You may well know Cristian Vogel as an electronic artist - the Chilean-born, Copenhagen-based musician has been turning out forward-thinking techno and electronica since the '90s - but Vogel is also a developer, designing equally innovative music software under the banner of NeverEngineLabs.
Until now, Vogel's software has been built for the Kyma system, a sound design environment that runs on a dedicated hardware platform. This year, though, Vogel has cooked up his first VST plugin, ShifterMesh, and its a unique multi-effects processor with a UI like nothing we've seen before.
ShifterMesh is a frequency shifter at its core. Frequency shifters work in a similar fashion to pitch shifters, with an important difference: they shift all of the frequencies that constitute a sound up or down by an absolute value. In contrast, a pitch shifter will shift the harmonics of a sound by different values in order to preserve their overall harmonic relationship.
In practice, this means that frequency shifters are a great way to introduce some wonky-sounding, harmonically interesting flavour to a signal, but not all that useful for more conventional tasks, such as pitching a sample to sit nicely within a track of a different key, for example.
ShifterMesh offers controls for the frequency shifter's shift level and mix blend, along with adjustable routing, and is equipped with a self-oscillating "ladder" feedback circuit that can be used to introduce some rather gnarly tones to your sounds. What's more, Vogel has incorporated a versatile algorithmic reverb into the plugin, with controls for reverb size, decay, modulation and mix blend.
ShifterMesh's fascinating interface is based around a matrix of tree-like nodes inspired by the Chilean araucaria araucana tree. Each of these nodes represents a preset; you can "plant" presets within the mesh to save your settings. Hit another node to load a different preset, and the settings will morph from one preset to another at a rate you can specify on the left-hand panel, resulting in some pretty neat transitional effects.
If you're intrigued by ShifterMesh, Vogel has designed a free browser-based version that lets you experiment with four demo sounds. The plugin is available now for macOS and Windows and is priced at £28.
