Product Reviews by KVR Members

easy to use, great sound, creative. valhalla knows how to do it.

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a synth at this scale as a free plugin. holy fuck. ofc i give it 5 stars. and honestly, well deserved as well. i have a really hard time actually finding aspects that i find worse than in serum without being pedantic. an example would be that is suffers from the typical sensitive mode mouse-event issues of juce plugins. but as i said: pedantic af. here the thigns that i love most about this synth:

1. the fact that it has a speech synthesizer for wavetable creation. how sick is that?

2. the parameters next to each oscillator which are used to really smash the wavetable into whole other directions. it's a bit like serum's warp modes, but 2 of them and with way fancier options.

really cool thing. good concept. some of the stuff is a bit too fancy for me like a filter type that morphs between lowpass and highpass, as if i ever want to do that.. or will i? maybe i got uncreative, but i can't imagine a sit.. well anyway. one thing that i love about this plugin is the section with the formant filters and the phaser ones. because they really give you a unique way to think about these types of modulations and they sound great.

this is a great kick plugin. i'm a fan of analog modelling synths in general. they often don't fully capture the feeling of a certain instrument, but for the compromise of really unique parameter sets that just enable a whole different workflow producing sounds that are new while referencing something older. that's the case with this plugin as well. it was so confusing first, especially the fact that there is no single parameter for the decay of the kick, but rather all parameters together defining how that behaves. it feels more like changing the genetics of the kick species rather than just making a kick superficially, if that makes sense. (it does not? well, it would if you tried!) this synthesizer doesn't have a lot of downsides, but what i don't like about it is that you can't define the body's frequency in 12edo notes rather than frequency in hz. also sometimes it's hard to find a good transient sound without messing too much with the way the pitch of the kick falls. i used it several times now and i often find myself rendering it to a new audio track at some point and then go on with other effects until it's really cool. but the basic concept and a lot of the controls of this thing are already great.

a unique approach to snare synthesis. usually i'm a huge snare synth hater, because that's usually just a totally predictable combination of a bit of pink noise and a sine wave without glue. this synth does not have this issue. it produces a believable snare sound if you don't go to the extremes with the parameters. however i wouldn't say they really fulfilled the potential of the concept here. for example even if you turn down randomness completely it is still rather random, so it's definitely not meant to be super tight. and it also has no parameters that don't directly aim at emulating reallife, like a lowpass filter, which would be a nice addition. i do understand that this plugin is more of a proof-of-concept thing for the researchers who worked on it though. but since it's here for musicians to use i think it's ok to state what else could be done for future releases.

OMG, i can't believe no one has ever commented on this little gem yet. 5 stars, hands down. see, I got introduced to the concept of having a "formularparser" in a VST plugin by xfer serum, where it is used for many things like making 2d- or 3d-wavetables, modifying existing wavetables or setting up the wavetable editor for certain types of sample import. that was way before i started developing myself and i loved it. when i was bored in math class i pulled out my phone and pretended to do math for school, but i was really doing math for myself in the mobile app "grapher", where i came up with the fanciest looking graphs that i then tried in serum when i got home. Ofc at some point I just decided to google for more plugins with a formularparser and this was basically the only other good plugin i found. honestly it has a bit less of a hype factor than serum, because only certain shapes work well on most material when used as a waveshaper, but it's still huge and became one of my favourite distortion plugins. you know, when you are developing plugins you're constantly asking yourself if a certain feature you wanna add is overkill or not. you don't want to cluster the gui too much and make it feel inviting to new users. but in funcshaper the user can define the transfer function that is used by the plugin to distort the signal yourself. you can just input ridiculous shit that no plugin developer ever added to a plugin before, even if they have considered it. and you can do this for every individual sound you drive through this thing, completely customized, but still as simple as it can get, with this super small and straight-forward interface. you don't even have to be any good at maths, believe me. just slap some functions at it that you remembered from school or read about in the manual and see what happens. there will be a lot of happy accidents.

I've thrown quite some weird stuff at this thing and it harmonized it with this unique distorting-ish approach. the aesthetic of the sound is actually something that i had in mind for quite some time but i couldn't reach for it with my other plugins. this plugin has some sort of texture that reminds me of old doors that start to make noise when you open or close them slowly. that sounds kinda bad, but i mean it in a good way, a really great way in fact.

It's one of those plugins where you can try really hard to get a specific sound and sometimes manage to do it, but other times it just gives you something entirely different that is even better than what you initially planned to do. super fun.

as quite a newb dev I'm excited about this plugin release because it might help me learn about IIR filters in a more practical way. All this dsp literature is just... nope. I mean it's important. But there really should be more of a bridge between the literature and the practical sense in a way and I think this plugin might be a good step towards a future where learning filter design is more accessible to a generic audio developer who is not super specialized in math (yet).

i would also say that adding autogain and additional gain knobs would make this plugin more comfortable to use. also i'd like to suggest adding a lookahead knob. it's not clear what some of the parameters do, like VU and Gap. I know you explain that in the description but idk, I just don't get it. Maybe it would be cool to see a demonstrational video with some common usecases for those parameters. Apart from that I think it's really great and a lot of fun. The plugin has a unique character defined by the perculiar signal flow between the distortion unit and the compressor as well as some of the internal processors' artefacts. it can be used for subtle settings but it shines when you take it more closer to the extremes (considering you lower the gain afterwards ofc).