We continue to interrupt Moog Week for Weird Plugin Day. Forget parody plugins — truth is nearly as strange as fiction. Just watch the latest on KVR:
Turkish Folk Instrument goes Virtual: First, there’s the Volko Baglama (via). The thousand year-old Turkish folk instrument known as a Baglama or saz has been converted to Windows VSTi. Great; I can see it now: the master Baglama player shows up to a gig only to have been replaced by some youngster with an Oxygen8. (at least it doesn’t sound half bad.)
Great Plug-in? BS! The “unfortunate plug-in branding” award has to go to a developer named bismark, who calls his plugins things like “bs-16,” “bs-1,” and “bs-spectrum.” My suggested motto: “if you sound good, you must be full of BS.” And if you’ve been reading KVR really religiously, you know the BS-16 just fixed a problem with an infinite loop on some drum presets. Hey, we’ve all known drummers like that . . .
Now With Seizures! Of course, my favorite odd plugin of all time has to be the Hypnos Vocoder. Is it really capable of finding an entrainment frequency of your brain? Based on what I know as the kid of two psychologists, probably not without dedicated biofeedback hardware. But come on: what other DirectX plugin costs US$800 AND can cause a seizure? (Tom at MusicThing covered this in December while I was too afraid, but hey, always worth a mention.)