HY-ESG

This thing is excellent. I've tried dozens of gate sequencers (triggergates, trancegates etc), both paid and free, and this thing probably has the best combination of power, flexibility and ease of use I've ever seen. It has a mix knob (believe it or not, some don't!), a full ADSR (some have just AR), the ability to set the number of steps from 1 to 32 (many just have a small number of options, like 4, 8, 16 - many just have 16 by default with no option for anything else), the ability to set the number of pulses from 1 to 32 (number of pulses has to be lower than number of steps), and also a reset count that can be set from anything between 1 and 1,024, which is completely amazing. With the wide options available for step count, pulse count, and reset count, you can make some very intricate patterns, anything from really short to really really long (all the way up to 16 bars with a sixteenth note pattern, or even 32 bars if you set the step count to 32!). Use all of these things together, and set the wet / dry and attack / release values to something pretty subtle, and you could put this on a chord / pad track that would evolve subtly throughout essentially an entire track. Brilliant. You can also set the step duration to be a dotted value (16th dot, 8th dot etc), which is a pretty cool feature. Just be sure to set the reset count to a multiple of 3 (12, 24, 48 etc) if you want the pattern to regularly recur in a "normal" sounding way.

Suggestions for improvement would be:

Allow the user to set the strength / depth of pulses individually. This is something that many (probably even most) free gates already allow, so I'm not sure why they opted not to allow this. It would makes it more "fiddly" to use for the average user, but if you had to access this feature by deselecting the default, you could maintain ease of use for average users while still unleashing greater power for more advanced users.

Allow the user to select where in the sequence each individual pulse occurs. The pulse dial is great, and super easy to use, but it would be nice to be able to dive deeper. Again, you can still leave the current behavior as the default and allow advanced users to go further.

Overall, just awesome. I've been using Gatekeeper for years and it's my go-to for rhythmic gates, but with how easy and flexible HY-ESG is, I could see this supplanting Gatekeeper as my go-to for rhythmic gates.

Excellent! Five stars.

Fantastic device. I would DEFO pay for a pro version of this with more features. Also would be amazing to have this updated. Great idea, real innovation. HY plugins do good stuff.

I don't know much about anything, so when I find a free plugin that is easy to use and sounds so damn cool that is can't stop playing with it, I have to leave a 5-star and say thanks, thanks, thanks!.

It is always incredibly generous for reputable developers to offer free VSTs. HY-ESG is a great example of free VSTs occasionally being even better than paid ones. It was immediately so fun to use and so powerful. One and only squawk is that you can't create quite exactly the gate sequence you want. You may not notice that however, since the level of functionality and tweekability is incredible especially for a free gate effect. The interface is also really nice.

I've spend half an hour with this amazing tool and the time flew.
A clear, nice Interface, easy to understand, fun to use. Fantastic!
And it's free! Thanks to the developers.