Strongly recommend this plugin. The formant pitch shifting is pretty much the only way I can get a good femme vocal recording from my testosterone laden cig-y vocal chords. The rest of the Soundtoys collection is pretty fantastic, but replacable. Alterboy is the only plugin I know of that lets you pitch shift the way it does.
Switched to a Mac recently and I cannot find a working crack of the Soundtoys suite for it, I am devastated. Decapitator was one of my most used plugins…
Decapitator and Radiator are impossible to overrate. I torrent plugins, so this isn’t an ad. Any recommendations I make, I just assume whoever I’m talking to will pirate it. Unless you’re actually making money off your music, I feel like most audio companies would probably support piracy. Carnage pirated Sylenth, but there’s a giant bump in searches for Sylenth after Carnage’s video. Even though Carnage is a massive producer, his pirated copy still provided Decapitator has such a defined sound for a distortion plugin.
I can think of two pretty big songs where Decapitator and the Soundtoys suite define the entire sound of the track. These are two extremely controversial artists, but the instrumental is fucking insane. Piss On Your Grave by Travis Scott and Kanye West makes HEAVY use of the Soundtoys suite. The 808 is completely a Decapitator tone. The guitar was ran through Crystalizer for the lead sound when the hip-hop section starts. Radiator decays the guitar and drum intro. Also the ever classic izotope vinyl on the track, that’s a completely free plugin at this point though. Another example like this is Heaven on Earth by Kid Cudi. The 808 is a defined Decapitator tone, while the sample is ran through Radiator.
I think I might have a magnet link for a MacOS torrent for it on a private tracker. Lemme check, if it’s there I can send you an invite.
Awesome writeup. I knew the whole ST suite is used in loads of mainstream tracks, but I didn’t know those specific examples. I’ve long had the feeling that 10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄ by Bon Iver also uses it for the fucked up drums, although don’t quote me on it.
And yeah, Decapitator specifically has a character to its sound that I just haven’t found in any other plugin. In techno I would throw it on almost any channel on a low setting just to add a little bite to stuff. It also sounds good at almost any setting, from barely noticeable warmth to completely mangling sounds. I really like others in the suite too, for specific needs, but that one is the only really unreplaceable one.
If you could help me get my hands on a good crack I’d be eternally grateful, but otherwise no stress.
Reaper’s built in ReaPitch will do formant shifting
And there’s Auburn Sounds Graillon, which will do pitch/formant shifting and a lot more besides and has a free version!
I didn’t know this, thank you for telling us! Last time I went really researching plug ins was quite a few years ago, so the landscape was a lot different. Graillon sounds pretty damn good, although I could never really get behind Reaper enough to use it :/
I pirate all my plugins so that’s why I didn’t consider pricing lol
Well if you’re pirating them anyway -
I didn’t recommend Waves Vocal Bender because their licensing model sucks and they’re Israeli; it’s the same thing as Alterboy but zero-latency so you can track with it. I actually like it better than Alterboy for that reason
