- Fabfilter saturn pc vst how to#
- Fabfilter saturn pc vst full#
- Fabfilter saturn pc vst pro#
- Fabfilter saturn pc vst series#
- Fabfilter saturn pc vst mac#
Saturn 1 included a brilliant preset called Magic Mastering, which always made me think 'surely this is cheating?', and the equivalent in Saturn 2 is even better. The other per-band controls (Level, Mix, Drive, Dynamics, Feedback and feedback Frequency) are unchanged. As before, each band can have its own type of saturation, and the already comprehensive list in version 1 has been extended further in Saturn 2, with no fewer than 28 different 'styles' now available. All Saturn processing can now operate at up to 32x oversampling. What has changed is that you can now have up to six frequency bands, and there's now a choice of crossover slopes, with an option to make these linear-phase. That fundamental architecture hasn't changed, and it still takes some experience to figure out, for example, that the most effective way of brightening up a source might be to apply a Presence lift on the mid band rather than boosting the high band. For example, if you operate Saturn in two-band mode with a crossover at 2kHz and crank up the Presence control on the low band, most of the additional harmonics that are created will be well above 2kHz. Labelled Bass, Mid, Treble and Presence, these are similar to the tone controls on a guitar amplifier, and mean that applying saturation to an individual band often generates audio content outside its bandwidth. Each band, however, also has its own set of four frequency or Tone sliders, arranged in a similar banded way. Like quite a few other saturation plug‑ins, it can operate in single-band mode or it can divide the incoming audio into two or more frequency ranges, and apply different processing to each. Both the envelope followers and the envelope generators have also been improved, with the addition of curved elements to the former and transient detection to the latter.Īnother potential source of confusion with Saturn is its 'nested' multiband architecture.
Fabfilter saturn pc vst full#
For example, the minimal visualisation of the envelope follower provides a very clear idea of the basic shape that is being derived from incoming signals, and clicking on it expands it to show the full control set. The modulators themselves have received a welcome visual makeover, which simultaneously declutters the interface and presents more information in a more useful fashion. The controls themselves don't move, but any offset introduced by macros or modulators is overlaid and clearly visible. Saturn 2 makes the whole business much more user-friendly not only is the process of connecting sources to destinations now much clearer, but any modulation that takes place is represented using animations in the main window. One of the things that made Saturn 1 less than intuitive was that there was no real visual indication of the effect of these modulators - an LFO might be furiously wibbling something backwards and forwards, but the control that was being wibbled would remain serenely static. Dragging from these onto controls in the main area sets up modulation or macro control, and it's easy to, for instance, assign a single slider to control multiple parameters. Initially blank, this can be populated by macro controllers such as X‑Y pads and sliders, and modulation sources such as LFOs and envelope followers. Sat TestsĪs before, controls that affect the sound directly are housed in the main central area of the interface, and there's an additional section at the bottom. It's backwards-compatible with Saturn 1 and includes all the original presets, but existing projects that used Saturn 1 will continue to load the earlier version.
Fabfilter saturn pc vst pro#
The basic layout is not too dissimilar from the original, but the graphics have been greatly refined and, as with the Pro plug‑ins, there's a choice of window sizes.
Fabfilter saturn pc vst mac#
Like all the FabFilter plug‑ins, Saturn 2 is available in all major Mac and Windows native plug‑in formats, and is authorised using a simple licence key. With the new Saturn 2, then, FabFilter have wisely chosen to focus on making its power more accessible. And although the original Saturn distortion plug‑in is equally powerful and flexible, 'intuitive' isn't the first word you'd reach for to describe the experience of using it.
Fabfilter saturn pc vst how to#
Timeless, for example, is a great delay effect, but although it's lived in my plug‑in folder for a decade or more, I still have only the vaguest idea of how to program it. However, the FabFilter catalogue also includes older plug‑ins that weren't designed along the same elegant lines. Products like the Pro‑Q3 equaliser, Pro‑C2 compressor and Pro‑MB multiband dynamics processor are used by almost every engineer featured in our 'Inside Track' series, and have inspired homages from rival developers.
Fabfilter saturn pc vst series#
There's rather more to FabFilter's redesigned multiband saturator than a slicker GUI.įabFilter's Pro series of plug‑ins is, arguably, the benchmark for current user interface design.