Ablaze Audio has released Ablaze Toolkit, a bundle of five free plugins for Windows, macOS, and Linux, designed to simplify common mixing and sound design tasks in modern metal production.
Oh, and there’s a fun easter egg for BPB readers. Ablaze Audio is run by the same developer who created our BPB Dirty Filter plugin. He also released the Screamer plugin for metal vocals.
The Ablaze Toolkit collects a set of utility plugins that were originally built for the developer’s own productions. Each plugin does a specific job, and although these were originally created for metal production, the bundle is useful not only for metal vocals but also for drums, bass, and experimental sound design.
Let’s take a closer look at each plugin.
Lifter
Lifter is a high-frequency enhancement tool for adding air to vocal tracks or entire vocal buses. It uses a smooth high-shelf curve with a subtle dip around the shelf frequency, and this helps bring out detail without sounding overly harsh.
There’s also a linear-phase mode for layered vocals and a mid/side bias control, so it’s easy to emphasize either lead vocals or wider backing stacks.
Booster
Booster focuses on adding loudness and character to your tracks. It combines brickwall limiting with pre-clipping. You get a crunchy response, especially at faster release settings.
It’s quite versatile. You can use it to shave peaks off uneven vocal takes, push the mix into more aggressive territory, or add some grit to a drum bus.
The maximize toggle switches the boost control between level driving and peak control, depending on how heavy-handed you want to be.
Pitcher
Pitcher is a dedicated pitch- and formant-shifting plugin for extreme vocals. It’s built around a frequency-domain algorithm that handles distorted material quite well.
You can shift pitch with or without formant preservation, adjust formants independently, and choose different smoothing modes depending on whether you’re working with low, mid, or high vocals.
Bass Drop and Snare Bomb
The remaining two plugins are simple synth-based generators. Bass Drop creates the familiar sub-heavy drops used to underline breakdowns, with tempo-synced length, adjustable depth, drive, and even a reverse option.
Snare Bomb does something similar for snare impacts, letting you trigger wide, aggressive hits via MIDI, with control over tail length, width, and impact.
Screamer Demo
While you’re on the Ablaze website, it’s also worth checking out the new Screamer demo-player on the homepage. It’s a web-based version of their flagship Screamer plugin that lets you mix the founder’s vocals directly in your browser, which is a really fun way to get a feel for the plugin without installing anything.
The Ablaze Toolkit plugins are available for macOS, Windows, and Linux in VST, AU, AAX, CLAP, and LV2 formats, with no signup required to download.
Download: Ablaze Toolkit (FREE)
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Last Updated on January 26, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
