Let’s keep this going with a couple of donationware plugins that are a wonderful little present to yourself.

the ((vacuumsound)) plugins.

Over at KvR they’re raving about the ADT – Artificial Double Tracking plugin, and indeed it looks to be potentially fun/useful. I actually haven’t tried it yet. However, the other night I dicking around with some of my new tools/toys, and was floored at the excellent sound of the Poor Plate Reverb.

I ran a drum loop from the Homegrown collection, through this and the ColorEQ, and the results were pure Portishead circa Dummy. I freely admit I don’t know my ass from elbow when it comes to the finer points of reverb. But this little piece of code that was designed to match the plate reverb algorithms of an earlier age, well, it just shines. My go-to room reverb will likely remain smartelectronix Ambience, but I imagine this will be my go-to plate.

These both come in all the essentials flavors, so everyone can play. There is no GUI. No problem for you Mac users, but we Sonar users are hosed in this regard. I can’t speak to other Windows DAWs but the Sonar host plugin GUI is fuggly beyond belief. It really looks like some engineer spent a day or two on it back in 1999.

But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that Poor Plate is a deceptively simple plugin that is fantastic.