Anemond Sloom, new FX plugin that creates lush soundscapes without losing dynamic content, using extreme time-stretching with spectral extras.
Time stretching is an indispensable part of today’s music production, especially if you are a beat producer or work with many samples. As a reminder, time stretch changes audio playback speed without changing its original pitch.
It’s handy not only in beat production but also as a sound design tool. Anemond, the developer of the Factorsynth 3 synth, has a new plugin that takes time stretching to the extreme and turns it into a fascinating audio manipulation tool.
Anemond Sloom
Sloom is an effect plugin that applies extreme time-stretching to audio. With classic time-stretching plugins, it results in slowly evolving ambient soundscapes. If you turn the stretching factor to high, the results tend to sound more and more static.
Anemond’s take on this classic effect is different here. Sloom ships with a set of unique spectral modification tools that restore some dynamics to your results. But let’s start with the most important thing about a time-stretch plugin, the engine.
In Sloom, you can choose between five different flavored time-stretching algorithms:
- wide – capable of producing a large stereo field
- narrow – preserves the original stereo content
- rough – produce a more aggressive sound containing pitch artifacts and beatings
- robotic – produce a single-pitched synthetic sound
- hybrid – a mixture between the robotic and wide algorithms.
The five algorithms offer a wide range of transformation possibilities. If you go a step deeper into the engine, you can the spectral-related sound shaping tool, making Anemod Sloom unique.
Into The Spectral Fields
The first is a spectral shaping module that lets you graphically modify the resulting spectrum in real-time. This feature allows you to filter out single harmonics and partials or easily separate noisy and harmonic parts of the sound.
This spectral shaping can be done manually or based on an adaptive spectral envelope curve that fits the current spectral profile. Powerful is the ability to draw your shaping.
Then, Anemond Sloom also hosts a versatile modulation section that can apply two things to the spectral engine. On one side, you can route an LFO to the spectral profile to create patterns following sinus or sawtooth-like variations.
On the other, you can work with randomness on the phase and position of the algorithm. Sloom works on both live audio input with an input buffer of up to five minutes or on sound files (WAV, AIFF, FLAC, or MP3) without length limitation.
First Impression
Anemond, kindly gave me access to the Sloom plugin to check out. Sloom is a creative plugin that is a lot of fun. It reminds me a lot of the free PaulXStretch plugin. However, taken further with clever new features. The spectral engine, for example, is a great add-on.
Anemond Sloom is available now for 39€. It runs as a VST3 and AU plugin on macOS (native Apple Silicon + Intel) and Windows. There is also a standalone version. Students can benefit from a 50% OFF discount.
More information here: Anemond
Mr(s) Developer, I would by it immediately if available for iPads and iPhone!
just tested it with many different sounds and settings…the rough stretch algorithm is also suited towards more noisy, dirty and harsh results..so sloom is not only for ambient music.
agreed, great textures possible also.