Turnado

It’s easy to consider audio effects as the salt and pepper of today’s music. Add too many of them and they may ruin an otherwise good musical production, but add too few and the music will sound bland. The same can be said about live performances and especially DJ mixes, where knob turning is sometimes elevated to an art form.

This is why you should really choose your tools wisely when it comes to effects. Sure, any DAW or virtual DJ controller has them aplenty, but there are also tools that are completely dedicated to this specific process. Turnado is one such fine example.

Well, there really are only eight knobs, but if you think you may need more, then remember about the analogy I made about the food with too much salt and pepper. Turnado is fairly easy-to-use; assign an effect to a knob, turn it while the music’s playing, hear what happens.

You can easily add effects by dragging and dropping them from the left side of the screen to those colored squares that are underneath the knobs. You’ll probably be surprised to find that the effects on the left also represent categories and contain quite a few more audio modifiers.

If you’re a bit overwhelmed by all the possibilities of the plugin, you can always try one of the many available presets and test how they work out with your music. You can also use the Dictator option, where you get a fader that activates all eight knobs at the same time. That may be overkill in most cases, but, with the right effects and settings, it could actually become a powerful tool.

It’s obvious that Turnado was also designed with live performances in mind, so, if you like using many effects on stage, then you could try and figure out a way to add this plugin to your setup.