Florian Mrugella just released Hammer and Meißel, a free polyphonic modal filter with keytracking and MIDI support.
Have you ever made a make-shift resonator from white noise by imposing band pass filters or very narrow EQ nodes on the sound? That might serve as a very simplified example of where Hammer & Meißel starts.
I urge you to check out this plugin demo by the developer for a more technical, in-depth explanation of both the concept and the different parameters here:
While the plugin has an abundance of parameters and controls, let’s take a quick look at the basics.
At the top left of the UI is a slider labeled Noise. Infuse your sound with perlin noise if you want the sound to behave more like a synthesizer, for instance. Hook the plugin up to a MIDI controller and start playing melodies.
The next feature on the left side is a gain envelope with ADSR, followed by a modulation envelope with three different modes: envelope generator, envelope follower, and a randomizer.
These have a huge impact on the sound. Create evolving pads, textures, or melodies with a lot of timbral variation and character.
The center of the UI holds the modal filter engine – the heart of this plugin. Each voice has its own ADSR envelope generator, a modal filter, and a formant filter that runs in parallel. A comb filter and a lowpass filter let you shape the overall sound.
The formant filter is not keytracked, but can be used to add additional frequencies, texture, and movement to the audio.
Furthermore, you can construct your own modal materials by dragging frequency partials, or drag and drop any sample into the editor at the center of the plugin. Click the key selector or engage your MIDI controller to start playing the filters.
At the bottom, you’ll find a row of parameters, the first five controlling the modal filter and the last two controlling the comb and lowpass filter, respectively:
Blend – Blends between the two modal filters
Spreizung – Spreads or shrinks the frequency ratios of the resonators
Harmonie – Harmonizes the resonators’ frequency ratios
Kraft – Saturates the resonators’ magnitude values
Reso – Increase to create sharper ringing
Feedback – Feedback delay of the comb filter
Damp – Controls the lowpass filter
Each of the parameters come with additional knobs for modulation depth and stereo width control.
Hammer & Meißel also has a dropdown menu with even more possibilities for sound shaping. Clicking the “Create” tab unlocks different starting points for modal material: waveforms, prime numbers, Fibonacci ratios, and randomization.
Clicking “process” lets you flip the resulting table of partials horizontally and vertically, amongst other things.
The right panel of the plugin has controls for the xen-scale, a master transpose, modulation macro, wet/dry, mix, and output gain.
If you’re technologically illiterate like me, the depth of this plugin might seem overwhelming at face value. Don’t be discouraged, though. Workflow is intuitive, it’s easy to get cool-sounding things almost immediately, and it rewards experimentation in general.
View Hammer & Meißel as a sonic playground where you can revive boring tracks or entire projects by chucking them into a modal filter, coming up with something new and fresh.
You can always nerd out about the details later.
This plugin really shines when you apply it to non-tonal material like field recordings, drum beats, or any kind of dynamic noise. Turn it into interesting texture, lush chords, or pads teeming with micro dynamics and character.
Hammer and Meisel should be a natural addition to your palette if you’re into sound design and experimental music. Getting tools like this for free is truly great!
It might have had an obscene price tag, but instead, Florian Mrugalla lets you download the plugin directly from his GitHub.
No mailing lists, accounts, or other BS. Be sure to check out his other plugins as well, for instance, the parallel bandpass filter Manta, which we have covered here at BPB previously.
Hammer & Meißel work with macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Download: Hammer & Meißel (FREE)
More:
