Breathe new life into your plugins with FX Permutator

Left to right: Kyle Vande Slunt, Roel Sanchez, and Dave Benjamin

Hello, all. To start off, please tell us a little about yourselves and your role in developing FX Permutator.

Roel Sanchez: Hi I’m Roel, Technical Audio Director at Tech Audio. Tech Audio is a collective of tech-minded people from our parent company Team Audio. As a group, our years of working in sound and interactive audio have inevitably led to creating tools and applications. FX Permutator is the first release of the projects we have in the works. During development, I designed and programmed some of the core features, along with wrangling the team.

Kyle Vande Slunt: My name is Kyle and I’m the Sound Supervisor at Team Audio. I was responsible for the initial concept of FX Permutator and provided feature support and testing throughout development.

Dave Benjamin: Hi! I’m Dave, and I’m an Audio Programmer at Tech Audio. I write code for FX Permutator.

 
Could you give a quick overview of FX Permutator and its capabilities? What makes it unique?

RS: FX Permutator does many things but can probably be best described as a plugin exploration station. Its core functionality is to randomize a collection of your plugins along with the parameters and presets within those plugins. The secret sauce is the combination of all of these actions working together to create a unique output processing chain. Many of the operations found in FX Permutator can be found as one-off scripts in the Reaper universe but we wanted to create something more cohesive and fun to use.

DB: It lets you rapidly generate variations of an audio recording using random combinations of your FX plugins. You can build collections of your favorite FX using a friendly user interface, and it will build random chains of FX from a given collection with random presets and parameters. The generated FX chains can be surprisingly interesting and unusual.

KVS: It’s unique because you’re able to create processing chains that you never would have thought to make manually by yourself and do so very quickly. It can very quickly and reliably generate a never-ending supply of DSP chains. You can create custom collections of plugins and then use the tool to specify how you want your FX Chains to be created.

New tracks and FX chains are generated with FX Permutator

As Tech Audio’s first plugin, how did the idea for FX Permutator begin?

RS: FX Permutator came from the brainchild of Kyle and started as a collection of different Reaper scripts performing some of the actions within the final build.

KVS: It began as an idea I had in 2017. I was diving deep into the world of coding with ReaScript and beginning to understand the power of combining code with Reaper. I started writing scripts that would either force-multiply workflows or boost creativity. As an amateur coder, I was able to write a very rough outline that barely worked.

In 2018, I partnered with my engineer buddy Aaron Hathaway who I met while working together at Riot Games. He and I spent countless hours putting together another version of the script that actually worked but was really only useful for me, and not at all equipped for a release to the masses.

Then, when Team Audio launched Tech Audio in 2021, I pitched FX Perm for our first release. Once Dave and Roel started working on it, FX Permutator became the fully-featured and professional tool it is today. They captured the original idea and then added so many things to it that it turned into something that was above and beyond what I ever envisioned.

DB: When I came onto the project, it worked roughly the same as it does today, but it didn’t have a user interface, so you had to edit the script with a text editor to list the FX plugins you wanted. This made it relatively tedious to use, because you had to be familiar with editing code, and you had to carefully spell out the names of FX plugins. I thought that it could be useful to a lot more people if it had a user interface (and I was looking for a project to learn more about Reaper programming) so I started writing one. Then Roel jumped on board, and we’ve been steadily evolving it.

Demos of FX Permutator

 
What are some use cases where you see FX Permutator being quite helpful?

KVS: I’ve found success with all different kinds of situations. I primarily use it to explore the sonic possibilities with my custom field recordings. One-shot impacts can yield wild, out-of-control reverb trails, and more constant Foley recordings can turn into crazy textures. It’s also great for coming up with unique VO processing chains for sci-fi / fantasy / horror characters.

You will find that there is going to be a processing chain that will fit well with any source material. One area that I haven’t experimented nearly enough with is live performance. I think there is a ton of potential in generating a bunch of chains and then feeding live VO or live instrument performance or Foley performance into one or multiple tracks at the same time. Definitely need to start doing that.

You can throw in those plugins that have been collecting dust into a collection and see if you can find some sound design hidden gold.

RS: Exploration and source creation. FX Permutator is all about noodling around and stumbling onto crazy FX chain combinations. For creating interesting sound design textures, I’ll generally start with a simple high-quality source recording, then run FX Permutator using various plugin collections. You can throw in those plugins that have been collecting dust into a collection and see if you can find some sound design hidden gold. You never know what you’re going to get.

