Recording and Mix Engineer Skyler Gibbons Turns to Polyverse Plug-ins for Cutting Edge Sounds

Tampa, Florida, July 5, 2022 - ​ When Skyler Gibbons began learning recording engineering, ​ he had no particular aspirations of making a career out of it. “In high school all my friends wanted to record their freestyles, so I decided that I’d figure out how to do that,” he says. “I got pretty good with the DAW and decided to keep leveling up from there.” A series of internships helped him hone his skills and build his reputation, and today he and his partners are ready to open Grand Bay studios, a 7,000-square-foot three-room complex in Tampa. Through it all, Skyler stays hungry for new ways to deliver the hottest sounds for his clients, most of whom work in the hip-hop or pop music paradigms. “I try to keep it fresh for myself with the tools that I use, which also helps keep my mental health strong,” he says. This hunger for new ideas led him to discover Polyverse plug-ins, which have since become a fixture of his mixes and have helped him deliver cutting edge sounds.

Staying fresh
​Gibbons has long made a point of taking some of his favorite plug-ins and using them in unconventional ways to achieve new effects that distinguish his work from the pack. “It’s always been a thing for me to look for new ways of using the plug-ins I have,” he says. “Something might say the plugin is for drums, but I might throw it on vocals. You never know what might work.” Even so, he finds that he needs brand new tools periodically to spark creativity. “Even if you’re experimenting a lot you can hit a wall of using the same stuff again and again, so sometimes I’ll just strip down everything I’ve been using and start over with all new stuff,” he says. “That’s how I found Polyverse.”

Once Gibbons began exploring Polyverse’s plug-in offerings, he quickly recognized their power and flexibility. “The Polyverse plug-ins are so deep that I don’t know if you ever know everything they can do.” The Manipulator granular pitch and formant shifting plug-in is one such example, immediately finding a home in Gibbons’s mixes for the ever-present pitch-bent vocal sounds. “I use it with so many pop vocals because it’s perfect for a whole bunch of processed vocal sounds,” he says. “It’s also great for hip-hop, because they always want that deep voice in the background and it gives you the perfect version of that.” For Gibbons, Manipulator’s performance separates it from other plug-ins on the market. “It’s the ease of use and the sound quality for me,” he says. “A lot of times with sound manipulation you can get a lot of artifacts and other stuff you don’t want, but I don’t get that with Manipulator. Even when I’m messing with the formant a lot the sound stays really smooth and clear.” Gibbons points out the ubiquity of the kinds of processing Manipulator achieves, making it a must-have. “Every genre is using these kinds of effects now, so you’ve got to have something like Manipulator in your DAW,” he says. “I’m waiting to hear a country song with the chopped and screwed background vocals!”

Inspiring creativity
​Another tool in Gibbons’s production arsenal is Polyverse’s Gatekeeper volume manipulation and gating plug-in. “Gatekeeper is super cool,” he says. “I don’t even know how to describe it, it’s totally unique.” Gibbons finds himself turning to Gatekeeper to create unexpected rhythmic patterns from already-recorded material, sometimes as a jumping off point for new arrangement ideas. “I’ve been using it to create bridges in songs,” he says. “I might throw it on the melody or even the whole track and let it chop it up in one of the preset patterns, and then I might have the artist sing over that and just see what happens.” The on-the-fly experimentation Gatekeeper opens up is valuable for Gibbons and his artists. “A lot of artists don’t understand how creative they can be on the spot,” he says. “Gatekeeper might inspire them to do something crazy, and whether that becomes the part or just gets stuck on the end as an outro, it can change the whole dynamic of the record, and who knows what might come out of that?”

Deep space
​Gibbons has found plenty of uses for another creativity-inspiring Polyverse tool: the Comet reverb plug-in. “Comet is crazy,” he says, “I love that plugin. It’s perfect for vocal throws.” He describes using it to draw attention to key lines in a song. “I found a setting that I really like for when I want to create that larger than life throw, maybe for a certain line in a song that I want everyone to notice. It’s that little bit of sauce.” Comet’s highly malleable controls allow Gibbons to tweak the size and character of the reverb to his liking. “I really like how far you can throw it and how big you can make the reverb,” he says. “A lot of times with other plug-ins when you make a really big reverb it doesn’t translate how I want it to in the track, but with Comet it’s no problem.” Larger-than-life reverbs provide a way for Gibbons to add character to sparse mixes. “With hip-hop, especially some of the harder stuff out of Detroit, there’s a lot of space, so I can pull up Comet and be like ‘alright, let’s get weird’,” he explains. “Some of these vocal throws I create with Comet are more like what you might hear in an EDM song, but it works somehow.”

With the new studio ready to open, a long client list that includes recent Warner Brothers signee Taleban Dooda, and mixes that will be distributed in places like the next. “We will 100% have the Polyverse bundle on all the machines at the studio,” Gibbons says. “My partners love this stuff, too.” Both Gibbons and his studio partners remain eager to see what else Polyverse has coming down the pipeline. “I think what I love most about Polyverse is that you can tell they get inspiration from the EDM world with the Infected Mushroom connection and all, and EDM has some of the best production and the widest variety of sounds in my opinion,” he explains. “But then Polyverse brings those sounds to their plug-ins and makes them versatile enough to work in any genre. So I can take all those great sounds and apply them to what I do.”

The Polyverse Summer Sale continues until July 11 with up to 30% off all plug-ins. Please visit polyversemusic.com

About Polyverse
​Polyverse Music is a “by musicians, for musicians” company that creates uniquely powerful tools and instruments for artists on the cutting edge of creativity. Founded in 2015, Polyverse has continually set the bar in terms of plugin innovation, vision, and user experience. Every person on the Polyverse team is a forward-thinking musician with extensive knowledge and experience with music, sound, synthesizers, and technology. In each new step, Polyverse continues to push the boundary of possibilities with digital musical instruments and effects.