Scaler - Plugin Boutique

An incrediblely intuitive tool for not only learning scales and chords but how they work together. Beautifully designed and essential for anyone who is not versed in musical theory. The drag and drop feature which places the midi notes inside your DAW is fantastic as is the dragging of chord tiles from your selected scale into the arranger. One of a kind and probably the best and easiest out there, especially when compared to the likes of 'Instachord'.

Scaler is a unique and inspirational MIDI effect that makes finding chords and progressions intuitive and fun! With note detection, scale selection and chord suggestions, Scaler is a comprehensive but easy-to-use toolbox that will help anyone make better music.

A first of its kind, Scaler can determine what key and scale you’re in and suggest chords that match your music, or it can inspire a tune from scratch by providing a set of initial chords in an unexplored key. With the onboard bank of 1,728 scales and modes including genre and artist presets, there’s more than enough to keep the juices flowing.

Once you’ve determined a scale, Scaler lays out basic diatonic chords for you to audition, and lets you take things further with dozens of chord variations and voicings to try out. Theory buffs can also get an insight into each chord’s harmonic function.

Ready to put together a progression? Simply drag and drop chords into Scaler’s sequencer, change up octaves and inversions, and record or drag the progression into your DAW.

Benefits

•Discover your music’s key and explore alternative scales and chord sets
•Choose from hundreds of keys, and get the harmonic flavours of pro artists
•Easily audition chords and find alternative voicings and common substitutions
•Quickly build intelligent progressions by dragging chords into Scaler’s chord sequencer
•Drag chords and progressions from anywhere in the plugin out to your DAW

Detect

•Discover your track’s current scale with MIDI keyboard or piano roll note detection
•Get an insight into the emotional content of matching scales
•12 keys across 12 scales and modes giving you a total of 144 options to choose from
•12 unique voicing types giving you a potential 1,728 Scales and modes
•Over 50 artist chord sets from the likes of Carl Cox, MJ Cole, CeCe Rogers and Mike Huckaby
•Over 50 genre and mood-based chord sets such as Chill, Drum & Bass, Jazz, Soundtrack, EDM…
•Check how closely a given scale matches your detected input

Keyboard

•Keep an eye on notes and chords going through Scaler with real-time visual feedback
•Visualise the chosen scale as highlighted notes on Scaler’s piano keyboard
•Audition chords from your chosen scale with a choice of four sounds
•Play and record one-finger chords using Scaler’s Bind MIDI function
•Assign any VST / AU instrument to Scaler to control your favourite synths

Explore

•See the basic diatonic chords that can be built from your chosen scale
•Browse Chord Variations for each note to get suspended chords, extended chords, dominant sevenths and jazz chords
•Quickly get a sense of each chord’s harmonic function in progressions
•Discover chord substitutions that lend variety to your progressions
•Experiment with different chord voicings to spread notes across the keyboard
•Mix and match from hundreds of artist and genre-based chord sets

Build

•Drag and drop chords from your palette into Scaler’s Progression Builder
•Transpose and invert chords for even more voicing styles
•Audition your progressions and make changes with drag-and-drop
•Save your own chord sets to the preset bank for later use
•Export MIDI to your DAW simply by dragging and dropping

New Features in Version 1.2

•Humanise Velocities: the velocity of each note within chords is randomised to provide a more natural playing style.
•MIDI Export Length: select length of MIDI notes for export and drag and drop.
•Improved Progression Builder: Now handles up to 16 chords & chord progression is now played at DAW tempo.
•21 New ChordSets: Classical (8), K-Pop / J-Pop (6), Neo Soul (6)
•11 New Scales: Lydian augmented scale, Acoustic scale, Major locrian scale, Ukrainian dorian scale, Hungarian gipsy scale, Melodic minor scale (asc), Half-diminished scale, Phrygian dominant scale, Persian scale, Neapolitan major scale, Neapolitan minor scale

Stereo Savage - Credland Audio -

Lots of stereo panners out there but Stereo Savage is a particularly nice one with an intuitive interface and excellent presets. 

It’s always refreshing to review any of the plugins from Plugin Boutique, and in this case, something completely different from what most of us are used to. Open your plugin list, and check how many stereo image manipulation plugins you’ve got. I’ll wait… Maybe a couple? Three at the most? Now, check again and count how many of them can do almost anything you could imagine with the stereo image. Again, I’ll wait… Probably zero, right? Well, the StereoSavage plugin might be one of those plugins you can’t live without once you use it for the first time! Let’s check it out!

The GUI is very much in the style of other Plugin Boutique plugins, like the BigKick plugin, dark, gray interface with yellow indicators. StereSavage’s GUI features five different sections, plus Metering at the end.

