Soundtoys 5 Review

by Claudio

Dec 01, 2015

Here’s a full review of the Soundtoys 5, a suite of highly creative and great sounding plugins for saturation, delay and modulation.

Watch it in action on our video:

The Soundtoys 5 is a collection of really creative plugins for saturation, delay, modulation and more. All plugins are be neatly organised in an Effect Rack, allowing you to recall entire chains of effect.

The clever rack design allows to easily access multiple effects and parameters at the same time, which facilitates control, inspiration and experimentation.

Each effect has its own mix knob, allowing to determine how much of the effect you want to have, by blending the clean sound with the processed sound. Also it’s possible to blend the whole rack, with a master mix knob on top of the rack: very convenient.

All plug-ins in this collection sound absolutely fantastic:

– PrimalTap is a Lexicon Prime Time style delay, full of 80’s flavour, with very simple and intuitive controls.

– FilterFreak is great for analogue-like sweeps, with a variety of resonant filters, modulation options and shape/polar controls.

– EchoBoy is famous delay unit with incredible flexibility and huge amount of possible different tones available. That includes classic emulations like the EchoPlex, the Space Echo, and much more. This is the definitive go-to delay plug-in.

– Crystallizer is a unique granular echo synthesizer that takes inspiration from the revered Eventide H3000. It delivers incredible spacey, unusual and out-of-the world sound effects. A great tool for sound design, film and experimental music.

– Decapitator is considered a modern standard for digitally modelled analogue saturation. It’s an extremely popular plug-in for distortion, beloved by many of the top mixing engineers.

– PanMan is an auto panner with deep rhythm controls, focussed on imitating the sound of classic hardware panning boxes (I.E. Panscan, SpanneR etc). This is a great tool to deliver advanced and highly configurable panning patterns.

– Radiator is a vintage sounding saturation unit, recreating the tone of an Altec 1567a tube mixer. With just a few controls you can get to really personal and very useable sound.

– Little AlterBoy is a voice manipulator for classic robotic and vocoder sounds.

– Devil-Loc is a very aggressive compression/distortion unit and it sounds really radical. However, because of its “Darkenss” control it can easily keep harness in check, making it very flexible for a whole spectrum of great saturation tones.

– MicroShift is a pitch shifter and delay unit dedicated to stereo widening. It basically recreates a classic pitch shifting trick at the touch of a button, which works particularly well for vocals, guitars and synths.

– Tremolator is an tremolo and automatic gate allowing for great retro Fender-Vibrolux-like guitar sounds, lush Wurlitzer tremolos, and advanced rhythmic gating effects.

– PhaseMisstress is a great phase shifter with a strong analogue flavour, and advanced settings for tempo and modulation. It takes inspiration from the classic Bi-Phase, Boss Super Phaser, Phase 90, Moogerfooger 12 stage, Small Stone etc.

Soundtoys 5 retails for $600, which is a great deal considering how much each single plug-in is worth.

More info about the Soundtoys 5 here:
https://www.soundtoys.com/product/soundtoys-5/