EDITORS NOTE: Since this article was written Kilohearts' pricing structure has been reworked, and Snap Heap is no longer a free plugin.

If you’re new to Kilohearts stuff, or maybe even if you’ve known us for a while, it’s possible you’ve not yet discovered the power of our free plugin, Snap Heap. So we thought we’d write this blog to enlighten you. Prepare to be enlightened.

Ready?

Then let the enlightening begin!

Snap Heap is a Snapin Host. Snapin Hosts are the factories of the Kilohearts Ecosystem where all our effects plugins can be used as building blocks to create all manner of audio processing chimeras. The other Snapin Hosts are Phase Plant (a modular synth) and Multipass (a modular multiband effects builder).

Snap Heap allows you to combine your Kilohearts effects as Snapins in lanes that can be serial (affecting the signal one after the other) or parallel (affecting two copies of the signal at the same time). Most parameters can then be modulated in a few different ways. You can even modulate the modulations. Nice.

There is an infinity of possible combinations but, just for one example, you could have a Compressor on the first lane to tame your dynamics a bit, the second and third lanes could run in parallel with one clean and the other adding some Phase Distortion and Flanger to blend in. After all that you could have another serial lane with a tasty Filter, then a dash of Reverb and 3-Band EQ to taste.

But don’t stop there. We haven't added any modulation yet! Hook a beat-synched LFO up to some Phase Distortion and Flanger controls for movement. And let’s get really fancy and create an envelope from the incoming signal to control the drive and tone so the louder the signal is the more it breaks up…

Ah, what the hell, let's link that envelope to the Filter too and get funky.

Et viola! We’ve got a dynamic distortion and auto-wah effect! Kinda like this:

Groovy. And that was just one quickly cobbled together idea. Just think of all the possible ways you could combine your Snapins to make new and unique effects.

So far, so cool… but there’s more.

Just like our other Snapin Hosts there’s more than meets the eye to Snap Heap.

One really important thing to know is that any Snap Heap presets you can get hold of, either factory or third-party, will be fully functional whether you own all the Snapins used or not. All the effects will work as they should and you’ll be able to tweak the macros, just not any of the parameters for effects you don’t have licenses for.

So even if you just own Snap Heap and nothing else, you already have over 100 unique effects in the factory bank alone. That’s incredible value for… how much was it again? Oh yeah. Zero moneys.

Another super sweet function that we touched on earlier is the ability to use an input as a modulator. You can follow the amplitude or the pitch of the direct signal or a sidechain signal from elsewhere. You can also use MIDI to control things. All of these options allow you to really play Snap Heap in interesting, dynamic, and expressive ways.

Anything else?

Well, we could go on and on and on about this super useful plugin but we’ll leave you with just one more nugget of knowledge.

Snap Heap can be loaded in any other host as a Snapin. This means that whatever wild effects you’ve built for your guitar can be saved as a preset and loaded into Phase Plant to be applied to a synth lead instead, or whacked into Multipass to only affect a specific frequency band. You could also... and this is getting really deep… put Snap Heap inside Snap Heap and then put another Snap Heap inside that. Just for fun really, rather than any practical reasons.

What will you create?