EVOKE Review

Minimal Audio gave me early access to their effect Evoke, a vocal processing/“autotune” and multi effects plugin. I have no experience recording, mixing, or producing vocals, so if you are looking for a review on Evoke as a voice effect, or in comparison to other “autotune” style effects, I’d suggest looking elsewhere. I will be reviewing Evoke as a creative effect for synths and sound design.

Evoke centers around a vocal transformation effect with 15 unique transformation modes, a four voice harmonizer, and a “retune” pitch corrector. Adding to this is a multi effect page that lets you load up to 12 instances of eight different effects, and six modulators that can control nearly anything in Evoke. This makes for a rather deep and powerful creative effect, but also brings up my first complaint. As far as I can tell, there is no way to bypass the vocal processing, I’d love to be able to use Evoke as a modulated multi-effect. While the vocal transformation effects are cool, they somewhat limit the variety of sources you’d want to run through the other effects. I found Evoke works incredibly well on saws, simple leads, basses, and monophonic content. As for sound design, running textures, noise, and ambience into Evoke can lead to some weird experimental sound design. Because of the pitch tracking and some of the spectral qualities of this effect, I do suggest sampling your sound design rather than using it as a mix effect to get more stable results.

RESYNTH

The 15 transformation effects are quite powerful, each has a “shape” and “color” control to manipulate the transformation algorithms. From here you can shift the pitch up or down, blur the timing of the signal, shift the formant, or even dial back the resolution for a simpler sound. There’s some really cool transformation algorithms, from unison, to sync, to different robotic tones, and even textures. The sync based effects are very nice, great for leads. I like the robotic tones, they are interesting for sound design and basses. And the textures are quite extraordinary, transforming the input audio into either static noise, liquid mush, metallic alloys, or glitchy “data”.
These textures are probably the most fun “sound design” aspect of Evoke.

Following the voice transformation is a spectrum sculpting eq, four voice harmonization, and retune. It’s worth noting you can also freeze the audio signal as well.
The spectrum sculpting is quite fun, you can shift the focus and even randomize the curve, it has a very nice phaser quality when modulated. I only wish there was a way to stretch and squash the curve, perhaps instead of tilt.

EFFECTS

Evoke gives you 12 effects slots for loading eight different effects units. Effects include chorus, compressor, delay, distortion, EQ, filter, reverb and shifter. The compressor is a three band OTT style compressor, basically a stripped down version of Fuse. This is the case with all these effects, they are like “minimal” versions of the Minimal Audio effects line. The shifter, sadly isn’t a pitch shifter, but excitingly is a frequency shifter that allows for feedback and FM. These added effects can really enhance whatever you build in the resynth engine.

MODULATION

For modulation there are six modulators, each can be either an LFO, Curve, or follower, there’s nothing new here compared to Current’s modulation, so here’s an excerpt from my Current review:

”LFO: Your bog standard LFO, you get the basic LFO shapes and some morphing between, and a control to randomize them for using the LFO as a sample hold or randomizer.

Curve: This is your MSEG, you can draw point by point or use some of the various drawing tools to create custom patterns, The brush types can all be morphed as well for quite a few more options. One of the best inclusions here is the shape randomizer, which outputs a random curve shape depending on the grid settings. This almost completely removes the need for MSEG banks, you can just click thorough a variety of randomized shapes, all based off of a few different pattern types, from stepped, to smooth, to a combination of shapes. It’s a fun way to take a sound and get some unique motion out of it.

Follower: Something neat I don’t see often on synths is an envelope follower, this one can detect any oscillator and use it as a modulation source. I haven’t found much use for this yet, but it can be a nice way to get some cross communication going on between elements. “

Over all, Evoke is quite an interesting and unique effect, the resynth engine is capable of some wild sounds, and the effects and modulation round it out into a very powerful effects processor. I’ll be interested to see how it fairs with vocals, if and when I ever do vocals, this will be on my list of plugins to try. I will likely use this mostly for creative effects, and maybe sometimes for bass/lead processing. Again, I do wish I could bypass the resynth and use it simply as a multi effects processor. I don’t think this is super necessary, and much more powerful multi effects exists, but it would still be a nice option.

If you plan on purchasing Evoke from Plugin Boutique, please consider supporting me by using my affiliate links
EVOKE: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/2-Effects/54-Vocal-Processing/15793-Evoke?a_aid=61c378ab215d5