SupaPhaser

HI

Being a Reggae/Drum & Bass head my first port of call at mixdown tends to be chucking the piano/brass/rythem guitar or whatever through a phaser/flanger and it came as a pleasant surprise when I (finally) discovered this little freebie; I say that because there is very little on the market that offers up a thick slice of phased modulation mayhem, MHC's Space effect comes to mind but beyond that I can't think of anything much else, certainly nothing with a FREEBIE logo on it - not in this class, anyway.

What we have here is a very pro looking gui that is styled in a similar manner to the Smart Electronix 'Ambience' reverb, I like the added ORANGE colouring that is applied to the distortion and balance controls - if Smart Electronix were trying to highlight two particularly tweakable parametres with the bold colour scheme then they hit the nail on the head; because these two certainly impact on what is being put through the plug.

So the gui is pleasant and the controls have a nice feel to them - they are responsive and quite smooth, getting on to the sound now and what strikes me is that SupaPhaser has been coded with an extra bit of mileage in many of its operations, what I mean by that is, if you turn a control to its most extreme setting you tend to get like turbo treatment!

So with the feedback control at max in unison with how other parametres are set you start to get some pretty freeky treatments going that go way beyond phasing and chorus, this can be heard again with the distortion and even the LFO max has a button by its side that extends the rate to extreme cycles for some funky mod madness!

A hidden feature is that the face above the distortion control is actually a 4 way switch (click on the face for 4 different gestures that represent the 4 states of inversion - WHAT!)that inverts either the wet signal or the feedback and in Bram's own words gives you a choice of "invert feedback, invert wet,invert feedback-invert wet or invert nothing", don't ask me what 'face' = what inversion but its another subtle yet usefull addittion to the flexability of the plug.

There are over 40 pre-sets that give you a good idea of what is on offer but it shouldn't be hard to programme something new.

There is no documentation with the program but I don't think this is an issue really.

Customer support appears fine, this is the first program that I have ever made a donation to and I got an instant thank you, I sent an e-mail for some info and got another instant response, I don't think on freely downloadable software you can or should expect support to any major degree, can/should you?

Even at 10 euros or whatever this is a marvelous 'Steal' if it does something that is usefull to you, the programme appears to use a pretty minimal amount of cpu in my use of it (a maximum 7% hit on a 450mhz PC running 1 instance) and I have never had any stability issues that can be attributed to it.

As you can probably tell I really like this VST, for me it has all the essential ingredients that make a Plug-in a pleasure to use - Nice looking, responsive gui and engine, easy on the proccessor, FREE, and with a bunch of pre-sets thrown in to boot!

So this is not the only effect you would want but it can offer up a staple range of phasing and chorus type effects along with spatial, distortion and some weird modulation types as well, for me though this is one of a few effects that have allowed me to get a very specific slow deep metallic phasing that is remeniscent of the type of effect so often used in DUB reggae of the seventies, quite simply I like it!

Flipper.