Free: Minimal Audio Hybrid Filter, and some tips on how to use it

Minimal Audio is celebrating its anniversary, and so we get the excellent Hybrid Filter for free for a limited time. And what a nice multi-mode filter this is, with a bunch of exotic modes, amplitude modulation, and a built-in envelope follower as a modulation source.

This is far from a vanilla plug-in. That starts with the sheer quantity of unusual filters, including morphing, formant, vowel, and comb filters, and creative options like Howl with unique spectral characteristics. There are enough particular filter curves that you’ve got a strong argument for picking this up, even if you have some other leftfield filters in your collection. (Polyverse Supermodal goes nicely on the resonant filter side, for instance — and each covers pretty different territory.)

Don’t forget Minimal’s standard limiter toggle in the bottom right-hand corner. That includes a soft limiting/saturation mode (purple) and a punchier, more aggressive option (orange) as well as a disable choice.

And everything here is useful:

An envelope follower with attack and release curves, plus modulation routing to the filter cutoff or morphing, so that the filter responds to your input signal in subtle or radical ways.
A tuning option for the frequency cutoff.
Spread for stereo effects.
A low crossover with mono low toggle, so you can preserve your bass.
Amplitude modulation! So this follows filter cutoff, and you can get a bunch of timbral interest out of it, not just the normal AM chaos.

Here’s playing around with it, in a not-very-well-behaved way. But wow, you get some unexpected effects out of this. (You can also just use it as a modern filter with envelope follower, so you don’t always have to go this nuts, but it’s been a long day and I’m in this kind of mood.)