The plugin effects market is so vast, diverse and overflowing with superb options by an army of ’big names’ that many interesting and original gems from less high-profile developers don’t get the attention and recognition they deserve. With this round-up, we hope to change that by sticking big red flags in half a dozen of the tastiest signal processing contraptions you didn’t know you needed, courtesy of some of the industry’s brightest lights.

Devious Machines Pitch Monster

Although intended for vocal processing first and foremost, Devious Machines’ outrageously powerful harmoniser is capable of pitchshifting and/or turning any source material into chords. Up to two octaves of upwards or downwards shift, and up to eight unison voices can be dialled in, with manual adjustment and randomisation of timing and pitch variation between voices. Three engines – Granular, Formant and Vocoder – each offer very different sounds, as their names suggest, and the ingenious Chord mode lets you store and switch between eight chords on the fly. Unique and innovative, Pitch Monster is a sound design powerhouse.

HoRNet Plugins Dynamics Control

One of several highlights in the extensive catalogue of Italian developer HoRNet, Dynamics Control rolls three different compressors into a single device for extremely precise narrowing of dynamic range. The ‘Top’, ‘Mid’ and ‘Bottom’ legending suggests multiband functionality, but these are in fact the three serial processing stages: Top a regular compressor, Bottom an expander, and Mid a combination compressor/expander that works to keep the signal level as close as possible to the specified Ratio for final levelling. Designed for broadcast applications, Dynamics Control is most at home on the mix bus, but it’s also great at getting vocals sounding more upfront – and the price makes it a no-brainer.

Freakshow Industries Dumpster Fire

This extreme pitchshifter from the engagingly iconoclastic Freakshow Industries (“Apply directly to the garbage” reads the tagline) eschews the decadent luxury of a manual in favour of brilliantly written if only vaguely descriptive annotations for its five controls. These include Cage (“Sets the number of bands”), Tooth (“Rotates the pitches”) and Aether (“Generates hellscapes”), and the lack of concrete info inspires experimentation – Dumpster Fire is more about making cyclopean sonic statements (of non-Euclidian geometry, probably) through crazed rotary wrangling than agonising over precise parameter tweaks. Get it now, lest the void consume you…

Glitch Machines Fracture XT

Although Dumpster Fire easily nabs the prize for most deranged concept and presentation of… well, any plugin ever, Glitch Machines’ less ostentatious offering is a far wilder proposition in terms of the actual noises produced, buffering, repeating, filtering, randomising and delaying the input signal to create a tapestry of weird textures, drones and sci-fi-style effects. Parallel Buffer and Grains modules pull off various granular slicing tricks before outputting to the feedback Delay section for mixed processing, while four LFOs are in place for modulation. The ability to randomise the LFO parameters and modulation assignments is a stroke of genius – just keep clicking until you hear something you like!

Psychic Modulation Undertow

Billed as a “beat bending dub box”, Undertow transforms your drum tracks (or anything else, really) in all manner of ways – lo-fi degradation and retrofying, echoing and spatialisation, rhythmic modulation and more – via a very specific but endlessly versatile processing chain. The Tone Booster bumps up the low end from 30-160Hz, and applies telephone EQ and saturation; the Echo section comprises a wicked analogue-style feedback delay and a phase filter; and it all kicks off in the Bend module, where phase-adjustable and (input-triggerable) LFO modulation can be applied to select parameters, including volume and bass boost frequency, delay time and feedback, and the phase filter (for phasing effects). Constantly spectacular and wholly authentic in its dub production credentials.

Klevgrand Gaffel

OK, so this one’s not strictly speaking an ‘effect’ in itself, but Gaffel is just such a clever, useful and well executed idea that we feel compelled to bring it into the eye-line of as many producers as we can. In a nutshell, it’s a four-band frequency splitter, but the magic lies in the fact that adjustments to the crossovers in any one instance of the plugin are mirrored in all other instances assigned to the same ’group’, of which you can have up to eight. So, make three copies of a track (for four in total), chuck a Gaffel on each one with a successive single band soloed (this is even done automatically for you as they’re loaded), then follow each one up with your choice of effects plugins for a nifty multiband processing setup. And if you’re feeling really creative, go for an entirely disparate collection of tracks instead – anything can happen!

Have you got an effects plugin that you reckon isn’t getting the exposure it should be? Share it with the world in the comments.