WORLD OF MUSIC ; PORTABLE KEYBOARD - Latest Portable Music Keyboards, Synthesizers and Music News

Arturia Mix DRUMS is an ‘all-in-one’ drum processor that promises punchy, pro-sounding drums without the fuss.

Today, Arturia has unveiled a new drum processing plugin developed in partnership with Emre Ramazanoglu, a producer and mix engineer that’s worked with Brian Eno, David Bowie, Sia and more.

Mix DRUMS brings together a number of effects in a streamlined interface to help you craft impactful, professional-sounding drums in seconds. It’s designed to be used across a variety of applications, from creative transformations to precise drum bus enhancement, aiming to bring weight, power and clarity to lifeless drum parts.

The plugin features a dual-band architecture that splits the signal into low and mid/high bands visualized on its spectrum analyzer, each with dedicated distortion, dynamics and tonal shaping options. There’s a variety of distortion models onboard covering both analogue and digital styles, including emulations of tape machines, tube amps, fuzz pedals and more.

Mix DRUMS’ phase-coherent design ensures that parallel processing combining dry, distorted and compressed signals won’t present any problems at the output, avoiding the phase issues that can occur when multiple signal paths are misaligned. There’s also automated gain staging at the input, along with a signal path clipper at the output stage, designed to boost perceived loudness and tame peak levels without introducing unwanted harshness and distortion.

The plugin’s Space section houses two types of reverb (algorithmic and convolution), a digital delay and tape delay emulation, and its Noise feature introduces layers of vinyl crackle, tape hiss and digital noise to the mix pre- or post-processing for additional texture. Mix DRUMS arrives with a selection of 92 artist-curated, genre-tagged presets split into three stylistic categories, covering everything from organic, natural-sounding, tones to dramatic and experimental effects.

“This plugin recreates and actually improves upon one particular workflow I use when creating characterful drum sounds in a mix, or for increasing the impact of delivered stereo drum loops without raising peak level,” Ramazanoglu says.

“I wanted an all-in-one solution to achieve the retro-inspired but full-range and weighty drum sounds that I get hired to deliver — as well as everything from fully creative transformational processes to very subtle drum bus enhancements.”

A deep dive into Mix DRUMS video:

Compatible with macOS and Windows, Mix DRUMS is available now in VST/VST3/AU/AAX formats and priced at $/€99.

Find out more on Arturia website.

Heritage Audio takes on the legendary Echoplex with its TAPEoPLEX plugin.

Heritage Audio is a Spanish manufacturer focused on creating modern recording equipment that captures the spirit and sound of vintage gear; the company has a solid reputation for delivering high-performance, retro-inspired hardware that’s often affordably priced.

The company also has a fast-growing collection of plugins in its product catalogue, a list that expanded this week with the release of TAPEoPLEX, an emulation of the classic Echoplex hardware tape delay favoured by Brian May, Jimmy Page and Joe Satriani, among many others.

Released in 1961, the Maestro Echoplex EP-1 was a hugely influential tape echo unit that spawned several popular follow-ups, including the sought-after EP-2 and solid-state EP-3.

Heritage Audio tells us that TAPEoPLEX has been meticulously modelled on an original Echoplex and can deliver everything from soft and clean delays to distorted, self-oscillating repeats imbued with the space, depth and warmth that’s so characteristic of the Echoplex.

TAPEoPLEX’s interface closely mirrors that of the original hardware, with controls for Echo Time, Echo Repeats and Echo Volume joined by adjustable input level and a two-band EQ.

Unlike the original, though, TAPEoPLEX is a stereo delay with independent delay times for left and right channels, both of which can be synced to your DAW’s tempo. An additional control also lets you change the amount of wear-and-tear on your simulated tape loops, adding a chosen level of colour and harmonic distortion to the wet signal.

Here’s what they have to say about it:

“It was about time someone got serious about recreating the legendary tape delay sound to today’s standards and the use of today’s technology to carefully model this plugin from an original unit (Serial # 34553) is the real secret behind the sound of the TAPEoPLEX, making it the best sounding tape delay plug-in available today. And taking advantage of the extra options that a plug-in allows, the TAPEoPLEX is now a full independent stereo unit where you can choose different echo times for the L and R channel or link them to have the same or different delay time constant on each side, following either the same tempo or the DAW’s tempo.

An additional control even allows to choose the amount of freshness of the tape, adding color and a slight harmonic distortion to your tracks when needed.”

Priced at €99.00/$99.00, TAPEoPLEX is available for free to owners of any of Heritage Audio’s i73 PRO audio interfaces. The plugin is compatible with macOS and Windows and available in VST3/AU/AAX formats.

Find out more on Heritage Audio website.

Lese let us know that they has just updated Codec to version 2.0, bringing a handful of new features that give you more control over the way the plugin manipulates audio.

Codec repurposes a real-time audio coding standard designed for internet voice communications as an audio effect, producing a crunchy, digitally degraded sound that simulates a poor internet connection.

What’s new in Code 2.0 video:

Codec divides audio into individual packets, some of which can be randomly dropped out using its Loss control. This prompts the plugin’s internal decoder to try to conceal the packet loss, and there’s a choice of three modes that determine how this is handled by the plugin, each giving you a different sonic flavour.

The Disorder control (new in Codec 2.0) adjusts the ordering of packets being fed into the internal decoder to create a chaotic, glitchy effect, while a new Noise mode adds noise to the signal before it’s fed into the encoder, creating a “messier” sound.

Additional crunch can be applied via Codec’s Crunch controls, which crank up the gain on a selected frequency range prior to the encoding stage and dial it down it once the audio is compressed, creating more distortion artifacts with no added volume.

Codec is available now for PC and Mac in VST/AU formats. You can download it for free from the Lese website.