Kilohearts plugins are high quality imo and their SnapHeap is a very good modulation and routing platform for sound design, V2 adds a number of new modulations. They used to only give away 6 freebies but now many of their formerly paid plugins are free. I’ve used the six freebies quite a bit and like them. Worth the download IMO.
Note that you have to “buy” the SnapHeap platform for zero dollars (i.e. create an acct with them) and that is separate from the free plugin download for new users (offer expires in 23 days from this post date). Existing users can just d/l new installer and then do update.
Have been shaking out this plugin suite from the perspective of a guitar player and there is a hidden gem among the very good meat and potatoes plugins.
The Pitch Shifter totally hangs with my hardware Whammy 5 and Pitchfork. I own a midi glissando footswitch that does anything from about a 5 second to .05 second gliss (midi 0-127 button down, 127-0 button up) and the Kilohearts Pitch shifter is as smooth as silk using it at any speed. Has same audio lag as my hardware units and tone is similar to whammy 5 “classic”. Of course also works great with 0-127 expression pedal.
The magic settings are:
Jitter: greyed out since correlation below is on
Grain Size: 27.6 ms
Mix: 100%
Correlate: ON
Compensation: OFF
The grain size good for low D, you can lower this value a little when tuned in E for a little less lag. Or you can up it some for better chords.
It can load as a standard plugin that you can bind directly in Cantabile if you don’t want to use their SnapHeap modulation and routing platform. Just bind a midi modulation source to the Pitch parm, and for one octave upward range set the C4 binding as source 0,127 and target 0.500,0.750 and you’re good to go.
The Kilohearts filters are also good for doing an autowah, but unfortunately their “follow audio” modulator is a little too simplistic to get it where it needs to be. But if using an expression pedal, there are some very good swept filter sounds to be had. The distortion plug also shows some promise with light settings in front of a clean amp sim for touch sensitive crunch, still working with it… The comp is also pretty nice when mixed at 50%.
For anyone looking for a Digitech Whammy v1 type sound with all of its wonderfully horrible artifacts (as heard in '90s U2 songs), this stack is worth trying out. Added bonus is the grain size is very low making the lag more tolerable. It adds 12 bit 32 KHz low quality A/D and D/A simulations with a bit of HF rolloff at the end. I have no idea if the Whammy v1 had these conversion specs, but given the era, its probably not too far off from what was in it. This sim seems to validate that cr@ppy converters were a big part of the v1 sound.
