TANTRA Review
Dmitry Sches Tanta was one of the first plugins I ever bought. Tantra really changed some of the ways I approach audio and sound design, and at the time helped me do something my daw previously wasn’t very good at. Tantra is a multi effects plugin centered around 8 extra long Msegs. Tantra differs from other sequenced effects in that, rather than each step turning on or off a different effect, you can freely route modulation across the whole plugin to move controls in nearly any way you want. FX order is modular, and there’s an A and B part you can run parallel or in series, but unfortunately you’re stuck with the modules available and can not instance effects.
(this review is for Tantra 1, I do not own Tantra 2, but most of the information will apply)
UI: Curve drawing is intuitive and the extra long window is designed around 32 steps rather than a typical 16. Ofcourse you can always adjust the rate and squeeze more patterns into other Msegs, but visually, it’s nice having the extra length to play with. Many people seem to dislike the skeuomorphic design of Tantra, but I feel like they did an incredible job getting this one to not look cheesy. Also the position of the controls and sizing of more important controls makes visual navigation easy. Modulation is done through drag and drop and nearly every control can be modulated. One clever UI feature in DS plugins is the ability to use right click to adjust modulation depth. This allows you to use an entire different physical button to control mod depth, instead of either having to fiddle with a narrow mod handle, or bounce back and forth between modulation views. It’s little, and a lot of people don’t like it, but for me it’s the kind of UI design I really appreciate.
MODULATION: You get a total of 8 modulators in Tantra, each of which can be placed into step or curve mode. Step mode allows you to drag and draw steps easily, but you can also adjust the timing of each step to get some more interesting patterns. Curve mode on the other hand is where you’ll likely spend most of your time, Curve mode is a classic mseg, allowing you to add and move nodes, and adjust the curve between nodes. Motion can be as slow as 4 bars per step, meaning you can do full track automation with tantra if you need to. Going back to what I said earlier, Tantra allowed me to do some time synced automation way better than my daw at the time was capable of as tantra has pretty solid modulation timing. Each modulator has a few more controls that allow you to sculpt the over all shape: Tension adjusts the curve between every node, Shuffle applies swing between every other step, and smooth rounds out the corners between nodes for softer modulation.
Tantra is also one of the few sequenced multi effects that lets you easily set different step lengths for each pattern, allowing for creative use of poly meters
EFFECTS: There are 6 main modules duplicated in part B, then and EQ and Reverb. Eq comes in handy to sculpt the over all sound, and the reverb is ok, but nice to have.
The effects aren’t incredible, but they do all have a bit of character.
Filter: I’m not really an expert on filters, so I can’t quite compare the quality on your standard low passes and high passes, but there are a few interesting and cool filter types here.
The phaser filters are really cool for getting more notched type sounds, there’s also a vowel filter for those formanty vocal type effects. The ring mod pitch shift and octave band are all fairly intense, but can provide some extreme sounds design options. There’s also the addition of a post low cut and hi cut filter if you want to add some simple filtering on top of the main filter.
Distortion: The distortion is pretty gritty and rough, with some modes being completely on-transparent. Tube, Overdrive, Warm, and Crisp all provide different colors of dirt, and the fuzz/ tone control gives you just a bit of extra shaping
Delay: A simple delay, with classic tempo synced options, feedback, pingpong, and lowpass filtering. The bandpass filter is rather neat and can add some interesting depth.
If you enjoy creating resonators, you can deactivate sync mode and go down as fast as /1 milliseconds, though feedback doesn’t truly go up to 100% (in comparison with the vast majority of delays set to 100% feedback).
Lofi: One of my favorite bit reducers, the rate control is shimmery and glittery, and reducing bitdepth just has the most pleasant crunch. I need to do some side by side comparions of bitcrushers to really see if some are actually different from others.
Flanger: I usually activate the PHS (phaser) mode for this one as I’m not a huge fan of flangers (I prefer just using combs with custom motion).
As a phaser this one sounds pretty good, it does what phasers do.
Glitch: One of the cooler effects in Tantra, that unfortunately doesn’t seem to have the same timing precision as the Msegs. I don’t really have a metric for this if I’m being honest, I’ve played with many glitch repeaters, and some just seem to feel more synced than others. Again, this is something I will test in the future.
With that out of the way, it’s still a cool glitch effect, little repeats and stutters are fun, and it can even be reversed. The stretch control seems to actively time stretch the audio buffer and producers some gnarly tones, big fan of that knob for sound design.
There’s not a whole lot else to say, Perhaps tantra is a bit dated at this point, with Tantra 2 not adding a whole lot of new features. It’s worth pointing out that Tantra is not 100% transparent, it always adds a very tiny amount of grit and filtering to your signal. It is still a fun plugin to play around with and can be excellent for adding longer scale modulation. Tantra really shaped how I think about sound design, it taught me that I could create a “synth patch” or sequence with an effect, and just play tones into it for melodic or tonal articulation, while the contour of the pattern remains. Now synth patches could be multiplied by effects sequences to create infinite combinations.
If you own Tantra or Tantra 2 and want more presets, consider picking up my pack of 100 presets for Tantra “MECHANISMS”: https://databroth.gumroad.com/l/mechanisms
and if you already own Tantra or Tantra 2 and want more presets, consider picking up my pack of 100 presets for Tantra/Tantra 2 “MECHANISMS”: https://databroth.gumroad.com/l/mechanisms