Your First Time...

I was just getting some chuckles from reading this thread at KvR, wherein it is determined that the first third-party commercial VST plugin was Prosoniq’s NorthPole. (Which, incidentally, is still freely available but good luck using it on a modern Mac. The PC version still works fine, a fact I verified myself in Cubase 4 and Live 7 on a Vista machine.) NorthPole, along with the first of what would become many MDA plugins (RingMod), and two classics from Dave Brown (ProComp and ProDelay) were all released the day the VST SDK was released, 8/27/98.

An inherent appreciation for InterCaps aside, that was two months shy of ten years ago. On the one hand, when you compare these old plugins to what is currently available, there are light years of difference between them; one of the knobs on an AD product probably has more code in it than the entirety of NorthPole. On the other hand, you can see how these early products informed all future plugins. NorthPole may not be sophisticated, especially when you compare it to something like Dr. Device, which is a direct descendent, but damn if it doesn’t sound pretty good, and it’s not like you have to figure out how to use it or anything. (You do, however, need to go find that old BPM->Delay Time chart you haven’t needed for about 6 years.)

The interesting thing to note here is that the ProSoniq folks didn’t have any competition when they released this plug. They just thought “hey, wouldn’t a filter/distortion/delay effect be cool to make?” They had to actually invent a market where none existed before, and in doing so, essentially created the baseline effect that all companies end up releasing. It seems like virtually all plug-in companies have a filter/distortion/delay combination plugin of some sort, and that combination is definitely the Happy Place for plug-ins that have no hardware equivalent.

I was a (militant) Logic user in 1998, and Logic didn’t develop VST support until the following year. The first plugin I bought was D-Pole, another filter/distortion/delay that is still available to purchase, and completely current as VST2.4/AU/UB. While this market is relatively young compared to, say, guitars, it still has its standards, and an accepted methodology for doing things, which I think is somewhat interesting to note. Now that Audio Damage has an entire line of effects, we’re going to do some truly whacky shit, and maybe, if we’re lucky and imaginative, we can come up with a new baseline (unlikely) or something groundbreaking (more likely) that will inspire the next ten years of development, and some guy in 2018 will be writing in whatever blogs have become about that Audio Damage effect he bought in 2008.

A boy can dream.