aurelia-filtha: A Dynamic Stereo Filter for Your Tracks
Looking for a way to add life, movement, and a unique character to your audio? Filters are among the most powerful tools in a sound engineer’s and music producer’s arsenal. They can transform static sounds into something dynamic, rhythmic, and emotional. And when it comes to creative filter use, the aurelia-filtha plugin from easytoolz deserves your attention.
The Heart of the Plugin: A Unique Lowpass Filter
At the core of aurelia-filtha is a special stereo lowpass filter, which gained its fame from previous easytoolz developments, particularly from the easy-muug and Protege-Emus instruments. This filter doesn’t just cut off high frequencies; it has its own unique character and resonance, adding warmth and musicality to any signal that passes through it. Thanks to full stereo processing, aurelia-filtha is perfect for working with wide pads, stereo drums, guitars, and any other stereo sources, preserving or even enhancing the stereo image.
Modulation Capabilities: Two Powerful LFOs
The real magic of aurelia-filtha is revealed thanks to two built-in LFOs (Low Frequency Oscillators), which allow you to breathe life into the filter, creating rhythmic pulses, smooth timbre evolution, or amazing soundscapes.
LFO 1: Rhythm and Synchronization
- LFO 1 is ideal for creating rhythmic effects synchronized with your project’s tempo.
- Has 5 classic waveforms: Sine, Saw, Ramp (inverted sawtooth), Trigon (triangle), and Pulse.
- The Host-sync function allows you to tie the LFO speed to the tempo of your DAW, ensuring perfect synchronization of filter effects with the music.
- The Divisor control allows you to set the LFO speed as a fraction of the tempo (e.g., 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 note), making it extremely flexible for creating a variety of rhythmic patterns.
- The Depth control controls the intensity of the LFO’s impact on the target parameter.
- The Inverter function allows you to invert the LFO phase, creating the opposite direction of modulation, which expands creative possibilities.
- The main target of LFO 1 is the filter’s Cut-off frequency, which allows you to create classic wah-wah effects, pulsations, or smooth filtering that moves in time with the music.
LFO 2: Creativity and Complexity
- LFO 2 is more versatile and offers advanced modulation capabilities.
- Has 6 waveforms, including the classic Sine, Saw, Ramp, Trigon, Pulse, and also unique for many filter plugins – Sample and Hold. This waveform creates random, stepwise value changes, ideal for glitch effects or unpredictable modulation.
- Unlike LFO 1, the speed of LFO 2 can be controlled manually using the FREQ (frequency) control, which gives you complete freedom from the project’s tempo, or it can be synchronized with other elements via MIDI CC.
- The DEPTH control controls the depth of modulation.
- The Inverter function is also present for inverting the modulation phase.
- The most interesting thing in LFO 2 is its modulation targets. It can affect not only the Cut-off frequency and Resonance of the filter itself, but also… LFO 1! Modulation of one LFO by another opens the door to creating extremely complex, evolving, and unpredictable modulation patterns that can radically change the sound’s character over time. There’s also an “off” option if you don’t want to use LFO 2.
Additional Features and Convenience
- The plugin has a Dry/Wet control, which allows you to easily mix the processed signal with the original, implementing the parallel filtering technique, which is often used to preserve the sound’s density and attack while adding dynamic movement to it.
- For a quick start or inspiration, aurelia-filtha comes with 32 ready-made presets. This is a great way to quickly explore the plugin’s capabilities and find a starting point for your own experiments.
- MIDI CC support means that you can automate almost all of the plugin’s parameters in your DAW, and the MIDI CC values are displayed in tooltips, making automation setup simple and understandable.
Conclusion
aurelia-filtha from easytoolz is not just another filter plugin. It’s a flexible and powerful tool for sound design and adding dynamics to your tracks. Its unique lowpass filter, combined with two multifunctional LFOs (especially the LFO-on-LFO modulation possibility), opens up limitless creative possibilities, from classic rhythmic filter effects to complex, evolving sound textures. If you’re working in Windows (32-bit) and looking for a high-quality and interesting VST filtering effect, aurelia-filtha is worth trying and integrating into your workflow.
