Time is running out to save up to 45% on either Kilohearts Phase Plant or Toolbox Ultimate. Sale ends Thursday, December 31, 2020 at 5:00 pm PST. Phase Plant 2nd Anniversary Sale. From now until the 7th of June (Midnight CET) you can save on Phase Plant, selected Toolbox bundles, and Toolbox upgrades. The Following discounts are available. Toolbox ULTIMATE for $349 (reg. $499, save $150) Phase Plant + Toolbox PROFESSIONAL for $199 (reg. $349, save $150) Phase Plant + Toolbox STARTER for. Phase Plant is the crowning achievement of the snapin eco-system that Kilohearts have been developing since the release of Multipass in 2015. Introducing, a truly limitless hybrid synthesizer building on a modular system of generators, modulators, and effects from the acclaimed Kilohearts snapin range of plugins. Endless possibilities for creative sound design. Phase Plant combines the power of.
I feel that the most significant benefit to Phase Plant is how visual it is. Nearly everything that can be communicated with some sort of movement is animated when necessary.
The animations are high frame rate, glitchless (mostly) and there’s nice bits of eye-candy sparsely scattered around.
Per-voice modulations are only active when the voice is active, and some controls even show ‘clone’ animations for each voice. The LFO is an example of per-voice animation clones.
Let’s not forget the tooltips (in the bottom info bar) for every single control. Top notch.
If there’s any single feature that separates Phase Plant from the competition: it’s how visual it is, and how well it’s done.
Basically anything that outputs a signal can modify nearly any control, and do it cleanly at audio-rate.
It’s almost always animated too. Good stuff.
Macros and then some.
The VST 2, VST 3, AU and AAX plugin formats are not equally well-specced for handling a large number of changing automation parameters. It’s a fact of life.
Phase Plant gives you the main synth parameters: pitch wheel, mod wheel, master pitch, polyphony etc… plus effect lane gain/mix.
Modular elements must be assigned to one of 8 macro knobs to be automated. Macro assignment is a simple process that mimics any other modulation assignment in Phase Plant.
I’ve seen a number of people complain about this sort of workflow, but unfortunately it’s not going away until everyone starts supporting VST3 or AAX (hah) uniformly. At least Phase Plant makes macro assignment easy and utilizes a consisted interface for it.
Phase Plant allows you to store generators in groups, which means that everything in the group gets sent to the next thing when that routing logically makes sense. What does ‘logically makes sense’ mean? If a generator has no potential path to output from the group, then it is not routed. If there is a path to an out device, then it is routed.
There are 3 parallel effects lanes which provides you 3 layers of potentially polyphonic (one instance of each lane per voice) effects. The effects lanes each have their own mix control and individual routing. This is incredibly powerful for making complex sounds.
(Note: I am slightly bothered that there’s no encapsulation inside the effects lanes. It would be nice to throw in a multipass in the effects lane.)
There is relatively less functionality here than some of the competition, however the interface’s ease of use and ease of understanding what is happening in a patch are an acceptable tradeoff for absolute functionality.
The browser is a bit of a letdown in 2019. There’s no search, no rating and no tagging. It’s purely folder based.
You can organize things on disk a bit, but who wants to do that?
At the very least, search would be helpful.
Before we start, let’s be clear that this is a “clean” generator. Almost no aliasing is present, and the waveforms appear to be theoretically ideal. I’m not entirely sure what’s “Analog” about it, but I also don’t care.
Analog is a single oscillator with a good bit to offer. You get one of 4 shapes, sync, pulse width, 8 unison voices, fine(semi cent)/coarse(harmonic) tuning, phase shift and an interesting shift parameter that frequency shifts the signal by a fixed value.
There is almost nothing exciting about Analog except what you can do with it, and the fact that it’s technically competent. I think that can be pretty exciting in itself though.
You can import your own samples, but this is understandably a more involved process than just click and go. The wavetable system needs a selection of periodic signals to work, and not all samples provide that.
You’re given a few tools to deal with the issues presented by trying to make an arbitrary sequence of bytes to a wavetable:
The net result is that making wavetables is a positive experience.
SO FUN.
