Find the sonic key that will open the door to a whole new realm of creative potential in this list!
Music production is a many-headed beast, with a variety of disciplines combining to make up one creative endeavour, namely: writing, recording, arranging, mixing and mastering. There’s another step on the production journey though, one which borrows from and overlaps with some of the skills mentioned above - sound design.
Originating from the world of film and television, where audio professionals have long been tasked with creating the sonic identity of a project, in music production the term sound design refers to any process where you’re shaping the timbre and texture of a sound. It’s a fluid process of transformation and creation, and it’s very fun!
Of course, to manipulate sounds in this fashion requires some outside-of-the-box thinking, as well as a set of creative tools that work in unusual and inspiring ways. For this reason, we’ve picked six of the best sound design plugins on Plugin Boutique to help you explore new sonic territories.
Excite Audio Lifeline Expanse
Excite Audio launched the Lifeline series with Lifeline Expanse in 2022, delivering a hybrid multi-effect and amp sim that provides a wide palette of sound design options. Sleek, modern and flexible, Expanse has five re-orderable effects modules that you can send your signal through to add stereo movement, digital degradation, analogue-style drive, and versatile reverb options.
One of the key features of this plugin is the Re-Amp module, which offers four playback modes: Cabinet, for guitar-style amp simulation, Monitors, replicating a studio speaker setup, Device, for a radio or phone speaker effect or Vintage, which mimics old school tape or vinyl. Whereas real world re-amping requires entire rooms and time-consuming equipment configurations, Expanse allows you to instantly move mics, switch amps and add effects in a few clicks.
Each effect module has multiband functionality for gain and effect processing, meaning you’re firmly in the driving seat when it comes to fine tuning how it sounds. For in-depth control, use the effects in Advanced mode, or if you prefer a simple three-control setup stay in Main mode. Lifeline Expanse is a Swiss Army knife for sound design, and you’ll find yourself reaching for it time and time again.
iZotope VocalSynth 2
Massachusetts developers iZotope are renowned for making award-winning plugins that seamlessly integrate with one another to provide a holistic music production experience, whether you’re mixing and mastering, repairing audio or getting involved in some sound design. Like Neutron, Ozone and other titles in the company’s roster though, VocalSynth 2 is just as formidable an entity on its own.
A creative processing toolkit that features a Vocoder, Talkbox, Compuvox, Polyvox, and Biovox (a brand new effect based on the sonic qualities of the human vocal tract), Vocal Synth 2 obviously excels at conjuring up unique and transformative vocal effects. Each vocal effect module is blendable and reorderable, which means you can carve up your signal plenty before you’ve even touched the plugin’s seven stompbox-style effects (Distort, Filter, Transform, Shred, Delay, Ring Mod and Chorus).
As is the case with most areas of sound design, it pays to think outside the box, so it’s no surprise that Vocal Synth 2 performs equally well when applied to any sound source. From subtle to extreme, natural to otherworldly – this plugin is sure to open up a new world of sonic possibilities.
Krotos Reformer Pro
Sound design is a thriving industry, with a huge demand for high-quality audio assets for interactive media assets like video games and applications, or traditional entertainment fields like film and TV production. Professional sound designers need professional tools, which is where companies like Krotos Audio come in.
The Scottish developer specializes in powerful and efficient sound design tools for post-production, game audio and music, of which Reformer Pro is one. The goal behind the plugin is to give sound designers and foley artists an alternative to the sample libraries that they usually depend on. Reformer Pro allows you to ‘perform’ realistic foley within your DAW, rather than tediously cutting, dragging and dropping. For foley artists, in particular, this is a game-changing concept, as it means they won’t need to use potentially expensive studios to gather sounds.
There are over 2 GB of high-quality and versatile sounds covering common sound design scenarios, which can be controlled via a microphone (or any pre-recorded audio) in real time. Reformer Pro is a near-revolutionary prospect in sound design and foley, but as the plugin doesn’t recognise the pitch of an incoming audio signal, it won’t be quite as rewarding for melodic use.
Output Portal
Because of it's capacity to totally deconstruct and reconfigure sounds in unique ways, granular engines are extremely useful tools for sound design. You know the deal: audio comes in from a sound source, it gets broken down into tiny fragments ranging from 1–100 milliseconds called “grains” which are then re-sampled in a variety of different ways to produce new sounds.
