ZAK Sound makes beautiful plugins that are as elegant in what they do as they are in how they look. Their plugins do useful things, they are loaded with presets and the interfaces are clean and intuitive.
They have really outdone themselves with Skyridge. Like many of their other plugins, Skyridge has a specific audience in mind. If you use a lot of ethereal sounds and ambient waves, this one is for you.
Skyridge generates sounds based on vocal samples, transforming them into hauntingly ethereal pads. You have full control over two sampler engines. A built-in arpeggiator enables the creation of patterns and sequences from the transformed sounds. It is as plug-and-play as you want it to be, but the options for customization and experimentation are where the value is here. Through experimenting with the envelope, filter settings and filter modulation controls I was able to make these wispy sounds really throb with a dense and humid kind of sound, like what you might hear in slow dubstep. I am a novice in sound design but I didn’t feel like one using Skyridge.
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Skyridge comes with 100 presets and you can save more, saturation, chorus, delay, phase and reverb effects and a randomizer as well as an arpeggiator. Released in late May, it’s compatible with Windows 7+ and macOS El Capitan or higher with native Apple Silicon support. Skyridge requires a VST3- or AU-compatible DAW and costs $39.
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[…] Generating Dreamy Delta Waves with Skyridge. Screengrab: Ed Martinez generates gorgeous, sculptured atmospheres with vocal samples with ZAK […]