Having looked at a variety of techniques for working ear candy and spot FX into your productions in our article 5 Tasty Ear Candy Tips To Take Your Music From Good To Great, here we’re following up with some suggestions as to plugins with which to apply them. By ‘ear candy’, of course, we mean those seemingly ‘lesser’ incidental sounds and effects that maintain listener interest, enhance the mix and generally add to the bigger musical picture without dominating it in any sense.

While there are countless great sample libraries out there, packed with mix-ready, zero-effort ear candy, when you want to make your own from scratch, you’ll find no shortage of sweet virtual instruments and effects to aid in your sonic endeavours. Here are some of our favourites.

Synthesisers In General

The rich palette of endlessly malleable tonal colours provided by any high-end synthesiser makes fine source material for dazzling ear candy and FX. Although analogue emulations (Minimoogs, etc) can be highly effective if you know how to appropriately wrangle their elemental sine, square, triangle and saw waveforms, we’d recommend going for a wavetable- or sample-based synth in preference if you can, as their raw oscillators constitute far more interesting and empowering starting points.

Beyond that, you want your FX synth to include lots of modulation options (LFOs and multi-stage envelopes, most importantly), and, ideally, a healthy rack of onboard effects. Perhaps the last word in power synths, Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2 is ridiculously well equipped for this sort of thing, but there are plenty of equally qualified alternatives at much lower price points to check out too, including Xfer Records Serum, Synapse Audio Dune 3 and Native Instruments Massive X. And if the idea of a technical middle ground somewhere between sample libraries and synths appeals, Ujam’s Usynth range serves up a wealth of adaptable and very high-quality prefab sounds.

Blue Cat Audio Late Replies

Although ostensibly a delay plugin, Blue Cat’s thoroughly deserving winner of our 2018 Product of the Year award is in fact a multi-effects suite perfectly geared up for the manufacture of ear candy. Each of Late Replies’ eight freely configurable delay taps, you see, flows into its own four-slot effects rack, every slot drawing not only on a splendid array of built-in reverbs, filters, modulation effects, distortions and more (30 modules, all told), but also your entire VST/AU plugins library. The same racks are also in place in the Pre-FX and Post-FX sections, and the plugin’s two feedback loops, the last proving particularly productive for dramatic FX creation.

Putting a head-swimming amount of pyrotechnic signal processing at your fingertips, not to mention standing as a stunning delay effect in its own right, Late Replies can turn any input into sonic fireworks. Find out more in our review and Eli’s Product Of The Year.

Chiptune Sounds

The gritty, overtly digital tones of retro games consoles and computers have long been an ear candy go-to in contemporary music production, and today you can get them via some superb software emulation instruments. Plogue’s Chipsounds, for example, accurately models an extensive array of classic 8-bit sound chips, as used by Nintendo, Atari et al in their earliest machines, and including the legendary SID chip from the Commodore 64; while their Chipsynth MD resurrects (and improves on) the FM-based Yamaha YM2612 found in the 16-bit Sega Mega Drive.

If the relatively involved workflow and unashamedly geeky GUI styling of Plogue’s synths seem like overkill for incidental FX creation, Impact Soundworks’ Super Audio Cart Kontakt Player library makes for a perfectly streamlined alternative. Powered by a 7GB multisample bank, this one enables 15 vintage game console and home computer sound chips to be mixed and matched across up to four mixed layers, and features arpeggiation and sequencing, onboard effects and more.

Sugar Bytes Looperator

There are copious viable plugin effects on the market for turning existing sounds into compelling ear candy, but Looperator is surely one of the best. Sugar Bytes’ spectacular device utterly transforms any audio signal sent its way using five step sequenced effects – Envelope, Filter, Loop and two multi-effects modules (each offering a choice of Delay, Reverb, Distortion, Phaser, Vinyl, Reverb, etc) – and a real-time slicer. The brilliantly conceived sequencers make designing elaborate patterns and sweeps fast, fun and as microscopic a process as you want it to be, and plentiful randomisation systems provide at-a-click inspiration, should you need it.

As the name suggests, Looperator is geared up first and foremost for the glamourising of loops, but there’s no end to the unique one-shot FX and ear candy you can get by feeding pads, vocals, guitars, synth lines or anything else into it, whether you apply it in real time, or render its output for import into a sampler or direct placement on an audio track.

AIR Music Technology The Riser

An ear candy staple in dance and pop music, risers are used to transition between sections of a track (from the verse into the chorus, or the chorus into the drop, say) for those epic ‘hands in the air’ moments, and AIR’s eponymous plugin puts everything you need to build them – and more besides – in a single virtual instrument. The Riser comprises three oscillators (Sweep, Noise and Chord), each modulated by a trio of parameter-specific curve generators (Sweep Gain, Frequency and Oscillator Shape, for example), and each curve in turn modulated by either of two LFOs; plus filtering and a handful of effects. The duration of the rise (ie, the time it takes to progress through all those curves, from 16 bars to 1/16) is determined by the octave of the triggering notes; and it’s not all about upwards movement, as The Riser is also good for sweeps, falls, sirens, textures and all manner of other sounds. A sublime and focused addition to any producer’s FX toolbox.

Cableguys ShaperBox 3

This wild multi-effects plugin has long been an FX go-to for producers in the know, its nine powerful Shaper modules (plus high-spec Compressor and Oscilloscope Tools) each enabling freeform LFO and envelope-driven modulation of a particular sonic process. Alongside the self-explanatory VolumeShaper, FilterShaper, PanShaper and WidthShaper, DriveShaper and CrushShaper serve up riotous analogue and digital distortion, LiquidShaper delivers delicious phasing and flanging, NoiseShaper generates a wide variety of dynamically responsive noise signals, and TimeShaper opens up a world of tape stops, vinyl scratches, speed-ups and more.

The all-important LFOs can run looped or be triggered by MIDI notes or audio transients (internal or externally sidechained), and their waveforms are drawn in an intuitive and rhythmically inspiring editor. You can arrange your chosen Shapers in any order, and every one is applied independently to each of up to three frequency bands, with the dry/wet balance of every band of every Shaper governed by its own Mix control. Phew!

Whether you’re just whipping up a quick riser with NoiseShaper and FilterShaper, or rinsing the whole nine-strong shebang in the pursuit of happy sonic accidents, ShaperBox 3 gives you more options for incidental sound design than you’ll know what to do with.

Boom Library LiftFX

Another plugin dedicated to the production of ear-catching risers, fallers, drops and the like, Boom Library’s virtual instrument furnishes you with 275 ready-to-go presets, each one defined by a range of inaccessible under-the-hood synthesis and processing parameters, but also presenting four adjustable macro knobs for customisation. The specifics of these controls vary wildly from preset to preset, but they largely govern filtering, modulation and effects; and every preset also includes fixed and bypassable reverb and delay, as well as low- and high-pass filters for final frequency sculpting. Overall progression through the rise or fall, and the independent movement of each macro and filter, can be set to a fixed duration (forward or in reverse), or controlled by DAW automation or mod wheel MIDI input.

Ultimately, LiftFX is all about the quality of its lovingly curated library of categorised presets, which successfully realises a vivid and diverse cornucopia of noise-based and tonal sweeps, choppy rhythms and even drum rolls, fills and builds. Elevatory!

What sonic ingredients do you rely on for your own ear candy recipes? Let us know in the comments.