TRASH 3 Review

Reviews
Written By Data Broth

After discontinuing Trash 2, Izotope has decided to relaunch Trash in response to many customers communicating their love for the plugin. However they may have missed the mark on this one. If you’ve been following this release at all, or if you were a fan of the previous Trash 2, you may notice some glaring omissions in “Trash 3”. I decided to buy Trash just to see for myself what I think of it. My final verdict may actually surprise you, but before I get to that, lets look at the UI. At first I hated it, it’s not super pretty, the textures in the windows are a major turn off, and the color is kinda cheap looking. It grew on me a little over time, but the soft gradients just make it look plastic rather than refined.

While I did buy Trash with my own money, I got the original trash at a steep discount of $10 and was able to upgrade to the new version for only $30.

 

First of all, this isn’t “Trash 3”, it has been branded as simply “Trash”, an apt name for those who are not satisfied with this release. I interpret this as meaning they don’t see this as a successor to Trash 2, but instead a reimagining. However, when you use your previous product’s namesake, and leave out features, you WILL disappoint customers.

Lets address the elephant in the room, they have completely done away with drawable waveshapes, this is honestly quite a devastating omission. For many, this was the whole point of Trash 2, to be able to draw custom waveshapers and destroy your audio in an infinite number of ways. If this is what you’ve come to Trash for, there is no need to read further, it’s simply not a part of this update for Trash.

Furthermore, a few other things are missing from this one, there’s only a simple filter, no LFO, no EQ, no dynamics page. This is a MUCH simpler plugin than Trash 2. Luckily, Trash does not over write your copy of Trash 2. So if your concern is that you’ll loose your old version, there is no need to worry.

As far as custom drawable wave shapers go, it’s honestly a tricky effect to work with. Drawing your own shapes can be tedious, if there’s an infinite amount of cool shapes you can draw, there are an infinite infinite amount of bad ones in between. Here with the updated version of Trash, you get banks of predefined shapes that you can load into one of four corners, and use an XY grid to morph between. In many ways this is faster and easier to use, choose4 tones that are close to your goal, and scan around until you find what you like.

It’s not perfect for those of us who want to meticulously craft every nuance of our sounds, but it sure is fast.

I’m actually finding that I really like this process, especially when there is a dice icon to randomize each corner. It just makes it fast to dial in some fun distortions, randomize the corners, and scan around until you hit the right spot, drag the crossover for another band and repeat. Before you know it you have a substantial distortion. Compared to Thermal, Coldfire, and Rift, this is less of a creative distortion effect, and more of a straightforward distortion tool. For this reason, you likely wont see me do a stream or sound design video with Trash, it’s just not enough to really “demonstrate” with in terms of sound design, but if you see me reach for it in production streams, that means my review holds up (ultimately only time will tell).

This same philosophy is applied to the convolution, making for some really fun sound design as you morph between IRs. Unfortunately there is little onboard modulation to control any of this with. You do get an envelope follower for distortion amount and distortion XY position, but otherwise you’ll have to use external automation or modulation to really get the most out of this. Finally, you get unique convolution/distortion per band, but I wish you could really choke the IRs, often times I don’t want a tail, I don’t want this to be a reverb, I just want the tone of the IR.

 

I am actually somewhat surprised I enjoy this update for Trash, many people seem to refuse to even touch it as it lacks the drawable waveshapes, but in my own opinion, the exact curve of a distortion being defined manually isn’t all that impressive, as well, I have tools already that can do that. I do wish it were here, especially with the new morphing feature it would be fun, but I do actually see myself using this one. That is, if the Izotope updater doesn’t get on my nerves. I really can’t stand seeing that icon pop up, it’s not the end of the world, but it’s an immersion breaking annoyance. I can already see myself breaking this one out when I need a simple textural distortion, but I don’t want to dig through various distortion plugins to find the right bite. Perhaps they should have named this something new, it really feels like a “lite” version in many ways. But in the end, I actually like it, it’s not perfect, but it serves a new purpose that I didn’t ever see myself using the old version to cover.

Data Broth
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