Plugins
Slice Up Drums With This Pizza-Inspired Beatmaking Plugin
Software is the lifeblood of today’s music creator economy, and the new Beat Scholar plugin is innovating drum sequencing for a new generation of producers. The plugin incorporates a unique system of pizza-like buttons, which allow users to more granularly and flexibly program their drum hits than ever before. The plugin allows users to create their own unique sequences with varied denominations between one and 42. With the simple click and hold of the mouse, users can “split pizzas” and drag sounds into their workspace. The program includes a sampler and a master effects area for good measure. At more advanced levels of the tool, the unique layering of tracks additionally allows producers to combine two different time signatures within the scope of a single ar...
Celebrating 25 Years of Psytrance: Infected Mushroom Talk Virtual Reality, NFT’s, and New Album
After two decades of pioneering the psytrance genre, Amit “Duvdev” Duvdevani and Erez Eisen of Infected Mushroom are somehow just getting started. Having formed in 1996 at the height of the electronic music boom, Infected Mushroom have since released over a dozen albums and earned a reputation as one of the best-selling groups in Israel and the dance music scene at large. Over the years, we’ve heard high-profile collaborations with Lady Gaga, Steve Aoki, Matisyahu, Paul Oakenfold, Jonathan Davis of Korn, Ray Manzarek of The Doors, and many more. Now the two are scheduled to head back home to where it all started to celebrate 25 years as a group at Israel’s Yarkon Park, in an annual gathering with their hometown fans. “We love going back to Israel where we started produc...
A Pornographic, Anime-Themed Plugin is Stirring Controversy in Music Production Circles
A new distortion plugin that features sexually explicit anime imagery has the music production community divided. The Nani production tool was developed by Los Angeles-based company WXAudio, who has called it “the first obscene anime distortion plugin.” It features six modes of distortion with drive and color controls and a depiction of a female hentai (an overtly sexualized style of anime and manga) character. In a similar style to Dada Life’s infamous Sausage Fattener plugin, the character depicted in Nani reacts to performance on its digital knob control. As the drive knob is turned up on the plugin, the character loses more and more of her clothes, and if turned all the way up, her breasts become fully exposed. Naturally, the plugin has sparked some ...
Quadrivium, a Synth Controlled with Data from the Moon, is Out of This World
Modern producers know that the modular synthesizer plugins of the world today can create some pretty far-out sounds. Perhaps no one knows better than Giorgio Sancristoforo, the mastermind behind synth plugins such as Decoder/Encoder and Substantia. The creator is now putting forth his latest work, Quadrivium, and it might just be his most stellar offering to date. Quadrivium’s modulation is driven by data from the moons of our solar system’s gas giant planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Parameters within the synth, like the filter cutoff, ring modulator, reverb, and tape stop can be modulated using the data, providing some very unique and interesting sounds. Sancristoforo says that the data collected from the moons will span a ten-year period—from 2020 to...
