5 Things You Never Knew Weaponiser Could Do For You

Weaponiser allows you to transform your sound design with limitless flexibility. Matthew Collings, our Head of Product, demonstrates 5 super useful tips in Weaponiser that are guaranteed to fuel your creativity!

1. Quick, user-friendly sound variations

Weaponiser’s unique design offers almost unlimited variation of your SFX patches.

This sound design plugin allows you to import up to 5 audio files per bank, and with 4 banks per engine, that’s up to 20 audio files per engine. Using all of the plugin’s 4 engines gives you up to 80 audio files per patch!

Even only loading 5 audio files into the first bank of each of the Onset, Body, Thump and Tail engines can provide 625 possible variations, and this doesn’t even include any variation applied to speed, volume or synth layers!

This workflow is phenomenally powerful for producing assets for game audio, for variations of SFX for your own library, or to ensure the same exact sound is never heard within a post-production session.

See and hear this is action in the ‘Beast Calling’ preset from Mattia Cellotto’s ‘Plethora’ Weaponiser sound library.

2. Tighten up your sound design with Sidechained Gating

Did you know that Weaponiser’s FX rack contains a gate, which contains a sidechain feature? This can be triggered from the amplitude level of any other engine within Weaponiser.

Try using this effect to easily add layers of texture to your designs, by importing long, unedited recordings, or experiment with source files from your library! This can be a quick way to tighten up your designs without having to manipulate multiple envelopes in multiple engines, or edit audio files, or even select specific regions in Weaponiser’s banks.

Try using a burst from a weapon recording or a pass-by to introduce other layers of sounds when they hit a certain threshold. Coupled with the variation options Weaponiser already offers, you can have countless powerful sounds in no time, all driven from a single source file.

3. Tail mode

This magic switch just underneath the Fire button takes Burst mode to the next level.

Tail mode sets the tail engine to trigger on mouse up (when using the fire button), or note off (when using MIDI) when in burst mode. Use it to keep the mix clean by only triggering a tail at the end of a burst, add a reload to the end of a burst automatically, or for non-weapon designs the possibilities are endless!

4. Multi-channel output

Weaponiser can output dedicated stereo channels from each of its 4 engines, as well as the master output.

This opens up the opportunity to sync with other synths or hardware, to process any layer independently with your favourite plugins or plugin chains, or render out the layers of your designs ready for mixing or further processing. You can also render out variations as layers using this same technique!

This is a very easy process to set up, and can save huge amounts of time by rendering all layers at once, offering the most flexible sound design workflow.

5. Go Granular

We are always discovering new uses for Weaponiser!

When putting together our new SoundMorph Intervention Sound Effects Library, we realized we could take the library to the next level by cutting bursts from these weapons into single rounds, and firing them using Burst Mode. This took some work, but produces a more realistic and very powerful way of handling burst weapons. It shows how you can use burst mode and tiny edited grains of audio for realistic weapons or much more. If you have your own weapon recordings, we recommend exploring this approach to gain even more flexibility from Weaponiser’s functionality.