Analog Obsession released Realizer, a freeware random transient processor VST plugin for Windows and macOS.
Working with a DAW can sometimes make you miss the nuance that comes with a live performance. Analog Obsession has had a stellar run since its pivot to Patreon. Their latest, Realizer, is a novel approach to processing that doesn’t really have an equivalent.
Realizer is a transient random value generator, which is a bit of a mouthful to say five times fast. What it does is a little bit more nebulous, but let’s explore the atypical interface and see what’s what.
Six knobs adorn the front of Realizer’s interface, and when you realize what it’s doing, it becomes far less opaque in operation. Each knob has a range, of course, but those ranges correspond to random values. Realizer is especially useful as a tool to remove some of the static properties of things like drum samples and synths.
Gain and transient variations work great on drums and other percussive instruments. The pitch variations can be useful for more static wavetable softsynths, provided you aren’t programming in your own patches where those little variances are a great finisher.
The filtering seems less useful in practice than the gain, transient, and pitch processors. If you’re practiced in live instrument playing, it’s very rare to have notes that just completely lose the full range of their frequency because you’re playing a little softer.
Realizer has a wonderfully unique interface mimicking a hand-patch electronics kit on what resembles a breadboard. It is very much befitting this rather unusual effects processor to have it resemble something out of a maker’s lab. It isn’t a liberally used plugin, but there is certainly some utility for static drum machine samples and the like.
As with all Analog Obsession plugins, Realizer is available for Mac and Windows users. AU, VST3, and AAX are the supported formats for macOS. Windows users have the option of VST3 and AAX.
Download: Realizer
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