Puffer Fish, ÆLAPSE, Phlegetron: Free Plugins of the Week
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Puffer Fish, ÆLAPSE, Phlegetron: Free Plugins of the Week · Source: Sonible, Smiarx, Igorski
Colorful saturation, dual-band distortion, and a vintage-inspired combination of tape delay and spring reverb: Check out Puffer Fish, ÆLAPSE, and Phlegetron.
Free Plugins of the Week
Sonible Puffer Fish: Deep-Sea Distortion
When a renowned developer best known for high-quality AI-driven plugins releases a freebie, you know you’re in for a treat. Sonible Puffer Fish is a colorful one-knob saturation plugin designed to add warmth, grit, and harmonics to your signal.
Wrapped in a playful GUI, Puffer Fish offers three flavors of saturation represented by three friendly underwater creatures. But don’t be mistaken: Once you crank up the ‘Puffiness’, these inconspicuous deep-sea dwellers turn into gnarly beasts that can add some serious bite and distortion to your tracks.
Tinyfin specializes in subtle, warm saturation that lends a little more body and depth to your tracks. Spikeskin, on the other hand, is a little more aggressive and delivers bold, edgy saturation and distortion with sharp transients. Lastly, Twitchgill is ‘unhinged by design’ and explores the space between control and chaos, adding harmonics that react dynamically to the input signal.
Puffer Fish is available for macOS and Windows in VST, VST3, AU, and AAX formats.
Smiarx ÆLAPSE: Delay Meets Spring Reverb
ÆLAPSE by Smiarx is a combination of a tape delay and a spring reverb in a single plugin. Use it to give your guitars or vocals that classic vintage tone, or experiment with more extreme settings for all sorts of dubby weirdness.
The delay and reverb sections can be activated independently. In addition to the familiar Time, Feedback, and Dry/Wet controls, the tape delay section on the left offers a pair of filters for sound shaping, a Drive knob, and a Drift control that introduces subtle inaccuracies for an analog feel.
The reverb section features a cool animation of the vibrating springs. For a spring reverb, it offers a surprisingly wide palette of sound shaping options. In addition to the essentials (Time, Length, Damping, Dry/Wet), you’ll find parameters such as Shape, Scatter, and Chaos, letting you get creative with the reverb.
ÆLAPSE is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux in VST, AU, and LV2 formats.
Igorski Phlegetron: Dual-Band Distortion with a Twist
Phlegetron by Igorski is a free dual-band distortion plugin that lets you apply different settings to two bands. Each band offers a choice of four distortion modes: wave shaper, wave folder, fuzz, and crush, delivering anything from subtle harmonics to full-on digital quantization. The Modifier slider controls different properties depending on the selected mode.
What’s especially interesting is that there are two different options for splitting the signal into two bands. In addition to a simple frequency crossover, Phlegetron offers a harmonic mode that splits the signal into harmonic ‘bins’, with one bin containing all harmonic overtones of the selected frequency and the other containing the rest.
Phlegetron is available for macOS and Windows in VST3 and AU formats.
Looking for more free plugins like Puffer Fish, ÆLAPSE, and Phlegetron? Check out our archive!
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