Lifeline Expanse £50

Confidently calling itself the only multi-effect plugin you’ll ever need, is Excite Audio’s life-giving new star really the track sprucer it claims?

While it’s questionable whether we ever need more track surgery plugins, after years of experimenting with an incalculable number of such tools, we do remain hungrier than ever for those plugins that swerve our tracks into unexpected territory. Lifeline Expanse from Excite Audio serves not just one, but five different ways of entirely re-defining the sound of your track. By harnessing some clever re-amping techniques, the Excite team deliver multiple digital chains that you can send your audio through, and endless sonic exploration.

Get a lifeline

Upon installation we’re presented with a nice, to-the-point UI which maps out the five effect modules side-by-side. From left to right, there’s Format, Dirt, Re-Amp, Width and Space, with Main and Advanced views for each. The Main view simply presents three knobs, with the top being relevant to the specific effect (Time for Space, Drive for Dirt, etc) and the others controlling Tone and Mix level. Within each effect you can select different signal chain models. Under Re-Amp, for example, you can choose between monitors, cabinet or even a radio-style device. Across the five modules, there are 20 of these algorithms in total.

Experimenting with each in turn, on our clubby EDM-style track, we apply some Format degradation to our beats, which immediately adds some characterful grain by reducing the bit depth. There’s also the Resample which affects the sample rate of the audio, and Washed, which certainly doesn’t sound great on its own, but when applied to a snare or other drum element in a large mix, brings a ramshackle, sample-like quality to our kit.

Dirt introduces some lovely harmonic distortion and grit to proceedings, which immediately injects more of a snarl to our initially weedy synth lead sound. We can choose between Tube, Tape, Rectify (which fuzzes an octave above the incoming signal) and Fuzz.

Re-Amp is where great value lies for those that typically spend a long time building the perfect guitar or room tone, here you can move virtual mics, pump the sound through a range of very different speaker types, blend in the room sound and much more. Adjusting the age and tone of our vocal, it’s bewildering just how different its quality becomes.

Width is tailor-made for stereo field manipulation, with the ability to pan, pitch, signal boost and de-tune for a nice overall control of your mix, and maximising sound field. Our favourite module here though is Space. The impulse responses are brilliant across the board, and easy Pre-delay, Size, Duck and Stereo manipulation adds heaps of carving potential.

That perfect blend

Though each module certainly has much to offer sounds individually, the most rewarding results come from a chained combo of two, three or even all of the modules. You can get a sample of how effective this can be by choosing from a multitude of instrument and soundspecific presets. These can be good starting points, but Lifeline Expanse wills you to turn its knobs and get deeper into the sonic nuts and bolts by clicking on the Advanced tab for each signal chain. Here you can submerge yourself in the nitty gritty of these rich modules.

We ended up following quite a few pathways that we wouldn’t normally follow, mixing cavernous room sounds with lo-fi crunch, tape warmth with slapback delay and more. This is certainly an inspiring product. Top marks.