscillator synth. You could just use the filter FX plugin on the synth or sound of your choice if you want. The sound possibilities quite staggering. I'm am going to have to get FilterBank sometime *edit* I have got it already.
SOUND The sound is excellent. It seems impossible to get a bad sound. There are no nasty qualities in the sound, even the distortions are pleasant, and using the mix knob, you can blend in any amount of the dry sound you want.
STABILITY No problems here. Seems very stable. Tested writing some automation. That all seems fine and as expected.
PERFORMANCE No indications of any sluggishness or CPU stress whatsoever. GUI is very responsive.
GUI The GUI is well designed and is in the usual Tone2 style, similar to Firebird. It is obvious that thought has gone into keeping the GUI as simple as possible, making it easier for the user. It is solid with a classy look. Knobs perform as expected and smoothly (I choose linear motion in my sequencer and this worked flawlessly – Fabfilter's knobs sometimes reverted to circular motion for some reason). Also the knobs are a nice size, quite large without being too big. Nothing worse than fiddly little knobs. There is a cool Frequency Response display that shows you the shape of the filter, and the effect that your knob movement has made on the shape. This graphic is smooth, performs well and feels light and responsive.
All controls are laid out well and are easy to understand.
DOCUMENTATION The manual seem complete but I must confess I didn't feel the need to read it as the interface is so intuative.
PRESETS There are 100 presets, enough to get you started on any of the filter types, but a little tweaking can produce a quite different sound and you soon realise the different sound possibilities are pretty huge.
PRICE The price is very reasonable, and with its simple interface, you could be misled into thinking that this plugin is less capable than others around.
CONCLUSION Don't judge the capabilities and quality of this plugin by the fact that the interface looks simple or by the reasonable price, it is capable of much more than it first seems.
Tested on a P4 3.2Ghz Northwood, 2GB RAM, XP Home SP2, Cubase 4.1
RATINGS Not sure how this system works, but I have decided to start at 10 for each item, and reduce the number for any faults found. This is why it has 10s - I can't fault it. Documentation had a 9 purely because there were no online tutorials, but really it doesn't need any, so maybe it should have a 10 here as well.Read Review