Up to 16 voices twirling and twirling in the sonic space. 3 motions, per-voice detune (appears to be delay time, like in a chorus?) and controllable spread.
Incredible simplicity for how big of a sound it can create for you.
Ensemble on every patch.
It’s really fun to look at too.
Faturator seems to be similar to the distortion effect with the i/o sidechained dynamics, except I personally just never could make it sound good.
The “stereo turbo” knob appears to be a simple haas effect, and the colour knob a pre-emphasis filter.
I’m just not a fan of this one when Distortion offers more colours and more parameters for modulation.
Here lies one of the most disappointing corners of Phase Plant. It’s a simple filter/single-band-EQ without any fun filter emulations, drive, oscillation or… anything cool.
There are two other types of filters available, but compared to other synths on the market the selection is quite disappointing.
Then again, this isn’t a subtractive synth that depends heavily on filters to sound good. It could be argued that such a selection of filters isn’t necessary, but filters are fun and especially so when there’s an easily accessible modulation system available.
You can, of course, abuse other effects and modulation to get a filter sound close to some analog emulation if you wanted. It’s just a bit more work.
Pitch and time changing over time. Hit play/pause to enable the effect.
There’s only a single control for the start/stop curve, which I thought would bother me, but it didn’t. The effect is used so rarely in something like Phase Plan that the fact that it works makes it sufficient enough.
It’s a transient shaper with an ultra neato animation.
The “Pump” parameter is an interesting addition that creates a bit of a lull in the signal that further emphasizes the attack and release.
The sidechain parameter is even cooler still. You can craft your own sound to adjust the envelope of another. Extremely useful for creating a drum sound, creating an extreme envelope and then applying that through the transient shaper. Much easier than messing with envelopes and offers you some extra control.
I’ve mentioned competition a few times here. Any sort of modular system with audio-rate modulation or ultra-modular system fits the bill. I know of plenty of things that surpass Phase Plant in functionality. Melda Sound Factory is a superlative example of surpassing Phase Plant’s functionality in a large number of facets. Softube Modular is also an incredible system that forces you into the analog workflows.
So why even use Phase Plant? What’s the point? Surely you can get better, right?
There’s a difficult concept to encapsulate in writing. I think maybe “homogeneity” is a good word for it? I’m talking about the ease of movement through a UI because simple paradigms are used and reused throughout. Building complexity from a small set of uniform building blocks.
Phase Plant offers that. You get one style of modulation assignment that’s attached to the source and destination. You get one style of adding things. The GUI widgets are all very similar. There’s a single 3 pane interface and no menu-diving or layer diving.
I’m no designer, but I can’t come up with a less complicated way of creating software that allows such complexity results.
There’s a great deal of value in a product that allows you to reach your goals with the least friction possible, and even better so if there’s a bit of opinion thrown in. That’s what Phase Plant is.
You get a bunch of stuff in Phase Plant, but more importantly you get someone’s idea of how to build complexity from a uniform set of building blocks. It’s like buying a LEGO kit where you build something really cool from the core block set, rather than having someone throw every weird type of curvy LEGO brick at you and expecting you to make it yourself.
If you’re the type of person that likes to get things done without friction, then Phase Plant is absolutely for you. If you enjoy piecing things together from bare bits and don’t mind a variety of interfaces, menus, windows and other context switches… Then Phase Plant may change your mind.
There’s a lot of power here, particularly relative to how simple it is. If you don’t believe me, then check this out.
I reviewed the KiloHearts Toolbox Professional version here, which is $349 or $9/month usually. I was given this copy for review and did not pay for it.
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Check out tips and tricks on individual product pages, and watch user videos on YouTube about different extensions, as there’s a lot to learn.
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All other Kilohearts plug-ins support modular workflow in one way or another (except kHs ONE). That’s why we created the Kilohearts ULTIMATE Toolbox Crack app, which gives you everything we’ve published so you can be as creative as you want.
See hundreds of professional factory settings in these extensions from several professional manufacturers and artists around the world (but mostly from Germany). Just Phase Plant alone has over 400 carefully designed presets to get you started before making changes and creating your own.
You will find tips and hints for use on individual product pages. You’ll find user videos on the various YouTube extensions because there’s a lot to learn.
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