Indian composer, musician, record producer and multi-instrumentalist Allahrakka Rahman’s 2025 Wonderment Tour travelled across the globe, including shows in Hyderabad, Pune, and Mumbai. Each of the performances used Fourier Audio’s transform.engine, a VST3 plugin host server that lets live sound engineers run VST3 plugins with extremely low latency.
The transform.engine was utilised by both FOH engineer Riyasdeen Riyan and monitor engineer Mark Thomas, who were also pairing it with Fourier’s transform.suite ’25 software bundle on their respective DiGiCo Quantum338 consoles.
Thomas said that he and Riyan, initially discovered the transform.engine online, via social media. “We heard about it and then secured a demo unit before we went on tour,” he recalled. “We were looking for a way to transition from Waves to a third-party platform, which would support third-party plugins and beyond. The transform.engine fit the bill perfectly. And now, over the course of the entire tour, both of us have completely adopted it into our workflows. It was that transformative.”
Riyan said that he’s had a lot of success using many plugins through the transform.engine—including Oeksound Soothe Live, LiquidSonics’ Seventh Heaven and Cinematic Rooms bundles, Gullfoss Live, and SoundToys’ Crystallizer and EchoBoy—but its big advantage for him has been in the workflow department, and specifically for achieving a studio-level of sonic quality for that processing. “We can replicate live whatever effects that we are using in studio,” he said. “Whomever the artists are that we are working with, including ARR, they are mostly from the studio world, and now we can replicate whatever they used in their original sessions, easily and reliably.”
Riyan says this extends granularly to each plugin’s various parameters—“the kind and tempo of delay, the kind of effects, or the robotic vocals, or the harmonies… everything”—that allows them to recreate the studio experience onstage.
Thomas, who is also using a DMI-KLANG immersive IEM mixing system card on the shows, is applying the transform.engine primarily for his Valhalla and LiquidSonics reverb plugins, as well as the Oeksound Soothe Live dynamic resonance suppressor, which is part of the transform.suite ’25 bundle that he inserts on his console’s mix bus.
“The transform.suite ’25 software is our primary plugin bundle that we’re using on the tour right now,” he said. But the main aspect of the transform.engine for him is in the workflow. “The major change that has happened is that the sonic quality I previously wanted with using these plugins depended upon using a server,” he explains. “With the transform.engine, I can load up exactly the plugins that I need and have the flexibility of using them with time-code synchronization—so virtually zero latency.”
That’s critical for ARR’s complex shows, he said, due to the large number and frequency of the snapshots needed. “We have a lot of changes in the plugins’ parameters, which the transform.engine handles very well,” he commented. “And the coordination of the plugin host within the video environment allows us to tweak settings on the fly without going into a third-party screen. So the workflow is quite very fast and flexible, compared to most other plugin workflows that we’ve previously used. It really is transformative.”
