On Tuesday, Kilohearts dropped its free Clipper plugin, a no-frills design capable of producing some very interesting sounds, particularly for drums.
Clipper is a macOS and Windows release for VST, AAX, AU, and the Kilohearts snapin format.
At first glance, Clipper looks like your standard free plugin, with just four parameters on a bare-bones interface.
However, looks can be deceiving, as Kilohearts content producer George Reece did a great job in the walkthrough video explaining the varied applications the plugin can deliver.
Reece explained that Clipper can be used for “relatively transparent” clipping, or you can get creative and “harshly perform surgery on your peaks”.
Clipper offers four parameters, namely In Gain, Knee, Out Gain, and Threshold, with the latter accessible via the waveform display.
You can access more straightforward transparent sounds from Clipper by increasing Knee, which rounds off the edges, creating soft clipping.
Alternatively, you can take no prisoners and get creative by running Clipper with the Knee set at zero.
As Reece explained, Clipper runs sample by sample, so when run with a hard knee, absolutely nothing can get past the threshold, creating some interesting sonic outputs.
When run this way, Clipper is capable of adding distortion, harmonics, body, and tonality to the source.
This is particularly handy for drum sounds. For example, you can dice a spiky 808 kick and take it into a more full, tonal bass sound, as demonstrated in the walkthrough video.
By now, I guess you may be wondering how to score the freebie. Start by hitting the “Free” button on the Clipper product page and follow the Sign Up link.
Signing up is quite quick. You just need an email address (they won’t add you to the mailing list unless you request it), a nickname, and a password.
You’ll then immediately receive an account verification email. After verifying, head to the Downloads tab in your Kilohearts account and you can download the macOS or Windows installers, which are unzipped files that come in at 9.3 MB and 14.7 MB respectively.
The simplest way to get Clipper is via the VST, AAX, and AU formats, where it will work as a completely free release.
Kilohearts also offers the plugin in its Snapin format. While the Clipper Snapin is free, you’ll need to use one of the paid Snapin hosts to run it.
So I guess that’s more for users who want to dive into the whole Kilohearts ecosystem, where the different Snapins can be combined in novel ways.
Download: Clipper (FREE – Kilohearts account needed)
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