What’s better than a waveshaper? How about a waveshaper with a bucket full of different wavetables, dual filters, modulation, and motion sequencer that runs on mobile and desktop?
BLEASS has been delivering us a steady stream of goodies, now both on Mac/PC and iOS. There are plenty of distortion tools out there – I’ve reviewed a couple. But BLEASS Fusion sets itself apart with its copious collection of wavetable sources, with position and fold amounts you can dial in or use with modulation and a motion sequencer.
So many wavetables:
Fusion has a hugely flexible architecture:
Saturation with a variety of wavetables, from simple wave shapes to captured analog hardware profiles.
Dual multimode filter, and highpass (1) / lowpass (2), bell (both), and notch (both), in pre or post positions, with mix controls.
Modulation with two LFOs, each routable to two separate destinations, and an envelope follower. The LFOs have multiple shapes, free and synced modes, and plenty of controls, and that envelope follower in particular is indispensable.
Motion sequencer with its own two destinations and grid / length / shape controls.
Plus there’s a “dice” control for when you’re feeling lucky.
With all these controls, you can of course do some actual damage – as in, maybe turn down those speakers while you’re messing about. But it’s capable of some gorgeous results, as you can hear in the teaser video:
I played around a bit with this to give you a feeling of the range – maybe with some less musical results. But check out how it sounds with D16 Phosycon2 (for some balance, another 303-inspired plug-in, and it sounds totally different!) and a patch I whipped up in AAS’ Multiphonics CV-2. Yes, Multiphonics CV-2 has its own waveshapers / wavefolders / saturation, as I wrote about recently, but… it is actually fun combining those and Fusion. It’s like eating Oreo cookies with Reese’s peanut butter cups crammed inside.
Here’s a tour – just jamming directly with it, no advance prep:
Fusion is capable of some beautiful stuff when you mix it in with other sound design and dial in modulation – I wound up finishing a sound design collaboration with this earlier this week.
This one is easily worth the few bucks. (You will have to buy iOS and desktop versions separately.) On desktop, VST3 and AU are available.
https://www.bleass.com/fusion/
And look, I don’t have any problem with getting obsessed with too many distortion / waveshaping plug-ins.
Okay, let me rephrase: it’s a problem if I stop enjoying all these distortion plug-ins. There.
I didn’t even mention Sinevibes’ Corrosion, which is also multi-algorithm and has clever stereo controls.
https://www.sinevibes.com/corrosion/
So, best is to chain all of them together, of course. Enjoy!