The first section is the Effect section, with three different effects, mainly to widen mono sources. Those effects are: “Vox”, which actually pitch shifts one of channels and adds some short delay in time, with then results in somewhat a “chorus” Fx. You can go pretty crazy and detune by one semitone.
Next is the “delay”, which goes up to 40 ms (Haas effect), so, it can even do the “outside the speaker” trick, when using this effect on something really important, like vocals, always be careful to check mono compatibility.
Finally, the last effect in this section is the “expander”, which works pretty much as the Roland Dimension D vintage hardware, you can add a fixed low pass filter using the Warm button.
Each of this effects has an FX amount knob, so you can dial how much FX do you wanna apply. Clever feature indeed

Next section is the Stereo Adjust with a simple Pan knob, a width knob -which can actually widen your track or mix a lot!-, a rotation knob, and a level correction knob -in most cases, you’ll need to take the level a couple dBs lower when you mess with the width. Also, there’s a pre-function for the pan.
Next, you’ll find an Input Routing with various options and modes, as well with the ability to input just L or R channel, and reverse the phase of each. Modes are stereo, Mono sum -L+R summed in mono- and swap L/R. You can do some clever things with stereo tracks with this section, but, most important, it’s a great tool for monitoring your mixes.

The next section works great with the stereo adjust when you use this plugin for mastering a track, and that’s the Bass Bypass. Probably, you wanna keep your bass and kick right in the center, so, this section works as a filter side chain for the width. Pretty straight forward, you select the frequency and gain, and that portion, will stay on the center. Great tool for mastering purposes.

Finally, you’ll find an LFO which can modulate lots of parameters. The most obvious one is Pan, for creating the auto-pan effect, but, you can also modulate the rotation, the width, the level, for tremolo, maybe, the delay time -for the delay effect – and the size for the expand effect. You’ll find all expected analog waveforms, like sine, triangle, square, saw and random, plus a square+saw waveform. It can be sync’d to host tempo and the speed can go right up to audio rate (30Hz), you can change the phase of the waveform and, of course, the amount is bidirectional, so, you can, in fact, create some crazy effects with this!

Last but not least, there’s a quite handy Metering for checking Input & Output levels and Stereo Field & Phase.
The new StereoSavage plugin work on both PC and MAC based digital audio workstations, being available in 32-bit / 64-bit VST, AudioUnit and AAX plug-in formats.

Conclusions

Well, I’ve got to say, this is the first time I see a plugin that’s so complete for the stereo field. I mean, with this set of tools, you can manipulate pretty much anything you can think of in the stereo image. This is great for mixing and adding dimension to mono tracks, as well as stereo sources. Again, some tools are great for using with busses, and even for mastering purposes. You can go very subtle or very savage. In any case, when messing around with the stereo image, you should definitely check your mixes in mono, for phase problems (and if you go savage, chances are you’ll end up with phase problems!).
I don’t know any other stereo image plugin that’s so complete, so, as I said before, once you try it, you’d probably won’t be able to live without it! So, hey, try it!!! Review from Producerspot.com

Plugin Boutique - Carbon Electra v1.1 Win/Mac

Fantastic new vst definitely aimed more at beginners with several excellent tutorials on how oscillators , envelopes etc work. A superb vst for anyone learning the ins and out of synthesis and pros too, with its very modern sounds of today. I know i love it. The stepper in particular is a great fun feature and once again quite easy to use. Check my new song out using Carbon Electra HERE if you like!

4 Oscillator subtractive synthesiser featuring informative displays, editable step sequencer, vocal filter, integrated distortion and analog control.

Plugin Boutique & Samplify Present Carbon Electra. Carbon Electra is a powerful and intuitive synth built by producers, for producers. It's a four-oscillator subjective synth with a modern feature set. It has been developed as an advanced learning tool whilst also being a powerful and easy to program synth. Being based on vintage analogue routing and featuring flexible modulation options including an editable stepper and note performer.
The graphical displays act as a comprehensive information tool aswell as an accurate guide to each parameter change. Best of all, it sounds incredible.

Key Features:
Powerful synth engine that is easy to learn and use with no hidden menus.
4 Analog style sync-able oscillators with adjustable pulse width, frequency modulation and multiple wave types including pitch-able noise.
Informative physics based graphic displays with comprehensive info pane.
6 filter types including powerful vocal filter with filter drive and saturation.
Simple, incredibly usable and useful FX section, like having a bunch of great guitar pedals.
Editable step sequencer that can be assigned to pitch, volume or cut off independently or simultaneously with various wave types and edit mode allowing node creation and line curves.
Over 600 factory presets covering sequences, chords, motions, bass, leads, keys, pads and effects.
Ability to run the amp section "too hot" into the built in optional limiter at the main output, creating a modern hyper-compressed sound.
Super flexible unison control ranging from subtle warmth to massive super saw or super square sound.
Multiple stereo width parameters allowing high precision control of the stereo field.

Artists presets by : .
Mike Huckaby // Kosheen // Freemasons // Carl Cox // DJ Pierre // D Product // Rob Lee // Dom Kane // Timo Garcia...and more.

System Requirements
Carbon Electra is compatible with most major DAW platforms, and is available for both PC and Mac.

Mac:
Audio Unit 32-bit and 64-bit.
VST 2.4 32-bit and 64-bit.
Requires OS X 10.6 or later. OS X 10.8 or higher is recommended.

Windows:
VST 2.4 32-bit and 64-bit.
Windows XP SP3, Windows 7, Windows 8.