I love effects that take a sound, morph and modulate it, creating whole new textures. Valhalla's Shimmer [Tape Op #111] plug-in has been a favorite of mine for creating Brian Eno [#85] soundscapes out of almost anything. I'm always on the lookout for any tools that feature various ways to drench tracks in these crazy, unreal spaces. Soundtoys make many of my favorite plug-ins, and founder Ken Bogdanowicz [#62] used to work for Eventide Audio in the '80s. I use Soundtoys plug-ins on every mix in some capacity – they are well designed and fit easily into every song.
SpaceBlender, labeled the "Imaginary Space Machine," became one of my new favorite plug-ins within minutes of use. The GUI features a visualizer that looks like a mono waveform with a pulsing purple dot floating on it that "lets you see and anticipate the evolution of the effect." This is basically an envelope of what it will be doing, so we can see how it evolves and morphs. Grab the purple dot with your cursor and change the entry timing of the effect and how it wraps around the sound that feeds it. I found this intuitive and very handy, as some presets took a long time to generate and build up when I needed something to happen sooner on certain tracks. Virtual knobs for Time, Color, Texture, Mod, and Mix are mostly pretty obvious. Time goes from 100 ms to 60 seconds and turning it can warp the sound awesomely. Color controls EQ but feels like it's doing far more than a simple tone knob. Texture helps dial in softer, pillowy tones or more noticeably disruptive echoes and swirls. A Mod button will make the effect more static when off and modulated when on, and the adjacent Sync button will lock to a session's tempo. A Freeze button holds the sound in place, a captured sample of the effect, yet it will also keep feeding back to itself and changing over time. I even committed Freeze tracks in Pro Tools to bring back into sessions as new sonic elements, and then I could process it again and bring in and out of a mix. This brings up an important point: SpaceBlender can be played like an instrument. Record the automation and go nuts as the song rolls. Turn up the Color or Texture and let the sounds begin to take over the mix and then skew Time long or short to warp it all to hell.
In a recent console-based mix session, I found myself using SpaceBlender quite a bit. Sending faded in bits of a vocal track into it could generate warm, swirling fantasy sounds in the background during certain parts of a song. Pedal steel guitar would turn into synthy textures that the band really enjoyed, even though I'd had an edict of not letting any of the "real" instruments sound like synthesizers via my over-the-top effects processing. For reference, the other effects used included actual physical reverbs such as our EMT 140 plate and a Benson Amps Studio Tall Bird spring, so the fact that SpaceBlender fit into this analog workflow and made the clients happy says a lot about the judicious design of this plug-in. On drums, I even came up with some odd rhythmic barking filters and never-ending canyons – it was a blast.
Whether you need processing like this to create unique ambient music, or a spatial effect that can add a swirly unique color to any mix, SpaceBlender delivers. It's fun to muck around with, easy to use, and it opens up completely new sonic windows.