So I Finally Bought Air Flavor Pro...

I still don't really know how I feel

What’s up Forum,

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been excited about the Flex Beat Player release for MPC.

While yet to be released for Force I was almost tempted to purchase this thing. (I have a TON of presets from a sister plugin called MRhythmizer that I was planning on converting)

However, I decidd that for now I’d get better usage out of a tone shaping/colorization plugin than I would a time-based plugin.

So I dove in and bought the Air Flavor Pro..

and after 24 hours.

I still have mixed reviews.

Kind of…

Pros

1. The User Interface is quite beautiful actually,

   Especially when loaded up on the Force. I can appreciate the plugins in this category keeping some consistency across the workflow.
   

2. This sounds great on samples and other multi-instrumentation. Most of my experience with plugins like this is applying them to instruments individually. I tried that approach with Flavor Pro and was dissatisfied with the results, however, after slapping this on some sample material I was quite impressed.

   Most of the presets sound amazing when used this way. I’ve found that stacking these with the most recently released Air Vintage Filter and Air Chorus is really giving me the sample-making power that the computer affords.

   

   The Recently Released Air Vintage Filter and Air Chorus FX

3. It’s massively easy to use,

   You don’t necessarily have to know what you’re doing or know the signal flow, just start turning some big knobs and you can start adjusting the sound quickly.

CONS/Dislikes

1. The Vinyl emulation is good, BUT on the presets it. doesn’t sound like vinyl. The tone-shaping knob helps some

   

   But all in all, there’s a certain ‘ear candy’ element missing from the vinyl section.
   
   Until you start messing with it.
   
   I’ve found turning the rate up to 100% turning everything else down, and gradually increasing the values until it sounds real.

   

   

   Minus a bit of hum and rumble these are the settings that I’ve grown to love with vinyl..VERY subtle.

   With a bit of tweaking this can sound a lot like vinyl. But when I busted this straight out of the pack, I had to turn the noise down ASAP.

   I think I’ve found this typical of the presets on the entire suite of creative FX from AirMusicTech.
   
   They don’t highlight accurately how great the plugin can sound. however, I always remind myself that aren’t designed to ‘show’ they are designed to ‘do’

2. Some of the timbre shapers are resonant (speaker models), which makes the vinyl sound like it’s in a small reverb and out of phase.

   
   I’m instantly NOT a fan of the resonant sound. so immediately you’ve gotta turn the width down to reduce the phase issues caused by the resonant timbre setting.
   
   I think this is a casual oversight OR an effort to avoid copying someone else’s IP.
   
   either way, I experimented with adjusting the timbre with Flavor first in the signal chain and followed it up with an instance of Flavor Pro.
   
   This was a game-changer.
   
   the vinyl sound on top of the resonance sounds better and ultimately makes this plugin useful on single instruments.

3. Using this on single instruments is unlike other familiar plugins.

   
   Flavor Pro is joining a group of great-sounding multi-FX tone shapers, some of which need very little adjusting from preset to preset.
   

   

   
   So What exactly is its competitive advantage?
   
   Plugins like Retrocolor or RC-20 use very subtle distortion or IR modeling where the sound is useable on single instrument sources.
   
   essentially this makes these plugins almost an instant ‘sound goodizer’ and creating vintage-sounding samples by running different instruments through varied signal flows of these plugins is incredibly inspiring.
   
   If I were to compare this to other plugins on the market I’d compare it to Waves Retro-Fi and MAYBE Izotpe Vinyl.
   
   you need a bit of sound design to create samples instrument by instrument.. which is…. eh.. part of the process I guess 🤷🏾‍♂️

CONCLUSION

I think having something like Flavor Pro on a standalone device is amazing. The ability to create samples with a plugin chain that adds the subtle harmonics and pitch fluctuations associated with tape and hardware is like a dream come true.

I think there should be a few more timbre-adjusting tones BUT it’s probably more necessary to add some re-arranging functionality first. The ability to customize the signal flow would drastically change the output of the plugin.

So in closing, it sounds good, great, not so great, great.. just depending on what you feed through it.. it’s not a fix-all plugin..

BUT it does deliver on its promise..

and that is a bit of nostalgia..

LMK what you think in the comments section.