LOVE Review
Dawesome audio have released their first effect plugin Love, they gave me a copy of Love to test and review. Love is a simple multi effect, pulling in the effects from Abyss and Novum while adding a granular delay at the beginning of the chain. Loves UI is simple and colorful, with interesting rendered graphics decorating each effect mix slider for inspiration. Love seems to do best at creating nice pleasant ambience from the input signal, one of those plugins that’s great for softer droning music or creating mellow textures to sit lightly in the background. The granular engines add a nice touch of texture and experimentation.
GRANULAR: Love contains 3 different granular engines: Swarm, Chop, and Robot. They all share the same controls, with 3 unique controls to the right of the display. Each mode can be tuned, offset (delayed), pan and tune jitter, and randomly reversed/ octaved.
Swarm is your classic “clouds” type granulator, playing back small overlapping snippets of the incoming audio stacked into a grain cloud or in this case swarm. You can jitter the position and change the size of each grain, with up to 20 grains playing back simultaneously.
Chop is somewhere between a beat slicer and a tremolo. if you modulate the offset control it behaves like a beat looper. Position jitter places back each slice from a different location creating a chaotic randomized version of the incoming audio.
Robot is more like a buffer repeater, looping a small slice, but one grain at a time, with little to no overlap.
The “BPM” control sets how often the looped audio is sampled and speed is how fast the looping occurs.
Syn applies the “syntify” effect from Novum to your loop creating a more synthetic sound.
EFFECTS: After the granular engine, Love’s effects become fairly simple and traditional with a few exceptions. The filter has an interesting “anti” control, described as an “anti filter” it seems to modulate the signal with an inverted version of the filtered signal, producing AM like buzzing and distortion. Next the shimmer reverb is the same as we get in Abyss/ Novum, but now you can use it one anything, it’s a nice shiny and bright reverb great for adding an octave of ambience. The chorus and phaser are pretty traditional, but provide their own flavor compared to many stock or built in modulation effects, I don’t know quite how to describe it, they just have a subtly unique quality to them, like a boutique guitar pedal.
I’d say my biggest complaint about Love is the lack of internal modulation. Luckily with Bitwig I can add modulation wherever I want, but this means I can’t make modulated presets to share with non-Bitwig users. I also wish you could rearrange the effect order, but these limitations also bread unique creativity. Sometimes I can become reliant on modulation, and completely miss sweet spots or more static uses of plugins that are just as valid as their wild moving counter parts. Not every plugin needs to be a fully modular experimental ecosystem. Love does what it does well, it reminds me of the plugin Spacer by Spectral, simple and to the point designed with a purpose in mind.
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LOVE: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/2-Effects/53-Multi-Effect-/10701-LOVE?a_aid=61c378ab215d5