Uhbik

When you produce electronic music, little can be achieved without the proper use of audio effects. Usually, any digital audio workstation comes with its share of stock plugins that will help you shape your sounds the way you like. Some of these may be tools that you’ll use forever and ever, others, not so much. Sooner or later, you’ll want to see what other well-reviewed external tools can do for your music.

More often than not you’ll be looking for specific effects, but if you just want a suite of plugins that can help you diversify your sound, then you could also give Uhbik a try.

Created by u-he, Uhbik represents a collection of nine effect plugins that are easy-to-use and can produce results that may vary, in the words of the developers, “from subtle to spectacular”. The pieces of software that form the suite are Uhbik-A (for ambiance and reverb), Uhbik-D (a delay and echo unit), Uhbik-F (for flanger and chorus effects), Uhbik-G (a granular pitch-shifter and phase vocoder), Uhbik-P (a phaser), Uhbik-Q (a semi-parametric equalizer), Runciter (a distorting filter with a pattern-breaking name that will bother many), Uhbik-S (a frequency shifter), and Uhbik-T (for tremolo and panning).

The interfaces are similar for all the plugins, with a few large and small knobs controlling the parameters. One exception the Uhbik-T which also allows you to create patterns for your effects. Each plugin is inspired by analog units and using them is a fairly intuitive endeavor.

You can probably imagine that none of the VSTs in this suite are as powerful as other individual plugins from u-he, such as the Twangström reverb or the MFM2 delay. But they all sound more than decent, and getting nine efficient effects for a reasonable price is a deal that you could definitely take into consideration, especially if you’re just exploring new possibilities but aren’t looking for anything too fancy.