New Music Gear Monday: Phil Speiser THE_INSTRUMENT Virtual Instrument Plugin

Many musicians, especially ones that are more educated, tend to look down on music creation apps and plugins that automatically play chord patterns and rhythms. While it’s nice to have massive chops, most players don’t have that level of ability. Not only that, not everyone has keyboard skills, and even if you do, it’s easy to get stuck during songwriting. Those are just some of the reasons why it helps to have a music creation tool at hand, and a very cool one to check out is producer Phil Speiser’s THE_INSTRUMENT.

THE_INSTRUMENT is a really a composition tool, with hundreds of chord, rhythm, bass line and melody presets that allow you to turn single notes into the correct scales, so you’ll never hit wrong notes again. Then you can either use the 100 onboard royalty-free instrument sounds or export as a MIDI file to trigger other synths or virtual instruments.

The tool uses a smart music theory algorithm that figures all this out for you, plus if you use multiple instances of the plugin on a song, they all recognize the key that the first one you used so you don’t have to constantly readjust.

Tonal Adjustments

There’s also plenty of room to manipulate the onboard sounds. There’s a traditional ADSR generator with a display, a panel to change the filter settings, and onboard reverb and delay. There’s also a tonal section with Drown and Stab controls, as well as Locut, Air, Gain and Pan controls.

What’s also intriguing is THE_SHAPER section which provides a sidechain effect complete with Intensity, Attack, and release controls, coupled with a display.

While THE_INSTRUMENT lends itself to EDM production, it can be used on any genre of music and any type of music production. It will work on all music software that can can host VST3 or AU plugins, which includes Ableton Live, FL Studio. Logic, Garage Band, Cubase, Reaper and many more. Both Windows and Mac systems are supported, and the plugin has M1 (native Apple Silicon ARM CPU) support. That said, it still has not been ported to the AAX format for Protools.

THE_INSTRUMENT is available at an introductory price of $99. You can find out more information here.

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