Kilohearts

This plugin has no shuffle / swing function so unfortunately it's not suitable for me.. please add this feature as soon as possible. Thx.

Superb lightweight plugins rivaling many commercial and on-hype products! I use only several of them, e. g. clipper, still others are installed till the moment I need them or be able to evaluate properly - sometimes you need time to feel the real taste of a particular plugin.

There is NOTHING, I know of, other than Phase Plant (except for maybe Bitwig's Grid), that offers this level of granularity when it comes to providing as many tools as possible for sound design. Huge shoutout to KiloHearts for pushing the limits of what synths can do.

Here are the things I like about Phase Plant:

You can basically have an unlimited number of effects in the effects section and a LOT of generators in the generators section, and also a virtually limitless amount of modulators, which alone would personally have me sold on this synth already, but there's so much more.

It receives very substantial updates quite regularly, and what gets changed or added aren't small. At least once a year we get something pretty substantial.

There are full on revamps being done pretty often also. Not too long ago they revamped the modulator curve drawing significantly, we weren't able to change curves without opening the window, now we are, and that's not even the first time they majorly revamped modulators. One, of the many previous times they changed the modulators significantly, they added a lot of new modulators, of which, the craziest one was probably the Wavetable LFO.

They also revamped unison at some point, and to this day I don't really know of a single plugin that has that many unison modes. We literally have chords as unison modes! There are new synthesis types added (they added granular synthesis a little over a year ago), new very substantial effects added as well. Some effects that I consider pretty major additions for my personal sound design were; Filter Table - a wavetable filter, Shaper Table - a waveshaper that uses wavetables for its transfer function, Nonlinear filter - filters with different types of coloration, Convolver - convolution reverb.

There's so much more than this that Phase Plant has to offer. I would never be able to do it justice in a review honestly. And they're bringing more and more additions and always looking to improve or revamp things majorly and that is pretty significant. It's truly an incredible synth that you should most definitely try if you haven't already.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.