SHAPERBOX Review
Plugin Boutique have hooked me up with Cable Guy’s ShaperBox 3. ShaperBox is a multi effects plugin focussed around looping motion. You get about a dozen effects each with built in MSEG style LFOs, effects include time, pitch, drive, noise, filter, phaser, reverb and stereo processing. The UI is very clean simple and bold, everything makes sense and is laid out logically. ShaperBox comes with over one thousand presets with a nice preset browser that allows you to filter presets by which effects they utilize.
Each effect has a primary control that is connected to a drawable modulator, some effects even allow for a secondary control to be modulated. In addition to this, each effect can be split into three bands, each with their own settings and motion, making ShaperBox a fairly powerful multi-band processor. Multi-band distortion is the obvious use case for this, but splitting time and pitch into different frequencies can lead to some pretty interesting results. The effects are pretty straight forward, they sound great, but there’s not really any crazy experimental processing like you’d find in some alternative options, additionally I’d like to see a delay at some point.
EFFECTS
I like that the pan has a “hass” mode, but it does make me wish volume had a “doppler” option like Atelier. The width module sounds nice, and adding motion to the stereo image can be quite fun. There’s also a compressor that does not allow for motion, as well as an oscilloscope.
My biggest complaint is that you can only load one instance of each effect, you can’t stack a dozen time effects, or layer multiple filters and drives. However, there’s still a lot you can do with only one instance per effect.
Time: One of the more interesting effects, if you are familiar with “Gross Beat” you’ll understand this one. The axis relate to input and output time within a buffer, steps will jump you around in time, linear slopes will change the playback speed, and curved slopes will bend the speed. There’s a lot of cool tricks you can do with this one.
Pitch: a solid pitch shifter with a few different shifting algorithms, grain size control, and even a formant control that has its own motion.
Drive: great sounding distortion with a dozen distortion curves, includes some fun folding and rectification, would be nice to see more shapes in the future
Noise: adds a noise layer that responds nicely to incoming audio. There’s a wide variety of noises to chose from and controls to shape the noise. I do wish the noise could modulate the incoming signal as well.
Filter: basic LPF, HPF, band, notch, and peak filter types. Each with warm versions as well as different slopes. Personally I’d prefer warm/clean to be a button, with the slope being another control rather than a list of 20 different options.
Liquid: contains a phaser and a flanger, with the motion set via the modulator, you can also modulate the resonance
Crush: I really like the sound of this crusher, it seems to add just the destruction I’m looking for, also includes a jitter control
Reverb: A fairly nice sounding reverb, comes with a ton of reverb types, I’m assuming it is convolution
The modulation is pretty powerful, you get an extremely large window to draw shapes in. There’s multiple drawing tools and each node can be toggled between a sharp point or a curve. You can randomize, duplicate and shift around your shape as well. Each effect has their own collection of factory shape presets to chose from, this is nice because it means you get tailored patterns and curves designed specifically for each effect type.
Each band can have its own modulation allowing you to decouple the motion and timing of different frequency regions. The modulation can go up to 5khz for some really fun audio rate modulation, but above about 90hz it sounds like the modulation is aliasing, which still has some neat qualities.
Where things really get interesting is the “wave palette”, a bank of 8 temporary shapes you can store and recall using midi, letting you swap around different patterns on the fly. This does seem to be an editing feature rather than a performance feature though, as the palette is shared across FX slots and only edits the current focussed effect, so you can’t use this to externally sequence a larger pattern across different effects.
Also, I found myself wishing for some polymeric capabilities, while you can do triplet and dotted timings, theres no way to set the LFO loop length to something like 7/8ths or 13/16ths.
While ShaperBox isn’t as immediately exciting as some alternatives like Infiltrator or Looperator, it is very solid and straight forward, perhaps even a bit more “mix ready” with less glitching artifacts and rough edges. It’s a solid option for more standard production needs. Where I used to open infiltrator to add a simple sweeping filter, I may start using ShaperBox for these simpler motion needs, and reserve infiltrator for more extreme sound design cases. The UI definitely feels a bit more solid less distracting. I’ve always been interested in ShaperBox, so I’m glad to have finally got my hands on it, I think it fits alongside some of the more casual plugins like Kick 3, and other day to day mix utilities quite well. It can be nice to separate your mix decisions by plugin.
If you plan on purchasing ShaperBox 3 from Plugin Boutique, please consider supporting me by using my affiliate links
SHAPERBOX: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/81-Bundles/39-Effects-Bundles/9819-ShaperBox-3-Bundle?a_aid=61c378ab215d5