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UJAM let us know that Finisher RETRO, a comprehensive collection of vintage-inspired effects, is available as a free download from September 25 through December 7, 2025.

Finisher RETRO combines analog filters, delays, reverbs, tube drive, legendary choruses, phasers, and tape saturation.

“Vintage hardware gear is hard to come by and harder to use. There are software emulations, but they can be pricey,” says UJAM COO Wolfram Knelangen. “So, for a limited time, we‘re giving musicians an opportunity to explore vintage sounds with this gift that sounds amazing, with virtually zero learning curve, and a chance to get to know UJAM along the way”.

Features:

• Tape Aesthetics — saturation, wow & flutter, hiss, dropouts, echo
• Vinyl Character — crackle, rumble, stylus noise, lo-fi instability
• Analog Gear Coloration — tube saturation, spring & plate reverb, analog delay
• Early Digital Artifacts — bitcrushing, sample rate reduction, early digital chorus/reverb
• Classic Modulation — phasing, flanging, tremolo, vibrato, rotary speaker effects
• Noise & Degradation — noise layers, ambient hum, environmental patina

Finisher RETRO is available now in VST 3, AU 2, and AAX formats for Mac and PC, with native support for Apple Silicon. The plugin is free to download from September 25 through December 7, 2025.

Boochow Instruments has introduced a new web app that lets you create custom user units (oscillators, modulation FX, delay FX, reverb FX) for the Korg NTS-1 mkII using Pure Data.

Pure Data to NTS-1 mkII is a free Web-based application. It assumes that you know Pure Data, which is a free, open source visual development environment for making multimedia patches. To use, you just drag your patch to the converter.

Features:

• Convert .pd patches into ready-to-use KORG NTS-1 mkII user units
• Supports not only oscillators but also modulation, delay, and reverb effects
• No need to install any software — runs entirely in your browser
• Supports key parameters such as pitch, shape, and effect controls

Pure Data to NTS-1 mkII is available now as a free Web-based application.

Minimal Audio has announced the release of a new free formant-shifting plugin, fittingly – but perhaps a little unimaginatively – named Formant. Promising “real-time formant-shifting with musical, transparent results”, Formant is a fast and simple tool for experimenting with different vocal characters in your productions.

A lightweight and stripped-back plugin with a basic XY pad interface, Formant is equipped with a built-in tilt EQ for brightening or darkening the tonal balance of the sound. Both this and the formant-shift can be controlled via the XY pad, and there’s a Mix slider underneath for adjusting the balance between wet and dry signals.

The Minimal Audio team tell us they’d like to offer music creators an “accessible introduction” to their take on vocal processing with Formant, and are currently working on an advanced vocal production plugin named Evoke, due out later this year. This isn’t the company’s first free plugin release: they’ve previously given away Rift Filter Lite and Squash, an OTT-style compressor.

So how exactly does formant-shifting work? The technique is best explained in terms of the human voice. A typical vocal signal, like all signals with an inherent musical pitch, comprises a fundamental frequency – the root pitch – and mathematically-related harmonic overtones.

Regular pitch-shifting will transpose the fundamental and related harmonics up and/or down while maintaining their relationship, resulting in an obvious transposition of musical key. Need to tune a C vocal up to a C#? Then pitch-shift it up by one semitone – easy.

A vocal’s formants, on the other hand, are its inherent spectral frequencies – unrelated to pitch – created by that specific vocalist’s vocal tract, mouth shape and other resonant characteristics. It’s why, for example, one singer singing at C3 will sound completely different to another vocalist singing the exact same note. In broader terminology, we usually refer to this as ‘timbre’.

The process of formant shifting, then, allows you to manipulate these formants (and therefore timbre) while maintaining pitch. At subtler values, this can be used to gently shift a vocal performance’s timbre up or down, while more extreme changes are often perceived as ‘gender alteration’ – think extreme, chipmunk-style shifts or house-style deepening effects.

And though we’re using the human voice to illustrate, all audio signals contain unique formant frequencies, making formant processing a useful tool for altering the timbre of any instrument.

Minimal Audio Formant is available now for macOS and Windows in VST/VST3/AU/AAX formats. Find out more and download the plugin over at Minimal Audio website.