No strangers to the modular game, Noise Engineering has brought its expertise to the plugin world. Engineering the Sound investigates.
From the sunny climes of California, synth company Noise Engineering has been plying its trade in Eurorack synth modules, effects, and plugins, building up a solid community of fans along the way. With a tagline that reads: “Get out of the box… and back in” and displaying a penchant for all things Latin in their titles, there’s a lot to love about this eccentric crew.
So when they announced the free beta testing for a trio of new plugins, the interest of Engineering the Sound was piqued. Made up of two synths and a distortion processor, there’s so much more to these elegantly designed and ultra-fun plugins than meets the eye.
Firstly, there’s the Ruina stereo distortion processor. Taking its inspiration from the company’s Ruina Versio hardware module, its classy interface belies the chaos it can cause in any signal chain. With its wavefolder, multiband saturator, sub octave generator, octaviser, and phase shifter, you can pull off subtle harmonic excitement, or unleash hell with the ‘Overdrive’ control, which can multiply gain 128-fold!
Based on the now-discontinued Sinc-Itor module, the Sinc Vereor is a lightweight yet intuitive wavefolding synth. Though it employs traditional waveshapes for sound generation, you blend sawtooth, triangle, and square waves to cook up entirely new textures (which you can then augment with a vintage chorus). The Vereor dynamics section is onboard (which also appears on the Virt Vereor), which features an ADSR envelope, with a multimode gate/filter.
Virt Vereor is an equally powerful synth based on Noise Engineering‘s algorithms for the Arturia MicroFreak. Combined with the Sinc Vereor, you’ve got two instruments that share similar controls with a wide spectrum of sound design possibilities.
The GUI of all three plugins offers the spacious and intuitive experience of Noise Engineering‘s hardware while providing a bit of plugin only flair. You can switch up the graphics colours with the click of a button and even add a little ‘Fire’ (streaks of colour that follow the moving wave shapes, for example). Overall, the aesthetic is sparse and clean — but owing to its vector-based retro gaming aesthetic — vibey as hell. Obviously, this injection of personality doesn’t affect the sound, but with so many garish plugins out there, it’s a breath of fresh air to combine brilliant sound and visual design.
What’s more, at the time of writing, this trio of excellent plugins comes free. Though it’s still in the beta testing phase, the team at Engineering the Sound couldn’t detect any bugs, so giving these powerful tools a go is a no brainer. And when they do hit the shop floor, no doubt there’ll be a slew of customers ready to part with their hard-earned cash for these plugins.
For all the details, head over to Noise Engineering.
