AudioThing Noises €69

Ever felt inspired by background hums and whirrs? Award-winning soundsmith Hainbach has made a plugin that takes them further...

There's a degree of creative carnage bound up with any piece of equipment that feels like it belongs to a bygone age, and that's the spirit of Noises, the new creation from AudioThing, in collaboration with an electronic artist Hainbach.

What's that Noise?

Noises is an audio instrument; that's right, we said instrument! There have been many previous plugins that apply noise to a clean signal. These may include tape noise, saturation distortion, or even the sound of the needle on the record. But Noises is different, as it offers far more than a simple audio effect.

When you open the plugin for the first time, it looks beautiful! Some of us are suckers for anything that looks vintage, and this GUI is simple and characterful. The pseudo-illuminated central dial operates in conjunction with the eight buttons that form a row below. The noises themselves are samples, stored in banks of eight. They can then be switched on or off, by directly pressing the buttons in the lower row. With each press of a button, another notch appears on the large dial above, meaning that as you sweep from the left of the dial to the right, you hear each sample in turn, but with a degree of blending from one noise to the next, a little bit like a wavetable synthesiser.

Unlike a synthesiser, you cannot play the notes on a keyboard, in any conventional way. You do have control of the pitch, but this is accessed directly via the Pitch pot, which is found within the performance section of the plugin.