Bassdrum Murda Distocore VSTi Version 1.0

From the maker of the BassDrum Murda distortion plug-in, Bula, a new great virtual instrument: DistoCore.

With the aid of I:Gor he came out designing a VSTi totally oriented towards Hardcore and subgenres creation. In fact the first feeling I had playing around was to have a super-pimped Microtonic with ANY knob actually making something interesting to the final sound.

The hardest bassdrums on earth.
Don't steal and sample bassdrums, be creative and design them from scratch with the new "DC Bassdrum::Murda" VSTi.

The plug-in itself is composed by three main oscillators, each with separate filters and saturations. Every oscillator has a plethora of waveforms to choose from plus the ability to load up sampled waveforms. They also have separate panoramic positioning so it's easy to create interesting stereo-wide sounds. All the three guys go thorough an envelope follower, a resonating filter, a ring modulator, an overdrive + bit-crusher section, and an equalizer before being outputted to the host. This part ensures the most extreme and optimized distortion and punch!

From my personal experience with it I'd say that there's some sort of inner modulations between the oscillators, because when adding more volume to one it's possible to hear the other ones shape themselves so that the result is always coherent.

Hearing the overdrive + bit-crusher section at work really makes me suspect the code behind is the same of the original Bassdrum Murda plug-in and this can only be a good thing!

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KONEY PRESETS

Multi band BIT Crusher VST

There are thousands of bit-crusher plugins and most of them don't add anything important to the ones shipped with most sequencer applications. This one adds something: multi band support!

Multiband Bitcrusher I is a multiple bitcrush & downsample plug-in. It selects 4 frequency bands from the incoming signal - Low; Middle Low; Middle High; High - and then processes them through the bitcrusher and/or the grinder. Frequency cut-off point for each band is selectable in a variable range depending on the band; unselected frequencies are cut.

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VSTron VST for laser sounds

Being in the need of a VST to produce some laser sounds today I googled "vst for laser sounds" and found this:

VSTron is an effective and fun VST unit that is capable of producing different kinds of effects such as Laser sounds , Fast LFO's , Ascending/Descending Sweeps , Filtered madness , Bubbling Bleeps or attacking Ramps.
Initially inspired by the Korg Monotron the VSTron includes 1 Osc ( Saw , Sine , Triangle , Ramp , Pulse , White Noise and Pink Noise ) and 1 VCF Osc with 4 modes ( Low Pass , High Pass , Band Pass , Band Reject ) as well as 1 Main Envelope.

The sound generated is thick and fat and will not fear the deepest degrees of distrortion!


MORE INFO
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Barber Pole Flanger VST

Here's another child of the "simple GUI but great sound" family of plug-ins:

The sweep of the flanged sound seems to move in only one direction (“up” or “down”) infinitely, instead of sweeping back-and-forth.

It features a simple implementation of the Barber Pole Flanging but it's best feature is when used with all the knobs set to maximum levels. With such a configuration it acts as a "re-synthesizer" giving a typical metallic Vocoder timbre to any sound filtered.

• 4 different algorithms.


• Up to 8 stages for smooth and blurry flanging.


• Independent control of depth and modulation speed.


• Manual included.


• Open Source.

Highly recommended!

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Thrummaschine distortion VST

Finally a good distortion plug-in, capable of band separated modulations:



The signal is splitted in 3 adjustable bands and can be distorted quite strongly. Indeed, every band filter can be modulated with an LFO. Band can be panned freely so to transform any MONO sound in STEREO.

- 3 user-defined bands for bass, mid and high freqencies, with overlap if required
- 3 filters with tempo-sync LFO, for each freq band
- overdrive, distortion and bitcrush effects
- send level for each band to each effect
- pan and volume for each band

I got some very nice results by layering two or more instances of the plug-in in the same channel, that way the amount of controls and automation is widened.

More informations and DOWNLOAD

FerricTDS - Tape Dynamics Simulator VST

I had this FerricTDS VST .DLL sleeping in my plugins folder for a few months now. I did think it was good for whole mixes and never thought it could have any employment in industrial music.

Inspired by the smooth dynamic shaping capabilities of some high-end reel-to-reel tape recorders, this plug-in simulates three of the most distinctive and much appreciated sonic effects generated by these devices:

DYNAMICS
- gently shaping the overall dynamic response
SATURATION
- adding extra harmonic-related content
LIMITING
- controlling peak performance

But a few days ago I accidently watched a presentation video on YouTube and realized it was sounding incredibly good on snare drums:

So I spent the last weekend testing it on them and I was right: the correct sampled snare (mostly from '80 drum machines) processed with the right reverb and fed into this plug-in will produce the classic industrial snare, also the loudest ones from modern EBM.

I am going to test the plug-in on whole mix anyway, as it is said to work very well on enhancing loudness.


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Radio Effect VSTi

More VSTi noisy craziness from the Japanese website. I'm not stunned about that knowing how a strong noise culture Japan has, since it gave birth to a band like The GeroGeriGeGeGe...



