We’re constantly blown away by the incredible value for money to be found in the plugin market these days, with developers at every tier bringing us all manner of high quality virtual instruments and effects at pocket money prices. Here are five superb examples that have grabbed our attention and wallets recently…

Waves CR8

We’ve mentioned this one a few times in the last few weeks, so if you’ve somehow still not yet checked Waves’ nifty new plugin sampler out, procrastinate no longer. With its concise but powerful interface and focused toolset, CR8 puts creativity and speedy workflow at the very top of the agenda, and comes in at an amazing price – even before the company’s relentless discounting.

CR8’s interface is cheery and intuitive, and despite its comparatively (for a sampler) pared-back appearance, there’s lots here to get your musical teeth into, including tempo and pitch detection, a variety of timestretching modes, looping, reversing and freezing, filtering, plenty of modulation (assigned via drag and drop), and up to eight sample layers and/or splits in a patch.

And then there’s the USP of having the (also separately available for free) Cosmos sample browser built in. This uses neural network sorcery to automatically tag your samples by type, key and tempo, for browsing in a conventional list or an obviously XO-inspired ‘constellation’ view, where samples are triggered in real time as you move the mouse pointer through them; and having it built directly into CR8 is hugely beneficial. As a complete package, then, CR8 is a must-have for any fast-moving samplist.

Aberrant DSP Digitalis

We’re always up for a bit of digital degradation, and the latest release by maverick developers Aberrant DSP puts an arsenal of endlessly destructive sonic weaponry at your fingertips.

Digitalis’ brilliantly Mac System 7-styled GUI comprises three reorderable main ‘windows’, each housing a set of related processors. In the Data Manipulation window, the PaintBox presents a simple pen/eraser-based drawing interface for applying spectral filtering; the Pitch controls provide pitch and formant shifting; and the Telecommunications section dials in ‘lossy’ compression artefacts. The Time window handles the temporal side of things, enabling highly manipulable glitching and beat repeat effects, and pitch bending. And the Corruption panel is home to the essential bitcrushing and downsampling modules, with the added creative twists of multiband and dynamic processing, and a sample rate-controlling sample-and-hold algorithm; as well as the awesome Bitrot section, simulating the drop-outs of a knackered old CD.

All of that on its own would be more than enough to justify the super low price tag, but there’s icing on this messed-up cake in the shape of the 16-step modulation sequencer, with which up to four of the plugin’s controls can be automated in sync with the host DAW (or not). It’s here that Digitalis’ creative potential really becomes apparent, and the sequencer’s old-school knob-driven workflow is fun and inspiring.

Highly recommended for noiseniks of all genre denominations, Digitalis is one of our favourite plugins of the year so far, regardless of price.

HoRNet Plugins Butterfly

Over the last decade, Italian developers HoRNet Plugins have built up an impressive catalogue of plugin effects for mixing, mastering and sound design, notable not only for their innovative specifications and pro-quality output, but also their unmatched affordability. Released at the end of March, Butterfly is a cheap-as-chips channel strip intended for use on the master bus. It brings together freely reorderable Equalizer, Compressor, Clipper and Limiter modules, and a numeric LUFS metering section with ‘Momentary’, ‘Short Term’, ‘Integrated’ and ‘True Peak’ readouts.

Each module draws on existing HoRNet technology, so the 6-band EQ is essentially TotalEQ, while the Compressor borrows heavily from SyncPressor, and the Limiter and Clipper are based on those of Magnus MK2. Among the headline features are host-syncing of Compressor and Limiter Attack and Release times; Dynamic mode and optional analogue saturation for each EQ band; ‘Soft’ and ‘Hard’ Limiter modes; and wonderfully eye-catching metering for the three dynamics modules, including the Compressor’s sidechain input. Of course, none of this would count for much if the signal processing wasn’t up to scratch, but Butterfly sounds fantastic, delivering accurate, responsive dynamics shaping and equalisation, whether you need it clinically ‘digital’ or with a touch of analogue flavouring.

Sample Science Retro Cazio

There’s no arguing with the price of this dinky Casiotone home keyboard simulation, as it’s available on a ‘pay what you like’ basis, meaning you can get it for nowt if your conscience allows. Specifically recreating the Casiotone MT-100 (launched by Casio in 1983), Retro Cazio gives you all 20 of the original keyboard presets (Organ, Flute, Piano, Accordion, Elec Guitar, etc) and a drum kit (Kick, Snare, Tom, Perc, Open and Closed hi-hats), the last presumably sourced from the hardware’s preset rhythms.

They’re all sample-based, as you’d expect, but you can customise the sounds using a high/low-pass filter, an LFO (targeting Expression, Pitch or Pan), an ADSR envelope, and fixed preamp saturation and reverb effects; and switch between Mono, Poly and Legato (with adjustable Glide time) voicing. Palpably ’80s-evocative and great to have around for ‘naive’ electronic toy tones.

2B Played Warble

Ostensibly a reverb/delay multi-effect, 2B Played’s bargainous new plugin takes those fundamental processing concepts and puts them under the guidance of a set of “smart oscillators” to achieve a particular type of spatialising and echo generation. At the start of Warble’s signal path is a stereo delay with low- and high-pass filtering, feedback and distortion control, and this feeds into a pair of parallel reverbs. The first of these is a conventional algorithm with just Size, Length and LP/HP parameters, while the other is the titular Warble engine, dialling in modulation of pitch and various under-the-hood reverb and delay parameters with the Warble Rate and Amount knobs, and mixed in to introduce weird, spooky ambiences, massive, hyper-real spaces, and strange doubling effects.

The lack of a manual makes it a bit tricky to get to grips with at first, but Warble is a plugin that rewards experimentation anyway, and the spectacular sounds it makes are well worth the very reasonable price of admission.

Have you tried any of our picks? Let us know what you make of them in the comments.