Three free one-knob plug-ins from Abletunes
Free plugins that sound good and are easy to use - is this heralding a new direction for Abletunes?
I love a one-knob plug-in. When a track or a sound just needs a certain something you can often get lost fiddling with EQ and compression parameters. Unless you really know what you’re doing – and let’s face it most of us are making it up as we go – then a one-knob plug-in can be the quickest way to add bite and enhancement to your music. Click here for more on my view on the concept of the one-knob plug-in. Abletunes are now offering us three one-knob plug-ins for free! Are they going to liven up your production workflow?
Abletunes Knobs
This free pack of three contains a Drive Knob, Attack Knob and a Space Knob. As with all one-knob plug-ins they are designed to alter several parameters at once as you dial in the effect.
Drive Knob
It’s like pushing into a distortion or saturation effect. It beefs things up nicely when pushed a little and brings some nasty wide band distortion when dialled all the way.
Attack Knob
This is about transients – taking those first moments of a sound and giving them some shape and presence. I don’t think I’ve really played with a transient shaper before and it’s more interesting than I thought. It definitely adds more bite to a drum loop and brings that initial pluck of a guitar string up and into your face.
Space Knob
This is a reverb, it’s OK, nothing to write home about. I quite like the way it adds space to a drum loop without getting lost in the muddiness of most reverbs when you insert them on a track. I did expect it to do more though, like at the very least widen the stereo field a bit. So slightly underwhelmed with the Space knob, but it is free.
Abletunes Knobs · Source: screen shot
It’s easy to overdo these sorts of effects, perhaps because it takes no effort or knowhow to apply them. The temptation is to whack everything up to 11 rather than spending time crafting the sound. However, with a bit of thought and experimentation these can be very handy indeed.
You can download them for free from the Abletunes website and you’re not required to sign up to anything give any details away. Abletunes are normally all about templates for Ableton Live and sample packs so this is a new direction for them. The quality of these freebies is such that I hope this is a taster of something more exciting to come in the near future.
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