Legends of creative plugins Polyverse Music has an incredible sound sculptor for you, Supermodal. It’s a powerful new modal filter, that will beat stagnation out of any sound.
If you know about Polyverse Music, you know. They are popular amongst the creative geniuses in music production and mixing probably because of their free plugin, Wider. They’ve just dropped an inspiring plugin that will alleviate your creative blocks.
Polyverse Music’s new plugin Supermodal seems simple, but it’s not. It’s an insane world of warping, modelling, filtering, and sound sculptoring — and after reviewing this — I’m also calling it a sound inverter!
Founded in 2015, Polyverse Music makes plugins for musicians. They would know what musicians want (or didn’t know they wanted), as the co-founders are all musicians themselves successfully making creative tools that inspire people to make more instinctive and original ideas. The Supermodal maintains that legacy.
To see what this thing can do, I fired up the new Abbey Road Orchestra Low Percussion library — it’s been brilliantly recorded, and they’re great samples of low percussion instruments — perfect for me to see how messed up the Supermodal can make them.
Starting with a preset called Tunnels, it completely transformed the low ‘Djuns’ into a pitched synth-style lead line. At the heart of the Supermodal is a Modal XY control that is controlled by a magic 8-ball-looking control (which I loved!) that has 9 different models that all have their own characteristics.
The basis of the Supermodal is two filters routed in parallel — a classic and a modal filter. While the classic filter isn’t to be ignored, the modal filter is where the above-mentioned models come in to really warp your sound.
The classic filter has a 24dB-per-octave (four-pole) filter that can be blended between lowpass, bandpass, and highpass modes. Its resonance section is a lot of fun, and I like the inclusion of the ‘in-the-red’ section where it goes beyond 100 from 101-110. Watch your ears though!
The Modal Filter is a modelling filter, translating that it models various resonating bodies and the harmonic content of sounds occurring inside or around them. For example, you can model the sound of a glass — it’ll have its center pitch but will have harmonics shooting off based on a glass. It kinda makes sense as you play with Supermodal.
Being that the Modal filter is really the magic section of the plugin, here’s a table of the 9 models and offshoots within them making up 27 modes in total:
As well as being a plugin you can strap across any audio or software instrument channel, it’s got features that can be triggered via MIDI. This should not be forgotten.
To use the Supermodal in not such a sound changing way, I fired up a classic Rhodes emulation from Arturia, and used that dry/wet fader that’s ever so handy on the right hand side. I’m a big fan of internal sounds being used to create further sound scapes and ear candy moments, and this worked a treat.
Using the blend of the Supermodal I gave the Rhodes extra ‘weight’ by using the Drive control with the sound created. It sits up in the middle of the GUI and can get quite gnarly.
The Supermodal is exactly what I would expect from Polyverse Music and I absolutely cannot wait to see what else they have coming. Keep your eyes and ears out!
The Polyverse Music Supermodal comes in at $99 USD and you can get it from their site — along with other goodies — Polyversemusic.com