This plug-in emulates the tuning of a radio set. You can load samples that will be your "stations" and tune the radio to them with the usual knob. Sounds simple, but the implementation in industrial music are wide.

DOWNLOAD DEAD LINK
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Nipponic Noise Generator VSTi

I am being totally wasted by this VSTi plug-in:



It comes from this Japanese website with no information except for a Youtube video:

Anyway any information wouldn't be very useful...as the rest of the website is written in the language of rising sun!

Good enough the author added some very detailed information on the GUI itself in the amount of... none! All we know is that there are five stages of... something with cutoffs and volumes. Four additional unnamed slider have shown to be an ADSR envelope and a "FILE" button will ask us for a .WAV to load. Our choice here is not very important as it will serve only as seed for some noise generation.

As long as a note is played the instrument sounds continuously, generating powerful metallic drones.


There are more VSTs there which look interesting. Will be posting about them also!

DOWNLOAD DEAD LINK
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Beat Burner VST

More interesting chopping solution are coming out finally, this one from Lee Stacey is the most interesting after Dblue Glitch came out six years ago.



It acts as a sample based synth but centrifuges the waveforms as if in a blender. Something that IDM and Industrial freaks out there will love.

BeatBurner VSTi is a synthesizer plugin which generates its output by processing wav files. These files can be anything from percussive loops to vocals. This output is produced by passing the sound through a number of modules including a synthesis module, a number of variable filters, a waveshaper and some effects.

All of the processing is synchorinzed to the wav file which is looped. This can in turn be synchronized to the host.

The degree of sound degradation is sometimes embarrassing and what is outputted is often quite uncontrollable, so it is advisable to use it by bouncing out audio and cutting only the most interesting bits.



Any kind of sound can be loaded but I found it more effective with metallic ones as they make it act like a "metallic synth"...

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Weird Noise Machine VST Plugin WNM-1

I am recently spending many nights and afternoons exploring WNM-1 plugin:

Six osc's on each module, first five are modulators and can be routed to other osc's. * Sine, Saw, Ramp, Triangle, Pulse, w-noise and p-noise waveforms to choose from.

The best feature, beyond being totally insane in the concept, is the fact that every OCS has a different stereo output. So it's possible to further process the separated material with any other effects chain.

Every Oscillator can be set to "Track" the pitch of your music keyboard, this allow you to either make every note to have the same timbre but diff pitch or just add more weirdness.

The resulting sound is a bit thin, reminds me NI Reaktor's output, but the differences in sound nuance and its modulation capabilities are amazing enough to make it a good ally to generate some Industrial landscapes.

INFO + DOWNLOAD

TLR D15 Analog Drum Machine VST

When doing music not tonally one focuses more and more on drums and percussions. Kickdrums, when it comes to me, but generally speaking not only them. This is why I always try to test the wider range of drum machines possible.

This VST plug-in from TLR, the same authors of Blister, sounds weird enough to satisfy the said need of Industrial stomps and hits.

Fully customizable, analog modeling drum machine (no samples!). Each sound is tunable, opening the doors for drastically different drum kit presets. The amplifier stage contains a tube simulator with pre and post gain as well as a clean output.

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BLISTER Distortion VST

I stumbled upon this VST plug-in from TLR while doing a techno track a few days ago. Itself it's a nice piece of software but the characteristic that has cached my attention is its SERIABILITY.



Usually distortion plug-ins, after putting two or three of the same in the same track, sound nothing more that a big squared waveform. This plug-in starts to make interesting sounds after three or more instances are loaded in the same track. This is probably because of the oscillator there's inside:

Something important to mention here is the utilization of a Synthedit module called NewWave (by Ralph Gonzalez). Basically it detects an input frequency and then uses that information to spit out a synthy waveform based upon it. This technology works
much better when used along with a very simple input signal.

I arrived at five instances on a single track and actually getting some fun artifacts.

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Ferox tape saturation modeller VST plugin

I mentally divide distortion effects into two breeds: simple audio "inflaters" and "spicers". "Spicers" are the ones that can add "spice", usually with a knob that sums some kind of harsh noise.

This VST plug-in from the same author of Timemachine is definitely of the second, more rare, breed. It doesn't produce raw sounds only by exploding the existing waveforms but can add something of its own with the usual "noise" knob.



I found it effective on both long synths and short percussive material.

Ferox is a free tape saturation modeller VST plugin. It has separate controls for saturation and hysteresis effects. Feedback with variable tape speed is provided to simulate vintage tape echos.

Nice to see that it also does its original job flawlessly: an analog tape emulator.

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Vanguard VST Industrial Presets

Many readers of this blog showed interest on the post about Vanguard VST. In particular they're asking me where to find some Industrial presets.



As far as I know there are any of them around the Internet, commercial or free, except a few one on my harddisk!

In short, here's my collection of Industrial presets for Vanguard Volume One!

