“Try this on drums, and you'll end up with something similar to a classic gated drum kit. Eat your heart out, Phil Collins!”: Our go-to plugins for adding flavour to sounds

Plugins.

PLUGIN WEEK 2025: Ever since the fateful day that a guitarist turned up their amp just a little too much and discovered distortion, musicians and producers have been obsessed with applying colour, shape and degradation to an audio signal.

While this was a classic case of a ‘happy accident’, the resulting sound was gritty and crunchy - and the forerunner to the packaged distortion that we get today, in either pedal or plugin form.