UVI: THE EFFECTS BUNDLE Review
UVI have sent me their new effects bundle, which includes their newest compressor Opal, along with my favorite of the bunch Shade, as well as Relayer, DualDelayX, SparkVerb and the rest of their plugin lineup. These effects range quite a bit in complexity and utility, with some being modern renditions of classic effects, others being simple emulations, then Shade being a full modular filter processing device. I will have full reviews up of a few of these effects in the future as well, so I’ll keep things brief for now and cover a few of my favorites that are included.
SHADE: Absolutely my favorite of the bundle, I picked this one up prior to ever being in contact with UVI. On the surface it looks like an EQ, but it’s actually a creative filter. They provide you with various different modulation sources and a wider variety of filter shapes, not just eq related ones, but phasers and combs too.You can stack these effects to create moving resonators, chorus/ensemble, reverbs, and even swirling spectral effects. Read my full review here: https://www.databroth.com/blog/shade-review
RELAYER: Relayer is a multi-tap delay, a genre of effects I’m only recently getting into. It goes up to 32 taps, and allows for control over volume, time, pan, and even two effects per each tap. The two effects lanes are what really make this plugin interesting to me, being able to apply different effects per tap at various intensities is an intriguing concept. The most obvious use for this is filtering, but the included comb filter, phaser, distortion, and vowel filter are fun.
DUALDELAYX: More of a simple delay compared to Relayer, DualDelayX still offers some neat processing. The dispersion, feedback shaping and rotation controls make this a fun one to do heavy feedback short delays with. There is also a lovely display showcasing the rotation and color of each echo in the delay.
As for the others, there’s not a whole lot that stands out in terms of creative features, they mostly just simply sound good. The new Opal compressor has a very lovely UI and can cover a wide range of compression curves. I honestly can’t speak to the quality of one compressor over another as I rarely use them or manually modulate a volume curve. Phasor is a pretty nice sounding phaser, you can freeze it which is nice, and it has sample hold, which I wish Shade actually had. Thorus is simply a pleasant chorus effect, I rarely use chorus plugins, so I’ll have to shoot these out one day. DrumReplacer is a cool utility, you can isolate frequency detection regions to replace drums with samples or even plugins. SparkVerb is a fairly decent sounding reverb, it’s not the most natural, but still pretty decent, it can freeze the reverb as well and there’s this nifty little constellation preset view that lets you almost blend between presets, but it’s not really meant to be used performatively.
As a bundle it’s quite a few plugins, but it’s a matter of if you’d use or need all of them or not. Just like with any bundle, I wouldn’t go out of my way to pick up every one of these individually, but as a collection I always appreciate having access to those included tools. I do hope they add more effects in the future, more stuff like shade would be incredible. I think this bundle is really missing a distortion, and I think if they made a distortion in the same manner as Shade, it’d be quite an incredible plugin. Here is the complete list of included products: Opal, Shade, Plate, Sparkverb, Dual Delay X, Relayer, Rotary, Phasor, Thorus, and Drum Replacer.
you can find THE EFFECTS BUNDLE on UVI’s website: https://www.uvi.net/the-effects-bundle