Welcome to the first in a series of posts to get you more familiar with the beautiful future-retro world of Soundtoys plugins. We will be exploring the Soundtoys 5 suite for this first edition and getting to know the basics of what each plugin does. Later in the series, taking a deeper dive with each one, showing use case scenarios, examples, and quick tips on how to level up your productions.
Soundtoys are what you might want to call purists; they look to the past to recreate the best hardware from the ghosts of studios gone by, with cool tweaks and updates that you can only get from today’s software. A true dedication to the craft of music production leaning on the tried and true techniques to help make your productions sound like the pros.
Below is a look at Soundtoys 5, the best way to max out the plugin system from a production standpoint and bang for the buck.
Effect Rack – Drag and drop, mix and match. The full power of Soundtoys as a multi-fx rack in a single plugin.
Use: Create chains of effects with ease and store as presets. Vocals, guitars, drums, or any audio can be tweaked or transformed using Effect Rack.
EchoBoy – Decades of echo and delay devices in a single plug-in. The pro standard for vocal production.
Use: Get classic warm tape echoes, clear chorused multi-tap delays, harsh distorted echo doubling, and even reverb effects with the built in diffusion. Vocal producers love this plugin.
EchoBoy Jr. – Seven iconic analog echo emulations in one easy-to-use plugin.
Use: Fast way to the most common delay and echo sounds for production. Classic sounds from EchoBoy with a super intuitive interface.
Decapitator – Subtle to extreme modeled hardware saturation. Top mix engineers’ secret mix and tracking effect.
Use: Warm up a track or a whole mix with just a touch of saturation. Add super heavy distortion to drums and use the mix knob for parallel processing to blend in the right amount. You can also use the mix for re-amp effects on tracks with no complicated bussing.
PrimalTap – Modeled retro dual delay with “freeze” for lo-fi pitch warped loops and delays.
Use: Great classic digital delay and chorus effects. Cool lo-fi effects with the multiply knob, and looping with the freeze button.
Little PrimalTap – A single delay line with a lo-fi twisting feature from the classic hardware.
Use: Excellent for guitar, and great for hands on freeze loop effects with beats or vocals.
Little AlterBoy – Pitch and formant shifting, and hard-tuned robot effects for transforming vocals.
Use: Vocal effects such as hard tuning, vocoder like effects, formant/timbre shifts for effects or to create character voices.
Little Plate – The lush sound of plate reverb with an infinite twist.
Use: Anything that needs a bit of classic reverb. The Infinite switch can create huge ambient washes from any sound, and the shortest setting becomes a nice “body” to dry instruments.
FilterFreak – Fat resonant sweeps, driving filter rhythms, big analog hardware sound.
Use: Classic wah wah guitar with the Envelope follower, Massive dance floor sweeps with the High Pass and Low Pass filters. Tempo locked pulses and sweeps and programmed rhythms.
FilterFreak 2 – Dual version of FilterFreak for double the analog attitude.
Use: Same as FilterFreak, but two bands for additional effects including simple but powerful two band EQ.
MicroShift – The classic studio trick for super wide vocals – with a unique new “Focus” control.
Use: The background vocal effect. Great on guitars and any track that needs width. The mix and focus control can create chorus and spatial effects.
Little MicroShift – Super wide vocals with simple selection of the 3 most used hardware models.
Use: Same as MicroShift without the additional controls, but fast and simple
Devil-Loc Deluxe – A crushing, pounding, aggressive compressor modeled from iconic hardware for massive drums sounds.
Use: Massive drums sounds, instantly. Great on other instruments too and the Mix lets you add in just the right amount.
Devil-Loc – Two Knobs, one big drum sound. Audio level destroyer with vintage vibe.
Use: No bells and whistles, just massive crushing power.
Radiator – Vintage vibe, drive, and the magic tone of the classic 1567a tube mixer like the one from Motown. A beast on bass and drums with two drive stages to push.
Use: Tube warmth for anything but bass and drums for sure. Can also add tube distortion and lots of volume with both an input and output modeled drive stage.
Little Radiator – A little tube heat and tons of vibe. Modeled from the Altec 1566a pre-amp.
Use: Ideal for just a taste of tube warmth. A single drive stage with that Altec mic pre sound.
PhaseMistress – Rich phase sweeps, deep analog vibe, and multiple modulation types including tempo locked programmable rhythms.
Use: Guitar, synths, drums or anything you need some big or little phase-shifting sweet sweeps.
PanMan – Rhythmic auto-panning with cool classic features, new tricks, and analog color.
Use: Auto-panning. Moving stuff in stereo space in all kinds of ways. Great for pads and dance percussion.
Tremolator – Classic guitar tremolo, and beat-synced rhythmic chopping, plus analog tone.
Use: Classic guitar tremolo shapes are modelled to recreate those sounds. Also functions like a programmable rhythmic auto-gater. So much more than meets the eye.
Crystallizer – Pitch Shifting reverse tempo sync’d granular delay. Mind-warping, sound design trip.
Use: From old school pitch-shifting effects like doubling, and octaves to insane reverse rising pitch effects. Step through some presets to see diverse possibilities.
Sie-Q – Achieve spacious highs, smooth lows, and great tones fast, bringing a whole new modeled color to your EQ palette.
Use: A great mix EQ since it was modeled on a classic broadcast EQ. Excellent for instruments that need some spacious high end, like guitars, and voice. Also great on reverbs.
David Ireland is a professional strategist, creative, and marketer. He began his career in 1995 as creator and publisher of BPM Magazine. In August 2000, BPM Magazine merged with djmixed.com LLC, an online media company based in Los Angeles, which later evolved into the Overamerica Media Group [OMG] in 2003. In 2009, Ireland left Overamerica Media Group to serve as the VP of Marketing at Diesel. In 2011, he returned to his roots in media and cofounded the online electronic music publication Magnetic Magazine and created The Magnetic Agency Group. In June 2018, Ireland joined Winter Music Conference (now owned by Ultra Music Festival) as the Director to lead the reboot for 2019 and usher in a new era for the iconic brand. He served as Chief Marketing Officer at Victrola for three years, guiding product innovation and brand growth. He currently serves on the advisory board of Audiopool, a new music tech startup focused on AI-generated music licensing and artist revenue models.
