 This is exhale from output. It's one of the plugins I'll be looking at in this video which is selling at a really special price. Some of the other plugins I'm looking at are completely free. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. We'll be taking a look at exhale later but first of all I want to dive in by looking at a brand new distortion plugin from Arturia. I didn't want to let the fact that I don't really know about this plugin in depth stop me from telling you about it firstly because my initial impressions of it are so good and secondly because it's available at the moment at a special introductory price and I didn't want you to miss out on that. This is discold fire from Arturia. It's a distortion plugin with a few differences to any others you may have seen. The idea of it is that we blend two distortion algorithms together. You can see one on the left and one on the right over here. We can select different algorithms for each of these and you can see there's quite a number of different distortion types available there. We can select them and blend them together. The other elements of this are the fact that we've got in this case a multi-brand compressor. We can change that to a compressor or even to a limiter there and we've got a feedback module here. We also have and I think importantly because it creates some of the coolest effects this modulation section down at the bottom here and you can see that we can apply different kinds of modulation there. So I've got this applied to a road piano okay in this track or I'm not going to play it applied. I'm going to play the road as it is at the moment without this applied. Let's have a listen. Now in fairness the road already has a little bit of natural sort of overdrive that you were hearing there but we're still going to go ahead and use this distortion plugin. Now I'm going to go and select one of the presets that I like. This one's called pad industrializer okay. Now I'll switch this on and have a listen to this. Just instant inspiration there. It's totally transformed that to something very very different there. As you can hear there was a lot of things going on there. There was some sort of overdrive and distortion and there was a lot of stuff going on with the modulation as well. Let's have a little bit more fun with that here. Let's try this random stutter filter. Now of course not all of the presets in here, you know use the modulation and that kind of sequence type of effect there. You don't have to have that switched on. I just think it's one of the more exciting things that we'll be hearing here. Let's have a listen. That is so much fun. Okay so I've got that applied there to piano. Of course you could apply this to things like guitars, the vocals and you as I say you don't have to use the modulation. You could use straight sort of you know overdrive and different distortions. A lot of the presets are actually aimed at drums so what I've done here is I'm going to pick one of those. This is applied to the drums that we were hearing there. I'm just going to solo them first without this applied. Okay so this preset is called drum Titan. Very, very cool indeed. The other thing you can do some much weirder things than that. Let's have a listen to this. I've got this again applied to the drums but I've put it on a bus this time. Okay let's turn the original drums down so that we're just hearing the effect of this preset which is called drums wood. Let's apply those other or blend those other drums back in. I mean the creative possibilities with this are just mind-blowing. I'm definitely going to be delving into this further. How much is it? Well if you go over to plug in Boutique at the moment you'll see that it should be selling for $149 but they've got around about 33% off at the moment and it's just $99. If you're interested in this at all I would grab it now okay before the price goes up. This is Exhale, a contact library from Output which they describe as a modern vocal engine. There's three groups of sounds in here. There's notes, loops and slices. I'm going to start off over here in notes okay. Let's have a listen to this preset. That's just swell. My goodness I hope you're listening on good headphones or through monitors. That sounds so lush okay. Now you'll see that there's four sort of controls here. There's tone, there's a wetness control, there's shape and there's pitch here okay. We'll just mess around with them a little. Now the interesting thing is these controls are not the same. There's sort of different controls for each preset. So if we go to this one here which is called Club R. Have a listen to this. There's some very different controls there obviously for a very sort of rhythmic preset there okay. We'll just listen to one more. I'm just going to randomly pick this one. Primal call. As you can see I mean we're just seeing a small selection of the presets here for the notes. Before I can scroll through you can see there's hundreds in there. You can easily kind of filter them out using these nice sort of filter buttons here. So you can quickly sort of find the kind of thing that you're looking for. So that's a nice little feature in there. Let's move over to some loops okay. These are a little bit different. I'll play a few of these. So the difference here is I'm getting a different sound on each note of the keyboard okay. Whereas with the notes when you get the same sound you can play melodies and chords etc. Let's have a listen to a couple more. By the way these are synced to the tempo in your door okay. Just so you're aware of that. So you won't be having to sort of manually sync them up if you change the tempo. Try one more here. Let's try this random of course. And just like the notes you know depending on the sort of preset you'll get different controls for over there that's suitable for that particular preset. Let's go over to the slices finally and have a listen to a few over there. Now if you're creating kind of dance music and stuff obviously this is very very suitable for that. But even for other genres you know if you just want to get some nice vocal sounds in there especially if you're not a vocalist. Could just be a nice way of adding that sort of flavor in with your music. Now currently if you head over to Plugin Boutique by following the link in the description you will see that there's 35% off of this at the moment bringing it down to $129. I really think that that's very much worth it. There's actually quite a few free plugins over at Plugin Boutique but I've picked a bundle of four here this month. These all come together. They're from Ear Reckon and as you can see they're really simple to use plugins but they're very very useful in different situations. The first one that we're going to look at here is this gate plugin okay and I've got it applied to these vocals. Have a listen to these vocals and have a listen to the gaps in between the