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TriDirt filter VST

The TriDirt is sold as a filter. It is actually a filter, but its true strength is in the gain sections. What I'm saying is that it's a very powerful distortion plug-in, and we love distortion, don't we?



My friend Dredd revealed me the secret of this plug-in when we made together an industrial-hardtechno tune that is due to be released soon.

It's really sad that the developer's site, Noizeware, is unreachable since a lot of time, this will probably mean the TriDirt is not getting anymore development. What a pity!

More info about the TriDirt can be found on it's KVR audio page while a download is available here.

Microtonic kickdrum sampled through BOSS pedal

Ok, I admit that after writing the post about pedal FXs I got a bit over-excited! So I decided to put my ones at work...

In 1998 I bought this BOSS PQ-4 Parametric Equalizer from a small shop in Denmark Street, in London. It was already quite rare and definitely expensive.



Back in the days of liveset I used it to process my Roland TR-909.

Today that the mighty drum machine is gone in favor of an analog console I mainly use Microtonic VST to make my kickdrums, so it came quite obvious to me that I had to make a sample kit of those two together!



I've tweaked the stuff @ 100 BPM for 5 minutes, so the kit is quite huge, actually 500 .WAV files.

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Timemachine - Vintage sampler Emulator

I'm not new on using an old sampler as a distortion unit so this plugin got my attention when I discovered it.



The sound obviously is totally different as a real old-school sampler really shakes the speakers but if taken as simple distortion unit it can be useful.

At very high gain values it's quite raw convincing, especially on percussive material.

TimeMachine is a VST plugin that provides accurate reproduction of the characteristic sound of vintage samplers, such as the Commodore 64, or older Akai samplers. The (virtual) sampling rate can be varied, as well as the number of bits used for digital representation. furthermore, aliasing distortion can be generated individually for AD and DA conversion.

Find it here

DtBlkFx VST plug-in

Ok, now this IS weird!



I had this DtBlkFx plug-in since quite a long time but never used it properly. In a recent dig in my VST folder I found it and realize it was worth exploring a bit more its capabilities in the field of Industrial Music Production.

It's quite difficult to say what kind of effect it is...actually its a set of different effects (up to 8), combined to some unpredictable results. There are two FFT display for input and output and the sound is processed by these transforms, can't really understand in which way, anyway...

The output is a bit "empty" and doesn't really fulfill the mix, but for a noisy production it can be very interesting.

The signal can be set completely different from Left to Right, so it can be processed as two different tracks which are related one to each other. This is a feature I'm liking because with analog mixer I get two instruments out of one source.

• Precision parametric equalizing with sharp-roll off, adjust individual harmonics of a sound.


• Harmonic based (or comb) filtering, including active harmonic tracking.


• Various types of noise control, change contrast between loud and soft frequencies, clip frequencies or apply sound smearing.


• Frequency shifting, harmonic and non-harmonic shifting, including active harmonic repitch.


• Various methods of mixing left and right channels, standard and harmonic vocoding, convolution like mixing and more.


• Frequency masking, set harmonic or threshold masks for any effect.


• Up to 8 effects in series.


• GUI graphics can be customized.

Link to website with download (free)

Bassdrum Murda Bit crusher / Distortion VST

This VST plug-in from hardcore producer Bula reaches the boundaries of insanity as it completely disintegrate any signal fed into it! The degree of distortion is something even hilarious to explain and if you don't get enough harshness yet there are two fader to add crackness and noise.



Needless to say that it can be infinitely handy while carving industrial sounds...

Features:
- gain
- distortion
- crackness ( zeros samples under a given threshold value)
- add noise ( adds white-noise)
- low level quantization ( special quantization [for Bassdrums] between 1 Bit and 5 Bits)
- pre-/post Inversion (the old good FastTracker FX!)
- 24 dB LowPass: Cutoff and Resonance
- additional pre-quantisation (between 1 Bit and 7 Bits)

Quote from the author: "Please be careful - this Plug is fucking !Loud!"

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Two good reasons to use Vanguard VST in industrial music

Looking for some Vanguard Industrial presets?

When talking about "industrial sounds" it's very easy to talk about distorting effects and noisy samples while sound generators are much more rare topics so time to find out some of them.

We all well know Vanguard from ReFX, one of the best VST synthesizers around. But Vanguard is not only an instant Trance generator as it might be seen by most of its users.



There are two good reasons one can use Vanguard in an industrial production.
First it develops some oldschool electro leads, a-la Front 242, that makes it suitable for classic Industrial/EBM tunes.
Second reason is it sounds thick and warm, a perfect signal to be heavily processed with the worst distortion chain!

This plug-in features an incredible amount of good presets to start with as well as more free and commercial banks. Its arpeggiator can be configured in a large variety of ways, from melodic leads to mechanical and monotonic noises.

The trance gate is another nice feature and its name shouldn't fool because if well configured it can give more spice to our beloved raw waveforms.