Last week native instruments, who are well known in the music technology industry for developing pristine VST plugins/sound modules released a free VST effect called “phasis”
It's not an uncommon practice for companies to provide us consumers with free software to get in our good books and keep our interest in their products. Unfortunately not all free VST plugins provided by manufacturers are good, but as expected...native instruments blesses our D.A.W’s (Digital Audio workstation) with a pretty simple but really interesting plugin.
It has a simple GUI layout (Graphical user interface) which sometimes in the world of plugins means that you can end up with a basic/boring sound or effect, but this is not the case for phasis. From briefly testing it with various different types of sounds ie: Drums & percussion, Synth, Bass synth and acoustic sounds… I found phasis to provide a pretty clean and unique layer of sound when added in an FX chain.
The great thing about effects in music production and engineering is that they don't have to be used in a linear way, for example.. I tested phasis with drums and percussion loops by inserting the plugin into the actual audio channel of my loops and found that the mix levelling on phasis was not extreme enough to affect all bands of frequencies like most phaser plugins do and also tested it on a send channel with some distortion which really brought out the charactersitics of the plugin's sound. It also features a mod mix knob which enables you to sweep between two features on the plugin which are the center and spread.
The mod mix changes the focus of your modulation setting which will make the modulation process more focused on the center of the setting (45% - around 100% left) and the spread (45% right to 100%) and 50% being a mixture of both. Manually modulating the mod mix function provided some interesting results, for the setting I applied having the mod mix to the left provided a really watery and squelchy sound and having it to the right provided a really metallic like sound which was almost similar to a flanging sound.
Example of mod mix manually modulated (can also be controlled via CC):
Phasis also consists of the standard features which most phasers have:
stereo width
mix levelling (invert function is on the top right of this picture)
rate
feedback
amount
notch (up to 12 stages)
but also had two functions which are not as common in all phasers which are invert and ultra
Invert is self explanatory, but the ultra setting is a bit more unique. The ultra setting doubles the frequency rate of both the rate and center function which can give off some really extreme and cool results by making the modulation process twice as fast as the normal setting.
You can grab yourself a copy by simply having a native instruments account or creating an account and registering the serial number they send you via email, download native instruments access app and enter the serial number.
https://www.native-instruments.com/en/specials/happy-holidays-2017/download-phasis/
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy using phasis! :)