New Music Gear Monday: AudioThing Megaphone Simulation Plugin
One of the cool things about plugins is that there’s something for almost every situation, regardless of how seldom that situation might come up. We may only need a particular sound once or twice every few years, but there’s usually an easy solution for it in the box. One of those situations is when you need to convert a straight vocal sound into one that sounds like it’s using a bullhorn or megaphone. Sure, you can play with band-limiting the vocal and adding some distortion, but it’s a lot easier to just use AudioThing’s Megaphone plugin.
Lots Of Control
Megaphone is dedicated to emulating an electrically amplified megaphone. In essence, it features two loudspeaker emulations (Mode I and Mode II), feedback control (slapback echo), a noise section, and a master section.
The Main section of the plugin allows you to select between the different speaker modes, control the Bandwidth, and set the amount of Drive. The Feedback section has Time and Amount parameters to control the slapback echo effect.
It’s All In The Noise
The Noise section is clever because that’s where most of the megaphone emulation sound really comes from. There are two different noises that can be enabled by the Trigger button. The Button noise is the noise made when clicking on a megaphone’s button to enable its microphone. The Burst is the typical background noise that comes from the megaphone’s loudspeaker. The Source control allows you to adjust the balance between both. If the Envelope is enabled, the Burst noise will follow the transients of the input signal. Finally, there’s an overall noise Level control.
The final section is the Master, which controls the Input, Output, and provides a Mix control to balance with the dry input sound. There’s also a Limiter to keep it all under control.
You may be thinking, “This is cool, but am I ever going to use this?” Fair point, but Megaphone only carries a $9 introductory price right now (usually $19). Plus, you may come up with a few new uses for it that you never thought of.
You can find out more here, or watch the video below.
