If you want to add more interesting harmonic content to your tracks, we have a great free plugin for you today.
Resonator is a free plugin from Thony Audio, a seemingly new developer. That’s safe to assume since their website looks brand new.
Nevertheless, Resonator is an exciting plugin that’ll be a great addition to your sound design toolkit.
It’s designed to “color your sounds with vibrant, tonal resonance” so that you can take any sound, even white noise, and create lush harmonies.
We can see in this demo that they started from a noisy stack of sounds and created really cool chords from it using Resonator.
This type of sound is very popular in high-energy EDM, hyperpop and the like, but I reckon that this plugin could work great things like ambient music too.
As an ambient music composer myself, I do this sort of thing a lot, where I start from something like an atonal field recording and turn it into something tonal.
Resonator definitely seems up to the task, especially since you can blend in the dry signal as well, so you still maintain the texture of your source sound.
Using Resonator is fairly straightforward. It has 2 flavours: saw, which is more harmonically rich, and square “for a subtler tone that resonates with only odd harmonics.”
You can then dial in the decay and colour of the resonator to your liking, as well as blend in the dry signal as we mentioned earlier.
Keep in mind that square waves have an instant release, so Thony Audio suggests a longer decay when using the square wave.
Then comes the fun part. You can resonate whatever you feed this plugin with up to 7 pitches and create whatever chord you want.
It allows you to fine-tune, pan, and gain stage each pitch, which is a great way to customize the chord.
There are 8 modules available for this, so you can create a unique chord in each one and use automation to build a chord progression out of them.
Finally, you can use live MIDI input to control this plugin if you prefer that. You can also save presets to have your favorite chord progressions ready to go at any time.
Resonator is available as a VST2 and VST3 plugin for Windows and macOS.
Download: Resonator (FREE)
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