SPECTRAL RESONATOR Review
Bleass sent me a copy of their new Spectral Resonator. As the name suggests, it is a spectral resonator. I think I’m not a huge fan of the name, it’s TOO straight forward and many other effects cover this same territory.
Spectral Resonator uses FFT to resonate and filter various partials of your signal. This thing is pretty straight forward, you have a few main controls, settings for block size and “hop factor”, and a few other tricks here and there.
The UI is pretty typical Bleass design, rounded gradient boxes with blueish dark hues. Everything makes sense where you find it and nothing is hidden or confusing. I’m not really a huge fan of Bleass UI design, I think they would be insane with pastel or neon colors, but their current color scheme gives very “default factory” plugin vibes. Which is perfectly ok, to their credit, their interfaces are inoffensive and safe feeling right at home in any DAW. At least this one has a rainbow gradient
First of all, the resonator sounds great. It’s a pretty intense sound, you kinda get full resonant signal with mix at 100%. The decay range is solid and the various window and hop sizes alter the quality quite a bit. What is “hop factor” you might ask? I’m pretty sure it just determines how fast one partial “hops” to the next, you get a smoother sound with higher hop factors.
I love the ability to simply select even or odd partials. The stretch control drastically alters the tonal quality of the resonator. With low frequencies and high stretch values you can get some pretty awesome bass tones. The shift control moves the entire spectrum before it is processed by the resonator which provides some interesting tonal control.
Lower densities create more sparse partial resonances, causing shimmering digital artifacts. And blu resonates neighboring partials for a noisier tone. You can even stack notes and add unison. I found with longer decays, lower density and a medium blur setting you get almost a reverb quality. There’s also a midi controlled mode, but I haven’t played with that a whole lot yet. I always find midi controlled effects to be a bit tedious to set up.
I like that you can use the spectrum display to filter frequencies, but I do wish there was a way to lock the setting in. While you can adjust the filter, doing so with the display reverts back to the last setting as its more of a performance and assessment tool. Some of the other Bleass plugins I’ve tested so far have a simple modulation system built in, I’d love to have been able to add LFOs and modulation to this one. While this isn’t the deepest spectral effect I’ve used, it is still quite capable, I managed to pull a variety of unique sounds out of it with ease. I look forward to using all of these spectral effects when it comes to sound design, they are some of the most fun to play with.
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SPECTRAL RESONATOR: https://www.pluginboutique.com/product/2-Effects/19-Filter/17346-BLEASS-Spectral-Resonator/?a_aid=61c378ab215d5