Review: I Wish – Pitch Freezer Plugin by Infected Mushroom

Infected Mushroom “I Wish” Review

The Infected Mushroom’s “I Wish” pitch freezer plugin is clearly something you don’t get to see every day. Basically, it’s a granular sampler audio plugin that you use with audio tracks… so you can, in fact, kinda freeze audio and basically make, let’s say, a lead vocal track, a completely new instrument, so, let’s check it out.

Overview.

“I Wish” is the first plugin released by Infected Mushroom, award-winning Israeli psytrance/electronica/psychedelic duo. This is in fact, a very pretty straightforward instrument, but, the beauty of it, resides in what kind of audio are you feeding into it, so, results, are actually very random and most of the time surprising in a good way, of course.

So, basically, you’ve got a track, let’s say, a vocal track, you insert the plugin, nothing at all happens, why? …because you’ll need a MIDI track that outputs to the plugin, now, every time you trigger a MIDI note, the plugin will take a very tiny -granular- sample of the incoming audio, and freeze it, and that’s how the action gets going!

The thing is, every time you re-trigger the plugin, it takes a new sample. So, it can get very random! Also, the lower the note you trigger is, the longer the sampled loop will be, so, you’ll need to consider this too.

You’ll find two big knobs, one for ‘Pitch’ and one for ‘Formant’, and you can change both pitch and format of the incoming audio in values of semitones up or down, up to 24 semitones, that’s two octaves. You can also link together pitch and formant knobs, so, when you change values in one, it will be reflected on the other.

Next, there’s a crossfader for the sampled loop itself and basically, what this does, is the greater the x-fade, the smoother will sound, at small values, it will definitely sound very grungy.

Next, there’s a modulation section, consisting of one LFO and one ENV. Both can modulate pitch and/or formant. LFO can be also synced to tempo, and can also be re-triggered by note. It can go pretty up into audio range and also a fade-in can be applied to it. Waveforms for the LFO are Sine, Triangle, Saw, Square, Random, and Slew, which is a Random wave shape with softened edges. Both the LFO and the ENV can modulate in either positive or negative values. The ENV it’s not your standard ADSR, it’s Delay, Curve, and Decay values.

There’s a second ENV for the AMP, and this is more like an ADSR envelope, in which you can’t change the sustain level, just the attack and the release times. But, in a plugin like this, it’s very useful! There’s also a Wet/Dry knob for blending the plugin as an effect.

Finally, you’ll find two extra knobs for glide and delay, the Pitch Wheel bending range, up to +/- 24 semitones, and the playing mode, which can be set either to Mono or Poly -up to 32 voices- and in Mono mode, it can also play legato, and here, the glide knob comes very handily!

Conclusions.

I love when plugins are that straight forward but yet, that powerful. I mean, with this, you can do almost vocoder style things, use it as an effect in just some bits of audio, or you can go actually mad and have a big random pad playing out of a vocal track. So, to me, the most important thing is the audio you are feeding into the plugin, and by that I mean, you should definitely try almost everything! This is great stuff and the randomness of it makes it beautiful to use as an instrument, but also, to try some freezing effects in your vocals or drums or whatever.

So, to me, the most important thing is the audio you are feeding into the plugin, and by that I mean, you should definitely try almost everything! This is great stuff and the randomness of it makes it beautiful to use as an instrument, but also, to try some freezing effects in your vocals or drums or whatever.

This thing works wonderful, and I guess it’s worthy to have it in your plugin arsenal for those moments when you wanna experiment and try to create something new and unique!

Infected Mushroom “I Wish” is available in VST, AU, AAX plug-in formats, this means you can use it on both Windows and MAC OS music-based programs. Priced at $99, I Wish can be bought directly from our site.

More Details: I Wish