Discrete Signals SCULPTURE Review
When Discrete Signals emailed me asking to check out their plugins, I had never heard of them before, but one plugin caught my eye, Sculpture, a spectral multi effect with drawable curves. I really love to see different takes on spectral effects and I had fun playing with this one. The sound is surprisingly clean and capable of some unqieu sound design with the right combination of settings.
Sculpture allows you to load up to five instances of five different spectral effects; downwards, upwards, gate, delay, and resonator. Each effect has a drawable spectrum curve for each of its controls. This means you can map out each parameter to unique values per each bin across the spectrum. The effects are on the simpler side, with delay and resonator being the most fun.
While spectral gates and compressors can be found in other plugins, being able to create unique curves for attack, decay, threshold, and amount gives an added layer of flexibility with Sculpture. I take it, the idea being that you can “sculpt” every aspect of these spectral engines. Layering engines is quite fun, you can stack up several upwards engines to bring out artifacts that are normally silent, or layer delays for weird twisting spectral chaos.
I wish there were a couple more effects available, a frequency remap would be really fun and maybe some spectral smearing would be nice. I also think modulation would make take Sculpture into some incredible sound design territory. I apreciate that there are settings for FFT window size as well as “frequency resolution” which I’ve never seen before, though I should point out that this one can get a bit heavy on CPU if you use some of the more extreme settings. I love experimental plugins like this, and it doesn’t hurt that this one has a nice smooth sound to it compared to the harsher sound of some other spectral effects (which I also enjoy).