Creative effects

So far in our tour of the past year’s best software freebies, we’ve shown you studio staples such as instruments, mixing and utility plugins, taking in nearly enough freeware to outfit a basic music production rig along the way.

We say ‘nearly’, because there’s a vital element that we’ve yet to address: those effects that do more than simply document, correct, and enhance our musical journeys. These are the plugins that give us more – sometimes much more – than what we put into them. They take our basic recordings and programmed noodlings then either wrap them in an extra layer of sonic goodness, or transform them utterly, blessing them with that “how did they do that?” factor. With them, we can dive into demonic solos full of fire and fury, or sing from the mountain tops without ever leaving our living rooms. These are the effects that inspire. They make us sound like more than we are and that, in turn, makes us perform better.

Creative effects come in all shapes and sizes, and it can be difficult to know exactly which plugins belong in this category – indeed, many quite mundane effects can be used creatively. Surely the marker, though, of a true creative processor is one that is specifically designed to transform a signal into something new and different. The addition of distortion, noise and other artefacts, for example, is often a creative choice, and though there are plenty of processors used to remove such audio imperfections, they’re far outnumbered by those that degrade our signals by design.

So too, then, must the bitcrusher be considered. Previous generations of musicians and producers may have dreamed of a life of ultra-pristine high-fidelity, but today’s computer musicians recognise the gritty effects of reduced bit depths for the other kind of beauty they bring.

Some choices are not so clear: does reverb belong in our list of creative processes, or should it have been included among the mixing plugins? Since reverberation is all about putting our sounds in a fictional space, we’re going to stick them here – and when you see the ’verbs we’ve chosen for this section, we think you’ll agree with that decision. We’ll also make room for a collection of plugins – ‘snapins’, in fact – that may individually seem rather mundane, but work together in a very creative manner.

“We computer musicians recognise the gritty effects of reduced bit depths”