Cthulhu

First introduced by H. P. Lovecraft in the short story “The Call of Cthulhu”, the fictional tentacle-wielding cosmic entity has become synonymous with the author’s mythos. Pop culture embraced the Great Old One, which is now regularly featured in games, movies, and TV series. Cthulhu also gets a visual representation in the interface of the eponymous audio plugin which I’m reviewing right now; but other than that there’s no connection between the plugin from Xfer Records and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Sorry to disappoint you, but I just had to write that intro. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!

Cthulhu is a sort of a two-in-one thing. Firstly, it’s a chord memorizer and player, which means that it will play all the notes that you hit as chords, memorize them, and play them back in your DAW. This is a great tool to have when you’re trying to compose leads or basslines, even if you’re a beginner or an experienced keyboard player. The plugin allows you to review your patterns and add a bit of variation to your composition.

Speaking of variation, Cthulhu also works as a pattern-based arpeggiator, allowing you to rearrange your chords in many different ways, such as random selection, increasing octaves, modifying pitches, or velocity scale.

The plugin comes with quite a few presets for the chords, but also the arpeggiator. Keep in mind that while Cthulhu can improve your songwriting, it probably won’t help you too much if you don’t know a bit of music theory in the first place. It’s best to use it with a MIDI controller and it certainly won’t hurt to practice playing the keyboard beforehand. Nevertheless, this is a plugin that I can easily recommend to any musician who wants to write better leads.