Summary | |
An effective and easy to use doubler that creates a thick full sound from even the wimpiest of source material.Pros:
Cons:
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Scores | |
| Features: | Fair
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| User Interface: | Fair
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| Sound: | Good
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| Value: | Fair
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| Overall: | Good
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TestTone | |
| Reviewed on: | September 6, 2009 |
| Reviewed with: | Logic Pro 9  - |
This review used the free demo of the product. TestTone and its reviewers do not accept payment from developers in exchange for a review. Please see our full Review policy. | |
Manifold Review
Double tracking is a studio audio technique in which the same musician records two performances of the same part onto two tracks. When the tracks are mixed together, slight pitch and timing differences between them give the mix a thicker, richer sound. But if you can't record the same part twice, you can instead use a doubler effect like Loomer's Manifold to duplicate a track and shift the duplicate's pitch a bit to create the illusion of two performances. And if two tracks isn't enough, Manifold can even create as many as 20 duplicates and mix them all together to create a really big sound.
Exploring the user interface
Manifold's user interface is smooth and clear. The audio path runs from left to right through the interface, starting with high-pass and low-pass filters on the left, the doubler in the center, and the mixer and output volume on the right.
Filters
The plugin's two filters are arranged one after the other in the audio path and used to narrow the effect's impact to a band of frequencies. With both filters wide open, doubling thickens bass, treble, and all points in between. On lead sounds I've found that pulling down the low-pass filter is useful to focus the effect on doubling the mid and bass while leaving the lead's treble undoubled, sharp, and aggressive.
Doubler
Manifold's doubler effect creates 4, 8, 12, 16, or 20 "voices", or duplicates of the incoming audio. Each duplicate is detuned up or down to create a fatter sound. The extent of this detuning is controlled by the plugin's "Detune" knob and, as you'd expect, at low values the effect is subtle, while at high values it is not. Settings of around 30% to 50% worked the best for my taste.
The plugin's "Spread" knob varies the width of the stereo image. At 0%, all of the duplicates are panned to the center. At 50%, the duplicates use the same panning as the original audio, while at 100% the stereo image is enhanced to be extra wide.
Master controls
The remaining knobs adjust the wet/dry mix and the plugin's output volume. As you increase the number of duplicate voices, they all sum together and the volume can easily increase into clipping territory. So each increase in the voice count usually requires a corresponding tweak of the volume knob to bring the levels back down.
Along the top of the plugin are a few menus and buttons to select presets, load and save presets stored in a file, and enter MIDI learn mode to assign MIDI control numbers to each of the knobs. Along the bottom are status indicators showing CPU use and MIDI traffic.
Getting good results
The plugin comes with 16 presets that do a good job of showing what the plugin can do. The first preset, "Pad Enhancer," gets right to the point. It creates eight duplicates, detunes and spreads them out in enhanced stereo, and opens both filters wide to let everything through. When I tried the plugin on a sawtooth-wave synth pad, the plugin's impact was immediate and satisfying. The sound was instantly much bigger and richer.
To see what it would do, I switched to the thinnest, wimpiest single-oscillator synth I could find and ran that through Manifold. Again, the result was very satisfying.
On a vocal track, Manifold once again creates a big full sound. However, vocal doubling needs to be used with care and a sense of subtlety. Add too much to a mix and it can sound like the vocal was recorded in a bathroom.
If the plugin's 8-voice setting sounds good on a track, it's tempting to crank it up immediately to 20 voices. Surely that sounds even better? Not necessarily. Additional duplicates do thicken the sound more, but there are diminishing returns. The change from 4 to 8 duplicates is a noticeable improvement, but going from 8 to 12, 12 to 16, and 16 to 20, has less and less impact. But it does increase CPU use.
Using the plugin
Manifold performed perfectly throughout the review. All of the controls worked well and they can be automated without glitches.
A minor nit-pick is that I'd like to have seen the high-pass and low-pass filters display their settings in Hz instead of as a percentage. The documentation does not say what they are a percentage of, but my experiments found that 100% corresponds to about 22 kHz, independent of the DAW's sample rate.
Conclusions
- Features: fair
- Manifold has a good set of controls and a good range of settings. The filters are a useful addition. There is a fine line between a doubler and a chorus effect, though, and many plugins go ahead and cross that line and add LFOs to modulate the detuning. Loomer probably could have done this too without compromising the clarity of the plugin's feature set. But even without LFOs Manifold is a useful effect.
- User interface: fair
- The user interface is clear and it works smoothly. As I noted above, it would have been better to show the filter settings in Hz instead of a percentage, but this isn't a show-stopper.
- Sound: good
- The plugin's sound is smooth and very usable.
- Value: fair
- The price seems a little high at 35 pounds, or about $55.
- Overall: good
- Loomer's Manifold does a good job. Its effect is immediate, satisfying, and easily controlled.
Alternatives
There are other doubler effect plugins, but they usually only create two or three duplicates. This is still useful, but Manifold's ability to create up to 20 duplicates gives it more flexibility. If 20 isn't enough, though, QuikQuak's Crowd Chamber 2 can create up to 60 duplicates to turn almost anything into a roaring crowd. That plugin's addition of separate LFOs for each of the duplicates also lets it create complex chorus effects, if you have the time to configure the hundreds of parameters involved.