Happy Halloween, everybody. It’s the one day out of the year when the rest of the planet enjoys spooky sounds as much as we do, well, all year long.
Solid State Logic (SSL) is celebrating with a free plug-in for Mac and Windows (VST / AU). Registration is required, but otherwise, no strings attached. They write:
In response to ghost stories of economic doom and gloom we invite you to celebrate the festival of witches and ghouls with a bit of fun. SSL is proud to offer you ‘X-Orcism’, our free Halloween VST/AU format plug-in. Feed in your voice and you will be transformed into the voice of Halloween itself… be afraid, be very afraid.
Should be fun if you’re hosting a Halloween party, and you can try it on a drum loop.
I like the Jack-o-Lanterns, though severed head of the Headless Horseman would have been even better.
Other Halloween-themed goodness? Do drop us a line. Please, no Theremins: we consider them beautiful, Classical instruments and there’s nothing scary about them at all. CDM readers with kids most likely play elegant lullabies for their offspring on the Theremin each night when they’re not lulling them to sleep with a sequenced ARP melody.
I'm loving the idea behind this. Branded marketing AUs for free download.
Next step, surely, is the corporate sponsored AU – eg Lucky Strike to sponsor a tube emu plug-in. The slogan? "They're toasted".
It's certainly not a new idea — in fact, SSL themselves have done it before.
I think it might actually have the same marketing impact *without* the registration required, to be honest. (in fact, give people the *option* of signing up for the mailing list, and they might be more likely to want to receive it…) But anyway…
Yeah I have to say, after I saw the registration required part, my response went from "cool" to "meh".
Oh come on it's free! What's a little e-mail address between friends? Surely you have one just for spam anyway? Plus while you're there you can go fetch the Listen Mic Compressor too.
I don't know… my theremin playing is very scary, and not because I make spooky woo-woo noises with it either. 😉
Anyway, registrations like this are what Mailinator is good for.
So, a mini-review:
"Echoes" controls the mix (and possibly feedback) on a delay effect with fixed time.
"The Howling" mixes a wind noise mixed in with the input.
"Wailing" is a sort of modulated spooky vibrato.
"Tombverb" is a mix control for a very artificial, long-decay hall reverb.
"Ghoul" is a pitchshifter about as good as any I've heard in VST form.
The controls are a bit notchy, there are no value readouts and it doesn't expose parameters to the host. And of course there aren't a lot of pretty basic controls, like delay time.
But surprisingly, I think this thing can be useful beyond tonight. It doesn't sound bad, except in possibly good ways. And it's free and doesn't kill your CPU.
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Free Happy Halloween Stuff…
…Next is SSL’s Free Halloween Plugin: X-orcism via CDM:
“Solid State Logic (SSL) is celebrating with a free plug-in for Mac and Windows (VST / AU). Registration is required, but otherwise, no strings attached. They write……
No one's going to be falling asleep to the fat bass coming out of an ARP. It's too invigorating!
[…] SSL via CreateDigitalMusic […]
How come if I Wrap it in VST Wrapper, it doesn't show up in ProTools?
This weblog appears to get a large ammount of visitors. How do you get traffic to it? It gives a nice unique spin on things. I guess having something useful or substantial to post about is the most important factor.