With their plugins often simplifying what would usually be a much more complex task through smart workflows and sleek interfaces, Minimal Audio deserves a spot in any producer or engineer’s toolkit.
And at just $9.95/mo until it’s yours forever, the Minimal Audio Effect Bundle makes it easy to get started with some of their game-changer plugins.
In this article, we’ll give a quick overview of the four plugins in this bundle and how they can not only improve your next track, but make your next session feel like a breeze.
Rift: Cutting-edge hybrid distortion
Rift is a multi-effect plugin that can perform anything from heavy distorted mangling to subtle and crispy fizz. It hinges off the concept of waveshaping, where different sonic profiles are applied to the positive and negative parts of the incoming waveform, distorting and warping the signal in a way that simple saturation can’t quite do.
In addition to performing this unique type of distortion, Rift is packed with features that make it so much more. It also has a physical modeling Feedback section for extra sonic wreckage, plus advanced morphing filters to add movement to your sound.
Most parameters can also be tuned to follow a scale that you outline (or pick from a preset), meaning your sound will stay consistent across the keyboard.
The distortion that Rift can perform is perfect for beefing up dull bass and lead sounds, or an overly round-sounding kick drum. It’s an undeniably powerful tool for sound design in any genre or context.
We already have a full article covering Rift’s features here, and you can get Rift by itself through Splice here.
Morph EQ: Expressive EQ designer
If you’re a fan of electronic music—especially bass music—you’re probably familiar with the crazy bass movement of subgenres like dubstep, neurofunk, and drum and bass. Clever automation of effects like distortion and reverb help bring this movement to life, but a lot comes from intricate filter movement, which often ends up requiring a bunch of tedious automation.
Morph EQ makes EQ automation simple and much more musical, letting you “draw” lines within the frequency spectrum that each EQ node will move along. With the ability to have over 100 nodes in a single instance of Morph EQ (you’ll never actually need this much) and seven different types of filter shapes, you can create extremely complex filter movements with just a single plugin.
And if you do decide to load up a bunch of EQ nodes, Morph EQ also features macros to adjust all nodes at the same time:
- Shift: Adjust the frequency position of the entire EQ at once, moving all nodes together. Think of this like moving the cutoff frequency of an individual filter, but for the whole EQ, which works really well for dramatic filter sweeps.
- Pinch: Move nodes closer to or further from the center of the range they cover. So, if your lowest node is at 100 Hz and your highest is at 1 kHz, increasing the Pinch moves every node towards 550 Hz. Decreasing it would move nodes towards 100 Hz or 1 kHz—whichever is closer.
- Spread: Adjust the relative frequencies that nodes affect in the left and right channels. Move the knob to the right to raise the frequencies affected in the right channel and lower the frequencies affected in the left channel, and vice versa. This is helpful for stereo widening effects.
- Scale: Adjust the overall gain of the filters, pushing boosts higher and cuts lower. Turning this knob the other way will invert the EQ curve, turning boosts into cuts and cuts into boosts.
Not only does Morph EQ help when designing more extreme sounds, but it can also create more subtle EQ changes over time. This is perfect for creating intrigue and variation in more sustained sounds, like pads and foley.
Cluster Delay: Tap sequence designer
Most standard delay plugins simply use a delay time and feedback control to create a series of echoes, which usually does the job but can be pretty limiting.
Cluster Delay is a multi-tap delay, meaning you can dictate the number of repeats (taps) your delay should have, each lasting as long as the delay time control. So, if your delay time was set to a 1/4 note and you had four taps, a multi-tap delay would essentially play a one-bar sequence of full-volume 1/4 notes.
With this setup, you can then apply feedback to your delay line, which effectively causes each tap to have the typical “decaying delays sound” that you’re probably used to hearing. This ends up being much more flexible and allows you to create more complex delay patterns than you’d be able to create with a simple delay plugin.
But, this is just where the fun begins in Cluster Delay, because the center of the plugin has simple controls to adjust the taps within a sequence. You can shift them forward or backward in time with Spacing for accelerating or decelerating rhythms, ramp their amplitude up or down with Ramp to create swells or splashes, and pan individual taps with Scatter to create a semi-ping-pong (or full ping-pong) effect.
To the right, you can apply effects to the delays, ranging from a wobble that causes delay times to drift slightly for detuned vinyl sounds and a reverb-like diffusion effect to phasers and flangers. Even better, the FX section can be set to Feedback Mode, meaning the processed delays are sent back through the delay line, hitting the FX section again each time and compounding.
On top of this, Cluster Delay features some super helpful quality-of-life features that feel sorely missed in other delay plugins, like a delay killswitch to avoid the annoyance of crazy delays every time you pause playback, a built-in ducker that ducks the delay signal when the dry signal is playing, and even a “send” feature that makes it easy to automate Cluster Delay so it only affects certain notes (this “send” feature is on most Minimal Audio plugins, but it’s especially helpful for a delay plugin).
Fuse Compressor: Dynamic sculpting effect
Like the other three, Fuse Compressor makes a typically tedious process—dual compression in this case—much simpler and much more flexible, all in a single interface. Fuse Compressor is a multi-band dual-compressor, able to perform both downward and upward compression in up to six separate bands, tightly controlling dynamics across the frequency spectrum.
Fuse Compressor’s intuitive interface makes it simple to “squeeze” each band to your liking by just dragging on the visualizer section of the plugin to adjust the threshold and ratio of each band. The top section of each band performs downward compression (signal above the threshold gets attenuated), while the bottom section of each band performs upward compression (signal below the threshold gets boosted).
And if you’re looking to increase the dynamic range of your sounds, you can even use these controls to “stretch” each band and perform expansion.
Fuse Compressor also includes separate macro controls for the entire compressor’s upward and downward compression, plus useful features like mid/side mode and “adaptive time” controls that adjust how higher or lower bands behave.
Try the Minimal Audio Effect Bundle for free
These four plugins obviously sound great, but the experience of using them is their biggest strength. Whether it’s the distortion in Rift, filter automation in Morph EQ, delay design in Cluster Delay, or multi-band dynamics in Fuse Compressor, these often tedious production processes have never felt easier and more flexible to approach. Plus, Minimal Audio’s helpful tool-tips make the learning curve for any of these plugins easy to navigate.
Ready to give them a try? Start your free trial and get creative.
Try the Minimal Audio Effect Bundle free for three days, and then pay-as-you-go for $9.95/mo until it’s yours forever after 20 months:
December 11, 2024
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