 This video is sponsored by DistroKid. Follow the VIP link in the description down below to get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. It's Christmas and Arturia have just released a free plugin for you. It's called FX Refract and before we dive into exactly how it works, let's just have a quick listen to one of the things it can do. So before I go ahead and play you my first demo, I just want you to hear the track without the plugin switched on. It's a very simple electric guitar track. So let's bypass the plugin and have a quick listen. You get the idea there. So I'm going for a kind of a shimmer effect with the plugin on this occasion. Let's have a quick listen and see how it sounds with FX Refract applied. So as you can hear there, that kind of ethereal, surreal kind of shimmer effect there. I rather like that. I think it's pretty good for a free plugin. That's my first example. There's many different types of effects so that you can get with this plugin. So before we look at the second demo, let's take a look and see how all of this actually works. So this plugin starts off on the left-hand side with the refraction section and here we split our original signal into a number of different voices and we can control how many voices with the voices control at the bottom here and we can set it to up to eight stereo voices. Then it's going to actually detune and modulate those various different voices and we can control how much it does that with the amount control here. Now the overall effect of doing this is that we start to sort of widen the sound of our input, okay? Now with this amount control, we can further modulate that with the refraction modulation control here. So if I turn that up, you can see there's some actual movement in the value here, okay? So it's not a static sort of setting in that way. Now this is also further controlled with the LFO section over here where we can set the wave type here, different sort of wave types there and that will control the way in which that modulation is moving there and then finally we can set the rate and you can either set it musically in sync with your DAW or you can turn that off and set it in milliseconds, et cetera. Now the next thing we do is feed the output of what's happening over here to our second set of effects and it's bypassed at the moment. So you can see though that we have this band pass effect here. We also have a comb filter. We also have a bit crusher. We have distortion and we have a harmonizer. And it was the harmonizer control that I was using earlier on to create that shimmer effect with the electric guitar. I had the spray, as you can see here, set up to full and I have the chord setting set to octave. Now the control that you have down here, for example, here it's spray modulation called control the modulation of that spray setting there will change depending on the particular effect you're using in this second stage. And finally, we have a high pass and low pass filter over here and then on the right hand side we can set our dry, wet mix. So with all of that explained, let's take a look at my second demo. So this example's very different. I've got this applied to a bass guitar on this occasion. You're gonna hear some drums as well. I'm just sort of developing this part. And I really wanted to make this bass guitar part a lot more aggressive sounding and wider as well. Let's start off by hearing the bass without the plugin applied. So I'll bypass it, have a quick listen. So in this case, I've used the distortion section over here, effect over here and I've added a reasonable amount of drive. Now I couldn't decide whether I wanted the drive to be here or much more aggressive. So I'm gonna actually change it as I play you the demo. You can let me know in the comments down below which you prefer. So let's have a listen. I know which I prefer. Did you notice there how it got a lot wider sounding as well? You may or may not like that for a bass guitar. On this occasion, I wouldn't often do it. I rather liked it. Did you know it costs just $22.99 per year to upload an unlimited number of original tracks to places like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Google Play, et cetera via our sponsor DistroGid. Well, normally it costs $22.99. But if you follow that VIP link in the description down below, you're gonna get 7% off. So I've got this completely dry guitar sounding like this. And to go with those dreamy sounding chords, I wanted to create a kind of a widened sort of choracy type of effect, I guess you could say. Let's have a listen and see what I came up with. Now a lot of the widening section of this actually happened over here with the refraction. So have a listen. And that's kind of feeding into then the band pass. I'm just gonna play around with the cutoff control here so that you can see with this filter sort of cut off what the effect is. So there's a nice interaction between the refraction section and the other effect section there on the right hand side. And finally, I'd like to say Merry Christmas and a happy new year. Thank you so much for supporting this channel during 2023. I'd love to see you again in 2024. And if you're taking a break and you've got time to spare, how about checking out this playlist with a whole bunch of other free plugins?