Today I’m going to be giving you an introduction to the iZotope Iris 2 plug-in. It is one of the most unique and interesting VSTs that I’ve come across in a really long time.

I’m using it for composing, but I could definitely see if you’re a mix engineer or a music producer, you could use it to create unique textures or just general sampling. It’s really versatile.

Okay, so I’ve got Iris 2 loaded as an insert on this instrument track here, and although it comes with a bunch of really great sounds and samples within it, I’m going to go ahead and go to my desktop and just drag in this violin sample right into the iZotope Iris 2 interface.

Okay. Now immediately, it is laid out chromatically, and I could play notes on this MIDI keyboard here.

[violin plays]

What it’ll do is it will play the entire sample that you load in. I don’t want that, so what I’m going to do is just select a loop here. Let’s play that.

[violin plays]

As you notice, when I hold down the MIDI note, it starts, goes to the end of the selection, and then returns backwards. That is a setting here. You can set it so that it just goes forwards and then loops.

[violin]

You could do the opposite and just have it go backwards and loop.

[violin playing]

For this, I really like the unique sound of having the violin go forwards, and then backwards.

[violin playback]

Great. So okay, within Iris, we have some really awesome effects, including delay and reverb. Let’s hear that.

[playing violin with delay and reverb]

They’re high quality. We also have a filter.

[violin with filter]

Resonance…

[adjusting resonance]

A lot of fun to play with. One of those things that you could spend an hour just messing with sounds if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing and what you’re going for.

Fortunately, I knew what I had to do. Let’s go ahead and take a listen to all of the strings that I created in Iris in context.

[strings play]

Let’s go ahead and record a little bit.

Awesome. So there as you see, we have MIDI notes created, and then I could go to grid mode, as you can probably hear, that first note was a little bit off. Edit this to be right on time.

[strings playback]

From there you can do so much. You can edit these modulation parameters, you can have it pan, you can load in multiple samples… It really does seem sort of limitless.

So if you guys have any questions or you’d like to hear some more tutorials involving music composition or anything at all, my name is Ian Vargo and I am with The Pro Audio Files. Thank you!