Summary | |
A unique mega-chorus effect for creating crowd roars, chattering aliens, whispering ghosts, and thick pads with lots of movement.Pros:
Cons:
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Scores | |
| Features: | Good
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| User Interface: | Good
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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: | October 1, 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. | |
Crowd Chamber 2 Review
The spacious rush and roar of a stadium crowd blends together the sounds of thousands of simultaneous yells. Differences in the pitch and timing of those yells creates a complex wash of sound with lots of movement. QuickQuak's unique Crowd Chamber 2 effect plugin takes on the ambitious task of recreating this stadium crowd sound but all from the comfort of your own DAW.
Exploring the user interface
Like all of QuikQuak's plugins, Crowd Chamber 2 includes a well-designed user interface that conveys a lot of information quickly. The plugin's window is dominated by a large plot showing a field filled with little people icons representing the many individual voices in the plugin's simulated crowd. Selecting an icon makes it the current individual to edit using the knobs to the right of the plot. The selected icon's little person even looks up and waves at you as it awaits your instructions. Cute. And a little creepy.
Controlling individuals in the crowd
To create a crowd roar, each of the plugin's individual voices duplicates the plugin's incoming audio and shifts it a bit in frequency, time, pan position, and volume. Frequency shifting pushes the tuning up or down and you can modulate the shift using a dedicated LFO. Note that this is frequency shifting and not pitch shifting. So, if you push the shift too far, the harmonic structure gets skewed and the sound becomes metallic.
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| Knobs at the right control the selected individual and vary their frequency shift, time delay, pan position, and volume. |
Time shifting uses a short delay and you can modulate this too with its own LFO. Just like a chorus effect, modulating the delay creates cyclic variations in timing and pitch.
Both LFOs used for this time and frequency shifting are per individual, so every member of the crowd can be modulated differently to create sounds with a lot of movement.
You can use the knobs to edit an individual, or you can drag the individual's icon about within the plot. In the plot's default configuration, dragging an icon left and right adjusts its pan position, while dragging it up and down shifts its frequency. The plot also can be reconfigured to show the individual time shifts instead of pan position or frequency shift.
Controlling the crowd
Controls at the bottom of the plugin's user interface adjust the size of the crowd and the wet/dry mix. The crowd's size can range from just one individual to as many as 60. While you can edit each individual one at a time, QuikQuak thankfully provides a randomize feature to quickly create an initial layout.
The global effect controls push everybody up or down in frequency or spread everyone out in time. With a wider time spread, delays lengthen and the crowd roar builds and fades out slower to avoid the artificial feel of a TV laugh track that starts and stops abruptly. Globally shifting the frequency up for all individuals can turn a cheering adult crowd into cheering children. Shifting the frequency down instead creates rather sinister monster cheers.
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| Knobs at the bottom control the whole crowd to set the crowd size, wet/dry mix, and overall time spread and frequency shift. A randomize feature automatically creates an initial layout of individuals. |
Getting good results
The plugin comes with a good selection of presets to create crowd roars and all sorts of weird effects. The believability of the result has a lot to do with the audio you feed in to the plugin. Audio clips of cheers and clapping work particularly well when paired with presets like "Stadium Chant" and "Gated Layer". An audio clip with just a few hand claps and yells immediate turns in to a vast cheering crowd.
Beyond crowds, other effects are possible too. The "Ghost Maker" preset turns almost anything into spooky whispering ghosts. To do it, the preset gives all of the crowd's individuals dramatic frequency shifts up and down, plus a lot of slow modulation. The "Mental Breakage" preset gives everything a springy metallic sound with just two individuals in the crowd, frequency shifted up and down and given wide delay and frequency modulation. The "New Species 2" preset creates chattering aliens with a lot of delay time modulation, and the lush "Ocean Deep" preset turns almost any input into ocean waves by using 60 individuals with severe frequency and delay time modulation.
While roaring crowds, whispering ghosts, and chattering aliens are all quite fun, the plugin also has more pedestrian uses. At its heart, it is a duplicator and chorus effect, and you can use it as such. Lining up the crowd on a centered horizontal line pans them side to side with no frequency shift. Adding slow delay time modulation to each individual creates a huge chorus effect. Spreading out the individuals with a little frequency shift up and down creates a large detuning effect. Combining both effects turns even the weakest synth sound into a lush pad.
The plugin can't work magic on everything. Predictably, audio inputs that include drum loops and melodic riffs don't work so well. The plugin's crowd replicates those sounds and shifts them all over to create a giant smeared mess.
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| A wide chorus effect. | A detuning effect. |
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| A ghostly rising frequency shift. | A panning shifting swirl. |
Using the plugin
The plugin is unique and interesting. The plugin's CPU load is understandably high. The more individuals you add to the plugin's crowd, the more audio processing the plugin must do and the more it uses the CPU.
There are a few bugs. I tested the plugin as an Audio Units plugin on a Mac in Logic 9, MainStage 2, GarageBand '09, and Live 7, and even in Apple's AU Lab test tool for plugin developers. I also tested it as a VST plugin on a Mac and a PC using Live 7, Reaper 3, and Tracktion 3. On the Mac, the plugin worked perfectly during sustained use with multiple instances and when loading and saving the entire project. But in each case it crashed the DAW at least once, but not every time, when I tried to load one of its own presets saved earlier to a .fxb file. On the PC, it crashed Live 7 almost immediately, wouldn't draw its user interface window in Tracktion 3, and crashed Reaper 3 when I closed the track's FX window. Whatever bugs are involved, they are intermittent. Sometimes the plugin works fine, and sometimes not.
Conclusions
Let's score the plugin.
- Features: good
- Crowd Chamber 2 has a unique and effective approach for creating mega-chorus effects that replicate the roar of a crowd, or create strange other-worldly sounds.
- User interface: good
- The plot showing the size and distribution of the crowd's individuals is a useful guide to editing parameters. The remainder of the user interface is well laid out and easily used.
- Sound: good
- From a few claps and yells, the plugin creates a vast cheering crowd. From any simple synth tone, the plugin creates a rich detuned and chorused pad.
- Value: fair
- The current price is 15 pounds, or about $23 US dollars. Pretty reasonable.
- Overall: good
- QuikQuak's Crowd Chamber 2 is a fun unusual effect. While you may never need to create the roar of a crowd, the plugin's rich chorusing and detuning abilities can be useful for thickening up weak pads or adding movement to just about anything.