Bedroom Producers Blog

This thing is excellent. I've tried dozens of gate sequencers (triggergates, trancegates etc), both paid and free, and this thing probably has the best combination of power, flexibility and ease of use I've ever seen. It has a mix knob (believe it or not, some don't!), a full ADSR (some have just AR), the ability to set the number of steps from 1 to 32 (many just have a small number of options, like 4, 8, 16 - many just have 16 by default with no option for anything else), the ability to set the number of pulses from 1 to 32 (number of pulses has to be lower than number of steps), and also a reset count that can be set from anything between 1 and 1,024, which is completely amazing. With the wide options available for step count, pulse count, and reset count, you can make some very intricate patterns, anything from really short to really really long (all the way up to 16 bars with a sixteenth note pattern, or even 32 bars if you set the step count to 32!). Use all of these things together, and set the wet / dry and attack / release values to something pretty subtle, and you could put this on a chord / pad track that would evolve subtly throughout essentially an entire track. Brilliant. You can also set the step duration to be a dotted value (16th dot, 8th dot etc), which is a pretty cool feature. Just be sure to set the reset count to a multiple of 3 (12, 24, 48 etc) if you want the pattern to regularly recur in a "normal" sounding way.

Suggestions for improvement would be:

Allow the user to set the strength / depth of pulses individually. This is something that many (probably even most) free gates already allow, so I'm not sure why they opted not to allow this. It would makes it more "fiddly" to use for the average user, but if you had to access this feature by deselecting the default, you could maintain ease of use for average users while still unleashing greater power for more advanced users.

Allow the user to select where in the sequence each individual pulse occurs. The pulse dial is great, and super easy to use, but it would be nice to be able to dive deeper. Again, you can still leave the current behavior as the default and allow advanced users to go further.

Overall, just awesome. I've been using Gatekeeper for years and it's my go-to for rhythmic gates, but with how easy and flexible HY-ESG is, I could see this supplanting Gatekeeper as my go-to for rhythmic gates.

Excellent! Five stars.

Fantasic plugin- I paid for Baby Audios Super VHS but this is easily just as good, if not better because more tweakable parameters. Also a beautiful GUI that evokes old blank VHS tape packages from the 80s/early 90s. Another great freebie from BPB.

Really like BPB plugins, and this one sounds pretty nice, but WAY too much CPU use. I'm getting over 40% usage on an empty FL project. Will keep an eye for updates that improve performance.

Edit: BPB made a new version, see below. In addition to the new version if you are still having trouble, open the options of the Fruity Wrapper, go to troubleshooting tab, and select Use Fixed Buffer Size.

Thank you to BPB for the quick fix and troubleshooting info.

Truely an improvement and succeeded enhancement of it's already quite popular predecessor V1.0. It includes now a complete set of elements for the 909, 808 etc, a nice graphical Interface, which allows any kind of tweakings you need and sounds even better in quality of sound than before.

If you owned the old BPB Cassette V1.0, it's really worth the effort, in exchanging it with this newer V1.1, since the developers really did a great job here. (Best plugin from BPB in my opinion) The outcome is: 5 stars out of 5 for this masterpiece.

Fantastic device. I would DEFO pay for a pro version of this with more features. Also would be amazing to have this updated. Great idea, real innovation. HY plugins do good stuff.

This plugin is a great good for mixing and mastering to mixdowns master mix buss glue on the multitracks elements in the stereo master out buss for dynamic glue enhancements, I love this plugin results.

If you use it, check the highs even without bitcrusher added you will get some nasty and harsh artifacts.

I do not like idea to combine spring reverb with bit crusher. It's best to keep them in separate plugins. Spring reverb is just very basic one - use it if you do not have anything better but bit crusher is actually quite usable for current lo fi music craze.

There are better free spring reverb plugins, and yes there are better bit crushers too. Both parts of plugin do something but not much while crusher doing more then spring reverb. I think crusher is included to encourage people to distort not very good spring reverb.

If you are not perfectionist you will use it, everything fits into current EDM and if mix quality is bad you can call it lo fi. Overall it's just average quality we see in free plugins, nothing you have to download.