EastWest has designed an ADT (Automatic or Artificial Double Tracking), a system allowing you to artificially double a track, designed by Ken Townsend at Abbey Road. EW has done a great job on it: Delay, Depth, and Speed emulate the original while Level sets the relative level of the added signal. Only issue, Delay and Depth can’t be automated, Especially Depth, since it produces clicks when modified while you play.

However, you should be careful when you set ADT and Stereo, otherwise you may create serious stereo phase issues...

Finally, there’s an impulse reverb with 35 impulse responses including plates (EMT), Hall, Studio, Chamber, Church, etc. Seeing that the quality is very good, it would have been nice to have more than one and only one parameter (Level). But I imagine it would have resulted in a more demanding effect, while this is relatively light on the CPU.

It’s time for some details about the presets. EW has implemented keyswitches, allowing you to jump from an articulation to another by sending a MIDI note (in real time or via a sequence). An articulation is a sound variation, a playing technique, noises, etc. of the same instrument. Play recognizes when you are playing legato and immediately selects legato samples, but be careful, because the plug is not monophonic: if two notes overlap, they are both heard, because one does not cancel the other out. The suffix Mod refers to a sound modification that can be done via the Mod Wheel (adding distortion samples, switching between slow and fast strumming, level of release samples, etc.). When there’s a DXF in a preset name, it means that the Mod Wheel is used to fade between several layers. RR indicates Round Robin: different samples of the same note will be triggered each time this note is played repeatedly (which avoids the “machine-gun” effect).

On the down side, commands are fixed and there’s no MIDI learn. The only way to automate Play is to use the host’s automation and there’s only a few parameters available. But there are also parameters which aren’t on the plugin interface, such as different filter topologies. Another shortcoming is that the circular knobs are imprecise, making it difficult to get to the extreme settings. Fortunately, the mod wheel can be used as a modifier for all parameters and allows access to any value.