audiolatry - RetroGrit plugin
In the spring and summer of 2023, I worked with the virtual instrument developer audiolatry on the RetroGrit plugin, a sample based VST featuring gritty, lofi synth sounds. I was responsible for sound design work such as designing tones for presets and creating multisamples.
I created all of the 80 presets for the plugin. The process began with designing sounds from scratch on my various hardware synthesizers. In particular, I sampled sounds from my Yamaha DX7, Sequential Prophet 10 Rev 4, Arturia Microfreak, Moog Sub Phatty and Korg Minilogue XD. Once I had these synth tones available as digital audio in his DAW, I used many tried-and-true methods to introduce lofi character to these sounds, such as tape and vinyl emulation, saturation, bit crushing, band pass filtering, amp simulation, etc.
However, I also explored more unique techniques to colour these tones; for a few examples:
I re-amped sounds through effect pedals like delay and chorus while fiddling with the knobs in real-time as the tones were re-recorded for warbly chorus and pitch-shifting effects (particularly for sustained tones);
I used the audio envelopes from sources like field recordings and noisy ambiences to modulate filter cutoff on certain sounds, giving them a noisy, idiosyncratic filter modulation effect;
I used a light touch of convolution reverb with custom impulse responses to add interesting textures and tonal changes to certain presets;
and - perhaps my favourite - I re-amped a sound through an amplifier in my laundry room and set up a condenser microphone to capture the reflections of the space, giving the preset in question a distinctive roomy quality.
On the technical side, I created all of the 80 presets for the plugin. I first designed these sounds from scratch on my various hardware synthesizers before sampling them to process them further.
Once satisfied with the sounds, I created multisamples for each preset. To be specific, I made 13 multisamples per preset, spanning from the notes E0 to E6 with a distance of 6 semitones between each multisample. I also created smoothly looping embedded loop points for presets which needed to maintain a sustained tone when a note is held (about 75% of the presets). The multisamples were normalized at -6db and I also embedded root note information within them.
You can find more information about and purchase RetroGrit on audiolatry’s website here.
I also composed 10 demo melodies to showcase some of the presets included in the plugin. These melodies were included in audiolatry’s main demo video for the plugin. You can watch this video as well as one of my own demo videos for the plugin below.