Portal is a granular FX plugin that you can feed any audio, for it to re-synthesize it in a new and musical way. As with all Output plugins, its interface is stunning, which immediately gets you in the mood for expansive sound design. A large circular “portal” takes up the majority of the interface, which is an X/Y slider that controls two macro knobs (these vary according to which of the 250+ neatly ordered presets you’ve loaded up).
Under Portal’s hood is where the real potential for sound design lies. Here, there’s an extensive array of grain controls that allow you to manipulate individual grains in pretty much every way imaginable, whether you’re pitch-shifting, time-stretching, adjusting Density and Size, or getting stuck into some transformative grain delay. Modulation is achievable by two looping multistage envelopes/LFOs, which kicks the plugin into yet another gear.
Sugar Bytes Turnado
Sound design doesn’t have to be incredibly complicated, in fact, at its best, it’s often the simple processes that do the trick. And, when something works, it tends to stick around. While new-fangled plugins professing to be fuelled by revolutionary sonic concepts or AI power may fill the headlines, there are some plugins that have been go-to sound design tools for years because of their sheer efficacy.
Turnado is one such plugin, released all the way back in 2011 by Berlin-based developer Sugar Bytes. You can tell its age by its quirky GUI, which lacks the sleek aesthetic you’ll find on most plugins nowadays, but otherwise is totally intuitive and well thought out. And, with Australian Grammy award-winning electronic artist Flume on record as being a big fan of the plugin, there’s no doubt that Turnado is a serious sound design tool.
The plugin features a palette of 24 effects to choose from, ranging from the ordinary (Reverb, Phaser, Flanger) to the obscure (Spectralizer, Vowel Filter, Granulizer, Slice Arranger and much more). From there, it’s as simple as dropping effects into one of the plugin’s eight “performance” slots, where you can turn them on and adjust the intensity with one knob per effect. You can edit and automate effects in detail in Expert Mode, as well as use two LFOs/step sequencers per slot for hands-off control.
iZotope Stutter Edit 2
When American electronic music producer BT first started out in music production, he developed a signature technique that involved cutting sections of audio and applying effects in different ways. The stuttery, glitchy sounds he produced established him as an in-demand producer and artist, but unfortunately, they also required him to spend a large part of his time manually editing audio in his DAW. He needed a solution and decided to build his own custom plugin.
Fast forward to the present, and Stutter Edit 2 is the second iteration of BT’s ingenious multi-effects plugin, designed in collaboration with iZotope and used in the sound design of huge blockbuster productions like Star Wars and Stranger Things. You can use it to cook up rhythmic repetitions of small chunks of audio and combine them with other effects, in either Auto or MIDI mode.
With Stutter Edit 2 you can create a unique chain of effect events instead of static settings, which can be called up using MIDI input. The plugin has a large bank of effect events, or “gestures”, including cinematic rises, exciting transitions and filter sweeps. There’s a handy purple bar that gives you a visual representation of what’s happening to your audio, and you can customize gestures for length, release, direction and more, as well as editing modulation curves that affect the stutter itself.
Zynaptiq MORPH 2
Located in Hannover, Germany, Zynaptiq creates technology and applications for processing, analyzing, categorizing and generating audio-visual data. Their team are experts in state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and signal processing techniques, and even allow their own pitch-shifting and time-stretching technology to be used by other developers. Thankfully, they keep some of the secret sauce for themselves, using it to create innovative plugins that are perfect for sound design, one of which is MORPH 2.
The essence of MORPH 2 is something that Zynaptiq call structural audio morphing, whereby you seamlessly blend one sound with another across an X/Y axis. This is no mere cross-fading tool, however, as MORPH 2 instead applies the characteristics of one input signal to the other, meaning you get a hybrid sound that is totally original. Think of it like a vocoder, yet the plugin can take any sound sources and allow you to set a transition point between them.
Morphing can be carried out with one of five state-of-the-art processing algorithms with their own distinct character, which provides the high resolution and detail to fuel the plugin’s mutations. There’s also a really precise formant shifter which is excellent in its own right, and a hall reverb to add some dimension to the sounds you create.