DB: It’s also a great way to learn what FX you have on your system, and what they can do together. I find that it’s easy to accumulate a lot of FX plugins and have only a limited awareness of their potential.

Did FX Permutator go through any iterations before it was ready to release? If so, what were some of the features added later in the process?

RS: There was a lot of tweaking to land the overall feel and workflow. We wanted to strike a balance, making it simple to use while also providing a lot of functionality and interesting ways to experiment. There was a point where the UI was just a collection of a bunch of operations. This later formed into the Tools tab, which stores many useful operations to change up parameters and save your effects chains.

KVS: Yeah, we iterated and tested heavily throughout production. We spent a lot of time focusing on the visual experience and the overall workflow in the tool. We wanted to create something that was easy to use, very clean visually, and did not feel cluttered. Dave also helped us identify problematic areas of our color choices, names of the features, and overall user experience.

 
What challenges did you face when developing FX Permutator?

KVS: I’ll let the actual developers answer that question.

It can be fun to work in such a green-field environment, and sometimes it leads to more creativity.

DB: Building user interfaces in Reaper is a challenge right now because the ecosystem is not very mature. One frequently needs to build user interface components from scratch, solving problems that were already solved in the 80s and 90s on most platforms. It can be fun to work in such a green-field environment, and sometimes it leads to more creativity, but it can also be a drag compared to mature platforms with rich component libraries.

Another challenge is the chaotic nature of plugins. Each plugin is a different piece of software that works in its own way, and plugins aren’t always designed with the type of usage we have in mind. Sometimes, plugins can crash and take Reaper down with them. Not all plugins have presets, or publish their presets in a way that Reaper can see them. There are no perfect solutions, but we continue to try to find ways to make the experience better.

RS: Yeah, if you use FX Permutator and load up 15 instances of an already problematic plugin, things will probably not go well. We have instructions in our documentation to help with this, but it’s definitely something to be aware of.

It was also a bummer to find out that Reaper doesn’t expose many of the built-in presets that come with your plugins. To help you get the most out of FX Permutator, you can visit our preset repository and download our growing collection of presets for free. We also want to encourage people to also contribute to the repo.

 
Are you looking for feedback from users? If so, how can users reach out to you?

RS: Absolutely, we are always looking to improve and make things better. Best place to contact us is at TechAud.io.

KVS: Yes, absolutely! We would love to hear from users about what they like and what they don’t. We would also love to hear any ideas people might have for how to make the tool better and more powerful.

 
Is Tech Audio looking to develop other plugins?

RS: You bet. We are actively discussing our future plans. We have ideas for upgrading FX Permutator along with additional new creative design tools and workflow improvements for audio developers of all stripes. We are also paying attention to the audio community, so if anyone reading this has ideas or requests, don’t be shy.

DB: Yes, that’s definitely true for me. I am interested in exploring what else can be done to extend Reaper with new interfaces, as well as building FX plugins themselves.

KVS: YES! We’re not sure what it will be just yet, but there are several ideas floating around that we’re very excited about.

 
Do you have any advice for other audio folks who are interested in developing Reaper Scripts?

RS: Go for it. There is a lot you can do but make sure you search around, there might already be something that does exactly what you want. While Reaper is super flexible, its API certainly has limitations depending on what you want to do, and you might end up just wanting the entire source code.

KVS: Get your hands dirty and just do it. When I first started looking at ReaScript, I had zero coding experience. I started grinding every night learning Python and studying the ReaScript API.

Start with something super small, like a script that will count up all of your selected items and display the number of items. That was my first script: count the number of items I have selected and display the count, length, and name of the shortest and longest files. It was super simple and was only like 10 lines of code. Once you’re able to do that, you can build up from there. The amount of online resources to help guide you are vast and continue to grow.

 
Finally, how can people purchase FX Permutator and see it in action? Is there a trial version?

RS: Visit TechAud.io to download and pick up a license. FX Permutator is available at a reduced price for launch. You can also get the FX Permutator directly from ReaPack. We don’t have a trial but if enough people want one we can make one.

A big thanks to Kyle Vande Slunt, Dave Benjamin, and Roel Sanchez for giving us a look at FX Permutator – and to Adriane Kuzminski for the interview!

To learn more about FX Permutator and Tech Audio, visit their website at techaud.io, check out their demos on SoundCloud, and follow them on Twitter at @techaud_io. You can also learn more about Team Audio by visiting teamaud.io and following them on Twitter.