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Arturia _Efx Refract, a new unison plugin, and makes it free for the holidays.

Arturia has announced Efx Refract, a stereo multi-effect “with versatility at its core”, and has only gone and made it free until the 4 January. It is the latest in a series of free music software giveaways this year, making 2023 something of a bumper freebie year.  And if you download one free plugin this year, we reckon you should make it this one…

Refract is a multi-effect with a unison-based architecture, meaning that the sound or note is multiplied and subsequent effect processing takes place in parallel. This results in that rich, phasing chorus-like effect you get when multiple signals drift out of phase, effectively meaning a bigger sound.

The first process, then, is the Refraction, whereby Refract takes your input and duplicates it to up to eight stereo voices. This spread of sound is then passed through Refract’s multi-effect chain… and here’s where it gets even more interesting.

You get five effects – BandPass Filter, Comb Filter, Bitcrusher, Distortion and Harmonizer – which can be added to each of those (up to) eight voices and processed individually, before being summed back together.

It is a unique setup that Arturia says, “allows for some wild, new and creative results”.

The company believes that some of the results you get with Refract’s effect combinations are quite surprising, telling us that it’s easy to create metallic-style reverbs, surreal shimmers, melodic bit crush effects and monster basses.

It is available to download now at Arturia website. Efx Refract will be free of charge until 4 January 2024, and will cost $99/€99 thereafter.

Baby Audio’s new Beat Slammer plugin makes punchy, parallel compression easy and you can have it for free

Christmas is not just about eating, drinking and Santa. It’s also about free music software giveaways! And Baby Audio has just announced its regular seasonal freebie Beat Slammer, and it’s a Christmas cracker.

This year, Baby Audio isn’t alone in its plugin generosity; in fact it’s been a bumper year for Christmas plugin giveaways. We’ve had a free soundscaping instrument called Noctua from UVI, Native Instruments has given us its free Glaze plugin, Cherry Audio has its free SEM synth module, and Rhodes’ has given away its V-Pan vibrato effect. Like we said, that’s quite a line-up of software titles not to spend a dime on.

Baby Audio certainly has form in the plugin game. The developer has released some exceptional music production tools over the last few years, becoming one of the best out there, with titles that don’t look traditional but more often than not, sound stunning.

The company’s Taip plugin (above) uses machine learning to create incredible tape emulation sounds, while Crystalline is a fantastic algorithmic reverb. Baby Audio has even got into the synth game more recently with the wonderful BA-1, based on the cult Yamaha synth, the CS-01.

Baby Audio also has a lot of form in the free plugin sphere, regularly dropping free gifts at this time of year. Previous free releases include Magic Dice, Pitch Drift and Magic Switch, all of which you can still download from Baby Audio website by signing up to its newsletter.

This year, Baby Audio has dropped another festive freebie, and if you fancy slamming some beats this Christmas, this is the plugin for you. Beat Slammer is a compression plugin geared towards applying heavy dynamic control to drums and mix buses, giving you a “pumping and bouncy compression sound that slaps you in the face”.

We know Christmas can get a little rowdy, but we weren’t exactly banking on a slap in the face this festive season. Nonetheless, Beat Slammer looks like a superb tool for lending a super-squashed, impactful style of compression to any signal.

Based on the compression algorithm from Baby Audio’s paid-for IHNY-2, a plugin Baby Audio describes as “the industry’s hardest-hitting compressor”, Beat Slammer delivers the same punchy compression without the majority of IHNY-2’s controls.

Both plugins are parallel compressors, which means that you can take advantage of a technique where a heavily compressed ‘wet’ signal is blended with the original, uncompressed ‘dry’ signal to produce a hybrid sound that benefits from aspects of both.

While Beat Slammer lacks much of the tweakability of its bigger brother, it still features controls for the dry/wet mix and compression amount, which can be handily manipulated on a XY grid, alongside sliders for make-up gain and output level.

All you’ll need to do to access Beat Slammer (and several other free plugins) is sign up to the newsletter on Baby Audio website.

“It’s the original synth on steroids”: GForce AXXESS, a vintage ARP AXXE emulation with a 21st century blade.

GForce delivering some big news to unwrap for Christmas. The company has announced its new soft synth, AXXESS. This is an emulation of a 1975 vintage synth, with 21st century extras, and very much the younger sibling of the company’s award-winning Oddity 3.

Vintage Synth describes the original 1975 ARP AXXE as ‘a budget-proof version of the popular Odyssey’ which we all agree with, because it could be seen as a single-oscillator version of that instrument.

Of course, GForce’s new version adds some solid, modern extras, all while retaining the original’s sonic character, a new/old balance the company has so brilliantly achieved with products like the award-winning Oddity 3 and Minimonsta2.

The original synth boasted a simple but classic oscillator/filter/amplifier left-to-right signal flow, and AXXESS retains that, but extra features mean you can either enjoy that original sound, or take it into completely new realms should you wish.

This is largely thanks to GForce’s X-Modifier technology, which adds dedicated LFOs and ADSRs to most of the synth’s parameters. This huge extra modulation potential means that “AXXESS is the AXXE sound on steroids”, according to GForce, but the extras don’t end there.

Other new features include a sub-oscillator, an arpeggiator and a 16-step sequencer (see screen above) plus effects in the form of distortion, stereo delay and reverb. There’s a Vintage knob to bring in more of the classic analogue imperfections we used to moan about back in the day, and a Pan Spread option for extra wide sounds.

There are 350 presets included, said to be ideal for synth-pop, dance, hip-hop, cinematic and prog rock, and programmed by the likes of Zardonic, GEOsynths, Christian Laffitte, Richard Veenstra and Ramon Kerstens (K/V).

GForce Axxess demo by Crazik:

AXXESS is available now with intro price of £33 + tax (normally £66 +tax). It’s available in standalone, AU, AAX, VST and VST3 formats, and you can get more info from the GForce website.