Phase Plant, Kilohearts' hybrid synth plugin

Kilohearts Phase Plant hybrid synth plugin | Product Spotlight

Kilohearts Phase Plant is a new hybrid synth plugin offering insane sound design capabilities and incredibly intuitive workflow.

The Run-Down

Kilohearts Phase Plant is a hybrid synthesizer plugin, it’s based around several synthesis methods and bundled in a shockingly simple interface. It’s based around three main sections – Generators, Modulators and Effects, with the more advanced functions available in popup windows that are scalable for much easier fine adjustments. Each of the main sections has various modules that you can add, drag-and-drop to change the signal-patch or minimize to clean up the interface.

The Generators section in Kilohearts Phase Plant is similar to oscillators in other plugins, however the cool thing here is that there are a variety of effects such as filter and distortion and other routing and grouping utilities to choose from, and these all function on a per-voice basis for crazy polyphonic sounds. The Modulators section deals with your LFOs, Envelopes, Random Generators and other modulation sources – and another huge feature here is that you’re only limited by your CPU power in terms of the amount of modules you can add.

The Effects section incorporates Kilohearts’ highly-acclaimed bundle of pro effects (Snapins) inspired by their Multipass effects system. Here you have three lanes of effects racks, allowing you to split Generators and send them to separate lanes or a variety of other interesting routing capabilities.

Best Features

One of the best features is the completely modular routing and workflow in Kilohearts Phase Plant, you have so much freedom to route signals anywhere within the plugin, in the generators section any of the audio output nodes can be used as audio-rate modulation to a variety of parameters within the Generator section. You can even stack them up to create ridiculous cross-modulation patches where everything modulates everything else – turning sine waves into something like white noise (if that’s your thing).

The built-in effects system is incredible, not only the ability to create layers and multi-channel effects, but also the fact that there are a ton of effects to choose from – and you can scale those up depending on what you need. The basic plugin comes with 6 Snapin effects however there are bundles that include up to 26 effects, with more to be added in the future.

Another great feature about Kilohearts Phase Plant is that it scales your computer’s resource usage depending on how you create the patch. A lot of more advanced plugins will cripple some older computers which is overkill for simple patches, here you have the freedom to scale up or down depending on your system and sound design needs.

The Wavetable and LFO editors are amazing, they have popup windows with more advanced parameters and allow you to scale them to your GUI which is particularly handy if you want to fine-tune some advanced sequence pattern on the LFO. The LFO editor window allows you to change the amount of grid lines, which makes life easier for making chromatic arpeggios and sequences using a custom LFO.

Kilohearts Phase Plant’s Wavetable editor has some great features from curve and point editing to effects such as various filters which you can apply directly to the waveform. It’s also very easy to import your own wavetable into the editor.

Final Thoughts…

I honestly think Phase Plant is one of the most notable synth plugins of the past few years, it may not have the raw power of something like UVI Falcon or the simplicity of xFer Serum, however I feel it strikes the perfect balance between the two.

It is ideal for hardcore sound designers and beginner producers alike, it’s got some great sounding presets and even a bundle of tutorial preset to help you learn the synth. The plugin comes in various bundles depending on what Snapins you want bundled with the synth.

The prices for Phase Plant are as follows:

with Kilohearts Toolbox FREE (featuring 6 effects) – USD $169 (Around R2500)
with Kilohearts Toolbox STARTER (featuring 11 effects) – USD $199 (Around R3000)
with Kilohearts Toolbox PROFESSIONAL (featuring all Kilohearts effects) – USD $349 (Around R5200)
with Kilohearts Toolbox ULTIMATE (featuring all Kilohearts effects and other plugins) – USD $499 (Around R7500)