Newfangled Audio Articulate Plug-In—A Mix Real-World Review

New York, NY (September 24, 2025)—If you’ve ever wished to be able to use a synthesizer-styled ADSR on previously recorded audio tracks, now you can. Newfangled Audio’s recently introduced Articulate plug-in shapes your vocal and instrument tracks’ envelopes in ways that even transient designers can’t, providing independent control over their attack, decay, sustain and release (room tone) stages—what Newfangled calls Smack, Punch, Body and Air, respectively.

A MOMENT IN TIME

If ADSRs are alien to you, think of Articulate as a processor that splits the signal into time bands rather than frequency bands. (The plug-in does not use a transient detector.) The four bands overlap somewhat but are roughly centered at 0 ms, 10 ms, 250 ms, and 500 ms and longer.

Each processing stage/time band is independently controlled by a corresponding “channel” fader, which you can adjust to provide up to 12 dB of gain or as much as -∞ cut (muted). You can also mute, solo or bypass (turn off) each channel using switches; in the latter two states, the envelope stage’s audio signal is passed through at 0 dB (producing no processing).

That’s a quite useful construct: Soloing lets you identify, in isolation, what slice of your audio track’s envelope will be processed before you start messing with it, whereas toggling a channel on and off lets you A/B its wet and dry signals in combination with the other three (processed or dry) channels.

A Separation slider in the UI’s bottom-center area controls the speed of the transitions between ADSR channels, analogous in a way to how a slope control works in a filter bank. Moving the slider fully to the left (Smooth setting) avoids pumping but can introduce considerable bleed between channels—even to the point where the fourth and final stage (release) might pass attack transients treated in the first stage. When the slider is moved fully to the right (Focused setting), there is no bleed between channels, but there could be pumping artifacts introduced. Use your ears to find the optimal setting; as you’ll soon see, the most artifact-free is not always the best!

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When the Sidechain button in the UI’s bottom-left area is activated, Articulate reacts to audio signals routed in your DAW to the plug-in’s sidechain input, but the ADSR channel settings get applied instead to the track on which Articulate is instantiated. For example, say you want to duck the attack of your bass guitar track every time a kick drum hit occurs. Simply instantiate Articulate on the bass guitar track, route the kick drum to Articulate’s sidechain input and lower the plug-in’s Attack fader. The bass guitar’s attack will duck in level only when a kick drum hit occurs.

When you activate the Limiter button (bottom-right area of the UI), a combination of clipping and limiting—similar to that used by Newfangled’s Saturate and Invigorate plug-ins— is applied at the plug-in’s output. Unfortunately, there is no threshold control; the limiter is basically an insurance policy against digital “overs.” But you can always follow Articulate with a full-featured limiter plug-in if you want to slam and destroy.

METER READER

The vertical, high-resolution, left- and right-channel I/O meters simultaneously show peak, RMS and peak-hold levels, with corresponding numeric readouts. Click and drag the I/O readouts to adjust input and output levels for the plug-in. To hear the delta signal (the output of the plug-in minus the input signal), click on the triangle (Δ) icon. A Mix control lets you blend the wet and dry signals to the degree you wish, facilitating parallel processing.

In the navigation bar at the top of the plugin are controls that enable sequential prompts of undo or redo, toggling between A and B workspaces, and recalling both factory and previously saved user presets (all organized according to their suggested instrument or vocal applications and individually tag-able as favorites). You can even add your name and website URL to custom presets you’ve created and share them online, thereby directing your followers on social media to your website.

In one of the Settings menus, you can hide certain elements in the UI to simplify its look. The GUI’s size is also fully adjustable. Hovering your mouse over a control reveals helpful tips on how to use it.

AMAZING!

Using Articulate on a variety of tracks, I could create sounds ranging from the outrageous to the sublime.

On a hard-rock production’s top-miked snare drum, cranking the plug-in’s Attack, Sustain and Release faders and lowering the Decay fader— with the Limiter button activated—transformed the track from an okay acoustic backbeat to an aggressive hammer (see Fig. 1).

The cranked Attack fader sharpened the stick strikes, while 12 dB each of added sustain and release boosted the sizzle, as if the drum was also bottom-miked, and increased the room reverberation four-fold. I initially set the Separation slider to 72% for the song’s barebones drum intro to avoid excess pumping, but once the electric guitars and bass kicked in on a driving vamp, I floored the slider to make the snare pump like it was having an anxiety attack. To say the track was transformed would be a severe understatement.

Using similar settings on room mics for trap drums gave me the best of all worlds. By plunging the Decay fader all the way, I could separate the hyper-accentuated kick and snare hits from the extended room ambience, creating a sonic hole in the middle that let the close-miked traps dominate in my mix. Setting the Separation slider to 58% produced just enough pumping for the room mics that they didn’t overwhelm and blur the manic snare drum track.

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On electric bass guitar, boosting the Attack and Sustain faders produced results similar to using a transient designer, accentuating pick strikes and extending note durations. Also, cranking the Decay slider made the bass fuller and rounder in a way that would be difficult or impossible to achieve with a transient designer or EQ. Nose-diving the Release fader tightened up the steady stream of eighth-notes played. The overall result was a punchy and round sound, yet tight.

For an oneiric ballad, I instantiated Articulate on an aux track following a reverb plug-in with a 3.6-second RT60, to which the lead vocal was routed via a send. I muted Articulate’s Attack and Decay channels, boosted the Sustain fader 5.7 dB and cranked the Release fader to the max. The final touch, adjusting the Separation slider to 78%, created a fascinating, pulsing reverb that defies precise description—sort of like a reverse reverb with a super-long predelay, but with a faster ramp-up and stronger peaks. Strangely beautiful as it was, I challenge the uninformed listener to figure out how that sound was created.

These are but a few examples of the sounds you can create with Articulate. And especially considering it sells for only $69, every mix engineer should own this extraordinary plug-in.