Plumper

Controls

Chorus

The classic chorus layer. Turn it up for more pitch movement and density, with up to eight modulated delay voices. At 0 there is no pitch modulation.

Ensemble

Adds thickness with multiple slightly offset voices that drift independently in timing and tuning. Low settings feel like a little extra body; higher settings build a denser, more layered sound.

Space

Adds a clean stereo amp field: two speakers moving against each other with a small room around them. It can add width and dimension even with Chorus at 0.

Motion

Sets how much the wet field moves. It animates whatever Chorus, Ensemble and Space have created, but does not generate a wet signal on its own.

Mix

Equal-power dry/wet. One quirk worth knowing: at 100% wet, the output is silent if Chorus, Ensemble and Space are all at 0. With no wet layer active, there is simply no wet signal to hear.

Bypass

The amber lamp in the header is the plugin bypass. It is linked to the host's bypass control, so both switches stay in sync.

How it behaves

Plumper separates a few jobs that are usually tied together in a chorus. Chorus handles the obvious pitch movement, Ensemble fills out the body, and Space adds stereo dimension. That means you can dial in width without much chorusing, add thickness without making the image wander, or push the whole thing into a more lush, moving wash.

Motion works on the wet field that is already there. At 0, the effect stays more still; turn it up and the layers breathe and shift without turning into an obvious auto-pan.

The dry center stays put, and the low end is kept steady, so heavier settings can get rich without the source losing its footing. Loudness is handled internally, so turning up the effect makes it fuller rather than simply louder. There is no output control.

Peaks are a different matter. Any chorus adds delayed copies of the signal to itself, and those copies line up now and then into peaks taller than anything in the source. Plumper is no exception: the loudness stays put, but the peaks grow, by a few dB at the default setting and more with everything turned up. On a dense, heavily distorted source that can push the output above 0 dBFS. That is normal and harmless inside the mixer, which works in floating point - use the channel fader if you need the level back.

Plumper supports mono to mono, mono to stereo and stereo to stereo. On a mono track the processing still works, but naturally you lose the stereo width that Space and the wider chorus field are designed to create.

Space is the most sensitive layer when the plugin output is summed to mono. Its width lives in the difference between the left and right channels, so that part can thin out in a mono fold. The dry center remains intact, while Chorus and Ensemble hold up considerably better.

Plumper adds no latency and reports none to the host. Bypass crossfades rather than switching hard, so tails and modulation stay continuous and A/B moves stay click-free.

Features

• Layered stereo chorus architecture.
• Separate Chorus, Ensemble, Space and Motion controls.
• Dry/wet Mix control.
• Eight chorus voices.
• Up to eight independently drifting Ensemble layers.
• Moving two-speaker Space field.
• Chorus-free width and dimension with Chorus set to zero.
• Stable stereo center during modulation.
• Protected low-frequency focus.
• Click-free bypass.
• Zero-sample latency.
• Mono->mono, mono->stereo and stereo->stereo operation.
• VST3 for Windows, macOS and Linux.
• Audio Unit for macOS.
• Native Apple Silicon and Intel support on macOS.

Installing

VST3 (Windows)

copy Plumper.vst3 to C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\

VST3 (Linux)

copy Plumper.vst3 to ~/.vst3/

AU (macOS)

copy Plumper.component to /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/

Your host may need a plug-in rescan, or a restart, before it appears. Plumper is listed under the Modulation category.