Review of Michael Kingston RetroBand and Audio Damage Replicant Originally published in TapeOp, 2007. If you spend a lot of time tweaking tracks on a computer, you probably have a big folder full of plugins, many of them freebies that you never use. At least that's the case with me—the sound mangling capabilities of software have become more or less limitless, and the market is clogged with decent, affordable product. This is a good thing for musicians and engineers, of course, but it can be a challenge to separate the wheat from the chaff. The stuff I end up using the most tends to fall into two categories: 1) the simplest, best-sounding, best-looking, most efficient in a given category, and 2) unique twists on a theme. Michael Kingston's RetroBand falls into the latter category. It's essentially a distortion, but it's a strange distortion, and it makes sounds I've never heard come out of any other plugin. According to Kingston's web site, RetroBand models “several aspects of the interaction between gain stages and transformers of analogue gear, referred to as intra-modulation (IM), ie. Class A/B gain stage switching distortion. It also features several forms of transient shaping in-between the stages.” The effect consists of four bands of distortion modeling: low, two mids, and “flexi.” Each band has its own gain and frequency knobs, as well as Q, noise, mid/side (to adjust the stereo image), flip (a sort of slightly ring-moddy kind of thing), emphasis/de-emphasis (“of the pre-IM transient”), and dyn (“emphasizes the post-IM transient”). You can solo any band. There's also a master bus, with wet/dry and drive controls, plus push/pull (a transient booster), and a 2x/1x oversampling button, to save CPU if necessary. In other words, it's a complicated effect. It's easiest to think of it as a very peculiar parametric EQ with some parts rattling around loose inside. The range of sounds is hugely variable, but the general impression is one of age—you can make things sound extremely old, distant, and broken. Torn speakers, blown tubes, bad caps, radio interference—you get the idea. When applied mildly and mixed with the dry signal, you can get a big, meaty, vintage roundness to your sounds; when you really push the thing hard, you get all kinds of lo-fi extremes. I don't want to give you the impression that RetroBand is like the other saturator-type plugins you already have. It really isn't. It's odd and ghostly—it's like if your amplifier was designed by Edgar Allen Poe. You can turn a drum track into a thunderstorm, or into a mouse living in your wall. And it sounds really, really analog—it's maybe the only effect I've ever heard that I was hard-pressed to believe was software. That's not a misapprehension you'd ever have with Audio Damage's Replicant, though. It falls into category 1—it's the best beat slicer you've ever heard. The concept is simple: it takes your track or mix, chops it up into bits, then lets you do stuff to the bits. The stuff you can do includes filtering, delay, reverse, and randomization. The GUI is dominated by a series of concentric rings that are divided into parts. The outer ring contains 16 sections; each represents a beat to which you can choose to apply the effect. Inside is the “opportunity” control, which addresses the frequency and randomness of your chosen effects. Outside the rings are two filters, high pass and low, with resonance; elaborate delay controls; bit reduction; and panning. There's a HOLD button, which you can hit if the computer randomly comes up with something cool that you want to preserve; and a direction control “for entire events or individual repeats.” Glitching and stuttering effects are this plugin's forte; you can take a static synth pad and turn it into a wild IDM beat-fest. It's great fun to let it rip apart “organic”-sounding sources like vocals or acoustic guitar; or set it loose on a drum track for instant frenetic accompaniment. The GUI is large, clear, and inviting, and you can tweak it all day, but it's almost as fun to set all the parameters to 100% random and just let it mess around. Since it appears to adjust itself automatically to your tempo, it doesn't take much effort to get it going. As its name suggests, it's a plugin that doesn't know it's a plugin—it thinks it's human. I find it most useful not to disabuse it of that notion. Both of these plugins are from independent developers, and both are highly affordable and idiosyncratic. Audio Damage also offers a suite of other great, cheap plugins (including last year's fantastic Reverence, a digital plate reverb), while RetroBand is Michael Kingston's first. Kingston offers a full trial download with intermittent dropouts, and a cut-down freebie called RetroBand Lite; Audio Damage doesn't do demos, but they are possibly the only software company that will give you a money-back guarantee if you aren't satisfied. Which you will be. c2007 by J. Robert Lennon.