 In this video, I'll be taking a look at three new modulation effects from Arturia. Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. So recently I reviewed Arturia's effects collection and I was so impressed that some of those plugins have already become go-to plugins in my music production. So I was very excited to hear that they've got three new modulation plugins coming out, those being chorus, flanger and phaser plugins. And I was even more excited to hear that I was going to be able to give them a test run. And that's what I'm going to be doing in this video. Now before we do get stuck in, if you like this kind of content, all about home recording, DAWs, gear reviews, plugin reviews, that kind of thing, then please do subscribe and ring the bell on YouTube so that you get notified about my future videos. Now these plugins could be used on anything that you want to try them out on. I do think that they go really well on vintage keyboard sounds, especially the phaser and the flanger plugins. But in this video I was most eager to try them out on my electric guitars and that's what I will be doing, starting off with the chorus. So first up we have the chorus dimension D. Now this is based upon a really famous rack mount chorus unit from the 1970s and the original unit was credited as being used by Brian Eno, David Bowie and even Stevie Ray Vaughn. So a really nice heritage there and this looks an awful lot like the original unit which had just a few buttons on the front of it to control the chorus, which makes it a bit of a breeze to use but you do get some really nice results from it. Now before we do get into the controls, let's have a quick chat about what chorus actually is because you've probably used it before but I find if you understand what's going on it helps you to use it a little bit more effectively. So what a chorus does is it takes the original signal, it splits it, it slightly detunes it and then it adds a constant delay to it, typically 20 to 50 milliseconds and the first part of that, the detuning, that pitch can be modulated meaning it can be adjusted repeatedly in a kind of a cycle so you haven't got the same pitch change happening all the time, it's changing throughout that cycle and that's where we get some differences in the modes that we'll talk about in a moment. So let's just take a quick look at these controls, I don't think I have to explain the power button to you nor should I really have to explain what the mono and stereo mode is but you will need to know what these modes do here. The most important of these are modes 1, 2 and 3. These create differences in the delay which is being applied and the intensity of the pitch modulation so that's where you're going to get your major difference. Then we have an interesting button here, button number 4 just really gives the wet signal a bit of a boost in the mix. So it's really not making a different type of chorus but just boosting the chorus which is there. So you make your main selections 1, 2, 3 and then if you want to boost it use 4. Now choice 0 is really, really interesting because you may think well it's just a bypass right? Well it is and it isn't. It does bypass the chorus effect but what they've done here cleverly is they've made it still go or simulate going through the virtual hardware here. So you're still getting a little bit of colorization to the signal even though there's no actual chorus effect being applied. Now here's where the bonus is to this though. Up in the top right hand corner you'll see this on a lot of Arturia plugins, that double arrow going down. That opens up an advanced mode so I'll do that now and then looks like this. Now this does not necessarily reflect controls which are on the original units so what Arturia often do is they kind of model on an original unit but then they'll add some bonus features via this advanced sort of area here. So that's a really cool approach that they're not being sort of religiously true to the original unit but adding a little bit of something extra for you. So what we have here on this particular plugin is some variations on the oscillator shape here. This is you know concerning the modulation. So with those differences in shape there you will hear some quite stark differences especially with these last two and you'll hear that in a moment when I demo this plugin on an actual guitar track. Then over here you've got some different dynamic color. So what this is doing is there's actually a compressor built into the unit and this makes some changes to the attack and the release of that compressor so you can hear some slight variations in the color there with that. Then we have a stereo width control here if you're using it in stereo mode and then a mix control. Now just a little bit off topic here but when you have mix controls in plugins the way I like to use them is if the plugin is sort of actually on the channel so if this was actually on the guitar track then I'll definitely go ahead and use this mix control to blend the effect in with the original guitar sound. However if I've actually got this plugin applied to a bus what I normally do then is actually have the wet signal coming through a hundred percent and then I use the controls in my DAW to kind of blend the original signal with the effect. That's just my approach but it's a really handy way to use any plugin if it does have that control. So without further ado let's actually have a listen to this chorus plugin. I've applied it to electric guitar here now in honesty I may not actually use a chorus on this actual guitar part but it was the best I could come up with at the time so I hope that's okay. It does serve to demonstrate the sound of the actual effect so let's go ahead and have a listen to it. I'm going to play with the controls here as we listen and you can see what differences you can hear. So if we leave the pitch alone but instead we modulate the delay times then we end up with a flanger and this is Arturia's Flanger BL20. Again this is based upon some old hardware but you do get some extra bonuses as well. Now I'm not going to go through every single control of this unit but I'm going to go through the main functions which I'll be using in the demo at the moment. So I want to focus first of all on the right hand side of this interface where we have the different modes. You'll see here we have selectors for three different modes, manual envelope or envelope do we say and auto as well. So let's start off with manual if we have that engaged then our main control is here that's just the manual control over the delay there. Doesn't seem all that useful at first but we'll get back to that in a moment. The second mode that we have here is the envelope mode and then these controls make the difference here the threshold and the decay as well. And then finally we have the auto mode which is a really easy one to use. We simply have these rate and depth controls mainly to use here so we can make effects to our modulation just using those two controls and you can use these different modes in combination as well. But where it gets really interesting for me is the manual mode. If we switch back to that and then we go using our control in the top right here to the advanced mode of the plugin then we can see a whole bunch of other functions here most interestingly this one in the middle where we can create our own oscillation shapes. Now we need to engage the add to manual here to hear that difference and then you can go ahead and you can either sort of start to draw in your own shapes here or you've got some presets as well which you can select from. Okay, so I'll be going through those in a moment with the demo and hopefully you can hear some of the differences but we'll start off in that sort of very simple auto mode up here as we play this guitar part. Now phases are often confused with both chorus and flanger effects but they're really quite different. With a phaser we do split the signal but then one of those signals is phase shifted and laid on top of the other one. Now that creates a notch where there is phase cancellation. You know that thing that we normally try to avoid in this case we impose it and then that notch is swept through a range of frequencies and that's where we get our phaser effect. Now the one that you can see on the screen here is Arturia's phaser bitron a kind of a double phaser if you like and because of that you'll see that the controls on the left and the right hand side here are reasonably similar. Now these two phases can be routed in different ways and we've got some different routing options down here and we've got Mono Parallel, Mono Serial, Stereo Parallel and Stereo Serial there which is the one that we'll leave on fort the moment. Now so you can get a feeling for the way that this effect works I'll just be using one of these phases I won't be confusing it right away by using both of them. We do have some sweep controls but on the left hand side we have some different options so we have some the rate of sweep happening here but you can also control it with this pedal. So if we click to the pedal mode here then we get to use the pedal to control the different rate for the sweeps and you can see the little light flashing accordingly there to indicate the rate but when we are in this mode we can also go to the envelope mode which we can reveal there by clicking on this button down here. So these are all things that I'm going to be playing around with as I go through the demo and as well as that I'll also be messing around with the depth and the feedback controls here. So have a listen to this effect and see what you think. So at the time of recording this video I don't actually know the price of these plugins so you should definitely check the link in the description down below to find that out. Now let me know in the comments down below which of these three is your favourite and how you would use them with your music. Are you going to use them on guitars like me or on keyboards as I mentioned earlier or is there some other use for these plugins that you think would be perfect. Definitely let me know in the comments down below. I love hearing about the way you guys make music. Now if you did like this video then make sure you hit the like button. That helps me out by letting YouTube know that it should show this video to other people. If you didn't like this video for any reason whatsoever then hit the dislike button twice and if you do like this kind of content then make sure you subscribe and ring the bell on YouTube so that you're notified about my future videos. And I will see you in the next video.