phrases. So you can hear that there's some sort of bleed there and in the longer gaps later on in the song you probably want to get rid of that. So it's handy to have something like a gate to do that for you kind of automatically. Now I've got it on a reasonably sort of aggressive setting at the moment. You'll see it kicking in with this meter in the middle here. Let's have a listen. Now we're hearing the kind of cutoffs there. You probably wouldn't hear those cutoffs in the mix okay. You could soften them a little by using the release control for example there but a very handy, just simple little plugin to have around. The next one that we're going to take a look at is this one. This is a compressor which I'm going to apply to an acoustic guitar. Now that acoustic guitar sounds like this and I just like to have some light compression on guitars like this just to control especially those bass notes there. This is a really simple compressor. We've just got the threshold control here mainly and then we've got slow, medium and fast attacks and release okay as well as of course makeup gain so that you can just boost that signal after you've compressed the guitar. Let's have a listen to it with this compression on. Especially it's keeping those sort of those louder and low bass notes under control there. So that's very very handy. The other kind of thing that I might add to this guitar is this plugin which is a simple. I mean you sort of wonder why you would have this until you have it and then you realize if you just want to boost one particular frequency and you want to get whole EQ plugin out and you want to save system resources. This is really handy. I just want to boost some high frequencies in here okay with this guitar so I've got it switched on now let's have a listen. Have a listen for which ones I want. I increase that Q. Okay that's given that guitar just a nice little bit of sort of sparkle in there. Now I'll add my vocals back in. We'll have a quick listen. Now one of the things I like to have on vocals is some parallel compression okay and it would normally be done like this and you'd use these sort of plugins okay. I've got these on a separate bus. The vocal is going to them and I've got both these on there and I've got some pretty hard compression on there and I've got a limiter as well okay. Now if I were to listen to this all by itself let's just have a listen to this. I'll turn it up reasonably loud. Get rid of that guitar. Turn the vocal down. There's that compression and the limiter working there. Now that may sound awful to you it sounds awful to me but the idea with parallel compression is you take that and then you blend it in with the original vocal gradually and it really does help to keep the vocals just on top of the mix. Have a listen as I blend it in. Turn that on again. Now it just kind of thickens that vocal up. Now the thing is is that when you do that to a lot of tracks parallel compression that is the whole sort of routing of it and everything can get quite complex which is where our next plugin really comes in. IHNY2 stands for I Heart New York 2. New York style compression is another name for parallel compression. This is the second version from Baby Audio. I did review the first one on the channel and they've improved this quite significantly and it makes your life so much easier when you're using parallel compression because you can just insert this onto a track or onto a channel. You don't have to set up busses and route things there and blend the two together and use separate compressors and things. This makes it really easy you can insert it there and you've got this easy interface to control it which we'll look at in a moment. Now I've got this applied to a vocal in a song where I didn't think it needed it in the verse okay but then as we go into the chorus I really think we needed some parallel compression to help to keep that vocal on top of the rest of the track so we're going to hear a bit of the verse to begin with then the chorus and hopefully you'll hear what I mean. Here comes the chorus. Now I'm going to do something here which I would never do with this kind of plugin and that is I'm actually going to solo the track so that we can just hear what was happening on the chorus there. The reason I would never solo this is because the whole point of using this plugin is to see how things are going to fit in terms of the rest of the mix. If you're not hearing the rest of the mix then there's no context for you okay but when we solo it now you will at least be able to hear more clearly what this plugin does. There's two accesses on this control here okay so from the top to the bottom at the top if we have this control right at the top it's fully wet okay so we'll just be hearing the compression and then dry at the bottom we'll just be hearing the original track and then we've got the level of aggression with the compression so over here on the left there's no aggression over here on the right we've got the full amount of aggression so in the bottom left corner it's just virtually like having the plugin switched off I guess because it's dry with minimum aggression and in the top right hand corner it's fully wet with maximum aggression let's go from those two points there and so we can hear what's going on. That would be more than I would use on a track like this but you could use it on some fairly aggressive tracks and especially you can hear you can really hear all the breath and things and yeah in there yeah so I pushed that up there so that is what's doing there it's just blending in some fairly aggressive compression there with the original track now this is a simple control but you can get some fine control with this tweak button down here if you click on that it reveals that we can control things like the attack and the release here also the ratio which is 12 to 1 at the moment it's a pretty aggressive ratio there the punch we've got you know how many how much harmonics we've got in there all kinds of stuff in there so you can tweak and just refine that compression to your needs really really handy really well implemented it will make your sort of routing in your mix as much simpler to navigate how much is it at the moment well if you follow the link in the description down below head over to plugin boutique you will see that there's 43% off of this at the moment bringing it down to a very cheap $39 you know one of my favorite plugins from this video was Arturia's disc cold fire and it reminded me of why I love Arturia's products so much over the last two or three years because they always seem to push that bit extra and give you something you didn't quite expect from that plugin in terms of features or creativity the same is true of the plugins in their effects collection three and if you look on the other side of this logo you'll see a review idea of that product there definitely check that one out now