Funny how reading a random email can lead to three hours experimenting….
Izotope recently redid their vinyl plugin to support 64 bit systems, meaning you can bring a little bit of crackle, hum and vinyl-esque distortion to your music projects. And it’s free. I used to have it, so I downloaded it to try out.
Great fun it is too, with a selection of options to recreate the era you desire – be it 1970s or something earlier. Call me picky, but the only thing missing is the option to choose what kind of mains hum you want to introduce – 50Hz or 60, as included in Steinberg’s grungelizer plugin – also from way back when but which works in Live nicely.
This got me thinking about another ancient plugin thing that’s been on my get working todo list for years. I used to really like the Stepfilter plugin that came with Cubase. It was a VST plugin but I never got it to work with Live or Logic, despite trying various wrapper-type things – like the nifty jBridgeM.
The StepFilter was effectively a sequenced filter. I’ve tried implementing something by drawing envelopes into Live and tried various Max for Live effects, but it never seemed to sound quite right or be so easy to mess with. Then this morning I stumbled across Cluster, from Sinevibes and tried that. Pretty close to what I wanted and also capable of much more.
Pretty amazing, just put white noise through it and you can mess about for hours. It’s 22 quid (including tax) but you can try it for free at http://www.sinevib.es/cluster/
So, three hours and 22 quid later and I feel inspired to do some tunes.