Artillery

Audio effects can do a lot of great things to your musical productions and live performances. Use them wisely and they’ll act like a good dressing to your salad of sounds. Use too many and there’s a big chance of you ruining the wonderful taste of fresh vegetables. Metaphorically speaking, of course. The vegetables represent the sounds. It was a figure of speech. You got that, right? Good.

When talking about effects, most people think about turning knobs. It’s true that, on most synthesizers, controllers and other instruments, effects can be triggered by pressing buttons and adjusted by turning knobs. Well, if you’re not satisfied with this, the creative developers from Sugar Bytes have found a way to change this.

Artillery allows you to assign effects to various keys on a keyboard. Instead of turning knobs, you can simply press the keys to trigger and adjust effects. Obviously, the plugin works best with a keyboard MIDI controller, but you can easily test it without one and see if it suits you.

The interface is very user-friendly; simply click above the keyboard to assign an effect, then drag the bar with the effect’s name over the exact keys that you want to control. The more keys you assign to an effect, the more variety you can to add to your music.

If you love knob-turning, then don’t despair, because you’ll still control various parameters (like pitch, direction and effect level) that way. Like with most Sugar Bytes plugins, you will have many presets to explore and test. You can modify the effects even further by using the Universal Modulator section, which can act as a low-frequency oscillator, an envelope or a step sequencer.

Even though it may seem like an unusual plugin to add your collection, the different workflow it suggests may actually become a breath of fresh air for your productions and performances.