Layering your sounds is the fastest way to inject some depth and sonic interest in your music.
Traditionally, adding texture layers to your audio, can take quite a lot of finessing and manipulating, to make them sound good.
Devious Machines’ Texture plugin is the perfect effect to add texture and depth to any incoming audio source.
An incredibly versatile plugin, that adds textures and grooves to your source audio. Perfect for sound design. An absolute must-have for people who like interesting textures.
- Excellent tool for beefing up and enhancing all kinds of tracks.
- Incredibly good for sound design
- Minimal learning curve.
- Sounds great when used sparingly, as well as generously
- Liven up the dullest of sounds.
- Particularly good on beats and basses.
- Pretty much nothing
Contents
What Is Texture?
At it’s core, Texture is an effects unit, that has the heart of a synth.
With version 1.5 bringing a lot of necessary features to Texture, this plugin is better than ever. Texture analyzes the level of the audio you feed into it, and then generates a new sound which matches the dynamics of your source.
Texture can be used to layer sounds with your original signal or create entirely new sounds that match the volume envelope and rhythm of your source signal.
Pros
✅ Excellent tool for beefing up and enhancing all kinds of tracks.
✅ Incredibly good for sound design
✅ Minimal learning curve.
✅ Sounds great when used sparingly, as well as generously
✅ Liven up the dullest of sounds.
✅ Particularly good on beats and basses.
Cons
❌ Pretty much nothing
User Interface
This plugin is seperated into four main windows that include the Preset and Menu bar, Source panel, Central panel, and Output panel.
The Preset and Menu bar allows you to save presets and access any of Texture’s 340+ stock presets.
The Source panel will enable you to manipulate Texture’s internal sound generator. This includes the texture source, different parameters like pitch, octave, colour and density. There’s also a sweepable bandpass filter with an adjustable center frequency and bandwidth.
The Output panel is where you’ll find your Gain, Mix and Master volume.
Central Panel
The Central Panel is where you’ll be spending most of your time.
Here you’ll be able to cycle between a Sample tab, Dynamics tab, Modulation tab, Texture EQ tab, and Original EQ tab. The Modulation, Texture EQ, and Original EQ can all be toggled on/off with a power button.
Sample tab
The sample tab is a welcome addition to the newer versions of the plugin.
It allows you to use your own samples as textures, to create custom textures and presets of your own.
You can play back your custom textures using four different sample modes:
- Trigger
- Loop
- Random
- Granular
Trigger will play your textures based on the audio input.
Loop will cycle your sample continuously, based on where you’ve placed the sample’s loop brackets.
Random plays back random grains from the source signal, and Granular uses granular synthesis to affect your custom texture.
Dynamics tab
The Dynamics tab allows you to control how Texture responds to audio fed into the device.
Audio running through Texture triggers an envelope that tracks the level of your input signal. This envelope can be controlled with the Attack, Hold, Decay, Gate, and Limit knobs.
The Dynamics tab also contains a sidechain section that allows you to make Texture respond to a filtered sidechain input.
Modulation tab
The Modulation tab consists of an LFO and an envelope modulation section.
The LFO allows you to use sine, triangle, square, saw+, and saw- waveforms, as well as control both the speed and phase of the LFO.
With the selected LFO, you can control the pitch, color, and filter cutoff frequency of your wet signal.
For even more modulation possibilities, you also have an envelope section
This envelope also enables you to control the pitch, colour, and filter cutoff frequency of your wet signal, based on the shape of your envelope.
Texture EQ and Original EQ
Both the Texture EQ and Original EQ are simple 5-band equalizers.
Each band allows you to choose between a low pass, low pass 24dB, high pass, high pass 24dB, notch, peaking, low shelf, and high shelf filter.
While perhaps not the most advanced EQs out there, they’re more than enough to sculpt your signal to your liking.
Texture in use
Texture is the perfect effect for sound design.
You can add a “vintage” flavor to sounds with vinyl crackle, tape hiss and digital noise – add depth with percussive reverb tails for rhythmic source material or, use as a subharmonic synth for heavyweight bass sound design.
Where we had the most fun was with more complex sounds though. We’re big fans of ‘found sound’ rhythm beds.
A hard beat, with subtle clicks crackles and noises going on all around that beat is something we really love.
And, if you do too this plugin works fantastically in creating those sound beds.
Load some organic layers including foley crowd noise and other foley sounds as your texture sample. Then use any existing audio cues, to create an entirely new, and unique atmosphere to fill out your tracks with charismatic chaos.
How Does It Sound?
Describing how the Devious Machines Texture plugin sounds is a difficult task, since it can do many different things. It can be just as much an effect that adds some hi-hat rhythms to your bass, or one that turns your drums into chords.
The versatility and the range of possible sounds are immense.
Our favourite thing to do with Texture is selecting a chordal sample in granular mode on top of a drum loop. This creates a unique melodic effect, that follows the rhythm of your drums.
Preset Examples
Here are some examples of our favorite factory presets, that ship with Texture. They’ve all been used on the same drum loop so you can hear what’s going on.
Texture’ Features
- Over 340 sampled, granular and generative sound sources onboard
- Import samples and play back in granular, loop
- Advanced envelope with attack, hold and decay controls
- Dual filter, to quickly shape your chosen texture
- Independent EQ sections for the wet and dry signal paths
- Source-specific synthesis controls include colour, pitch, density and octave
- Modulate a Texture’s controls and filter cutoff using LFO and envelope signals
- Tweak the response to the source signal with the sidechain filter
- Squash the Texture sound using limiting and make-up gain
- Global control of Texture level, Mix and Master level
- Intuitive user interface, for fast results
Finishing Up
An incredibly versatile plugin, that adds textures and grooves to your source audio. Perfect for sound design. An absolute must-have for people who like interesting textures.
- Excellent tool for beefing up and enhancing all kinds of tracks.
- Incredibly good for sound design
- Minimal learning curve.
- Sounds great when used sparingly, as well as generously
- Liven up the dullest of sounds.
- Particularly good on beats and basses.
- Pretty much nothing
Devious Machines Texture is perfect for any producer as it supplements texture to any existing audio signal. The plugin allows you to add groove and texture to your samples quickly & easily. It’s perfect for anyone looking to create weird and interesting sound design.
Toms is a music producer & DJ, born and raised in Post Soviet Latvia. Currently based in Brighton, Toms has had over 6 years of experience with all things production and in that time, he’s done a tonne of cool stuff! He’s played multiple festivals, had experience in the field with mixing & mastering and even become a freelance journalist in the music industry.
Toms currently creates music under the alias Sovereign. Producing music that’s intimate and subtle, while full of edge and energy, the young producer combines the artistic sounds of Trip Hop artists like Massive Attack, with the energy and youthfulness of producers like Flume, Jamie XX and Yaeji. You can check his stuff on Soundcloud.
