Soundspot Kara

We love pluck sounds…who doesn’t, but often when you start layering different sounds, you find yourself at the bottom of the rabbit hole with the laborious task of going into each synth and tweaking the envelopes to make each sound cohesive.

This is a personal bugbear for the team at SoundSpot during the production process, and we all wished that there was a plugin that could control the cutoff envelope on the group as a whole, so we decided to start work on a plugin that would do just that.

Introducing KARA – A bus processor designed to process multiple signals, into one cohesive sound.

As the KARA is an audio processor and receives no midi information, the first task was to find a way to trigger the cutoff envelope in a stable way. We achieved this by creating an RMS trigger that works much like a compressor, so when the signal hits the user definable threshold, which is set using the Sens parameter, the envelope and filter are triggered creating the pluck sound.

We’ve also added a delay to the end of the signal chain within the plugin, so there’s no need to have an additional delay unit after the KARA and using up any more of your precious CPU.

We also suggest using Kara on individual sounds, as whilst the plugin was designed to be used as a group processor, it can also yield fantastic results on single pluck sounds to add a more analog sound, so why not download the 14 day trial version today and see how it can take your pluck sounds to the next level.

Please note that whilst the preset manager is present in the Kara, we have not provided any factory presets. As the results achieved by the plugin hugely depend on the source signal, we decided that making presets wouldn’t yield consistent results, and therefore factory presets would not add any value to the user, and the inclusion of the preset manager was intended to allow users to save their own presets.

As Kara is so dependent on the source signal, we have decided to release an artist series synth preset bank which will include Kara presets that are designed to sound great specifically using Kara alongside them.