I’ve been using it on my background vocal bus not only for a bit of grittiness, but also to quickly EQ the highs and lows so they sit underneath the leads. In its day, it was used on many early Motown hits, and now you can add it to your DAW for some classic analog dirt.Ī colleague of mine uses it on anything he thinks sounds ‘boring’ - interpret that as you will. The original Altec 1567A hardware was a five-input tube mixer with removable transformers, a simple two-knob EQ, and a massive 97 dB of gain.īy digital’s standards, the sound it made was colored and gritty, with a huge portion of old fashioned hardware noise (which you can toggle on/off in the plugin it’s noisy!). Radiator is a dual-drive tube input channel and EQ, based on the Altec 1567A tube mixer from the ’60s. SEE MORE: Soundtoys Decapitator | Grade A Saturation.Then they narrowed down the pieces of gear they felt had the most distinctive sound and had unique character when used both subtly and at extremes.įinally, Soundtoys took their 5 favorite hardware pieces and packaged them up in Decapitator. In creating Decapitator, Soundtoys collected and analyzed vintage and modern hardware - consoles, preamps, input channels, EQs, compressors, and studio distortion units.
You can do anything from giving an instrument a bit of analog character to ‘punishing’ the signal with extreme distortion. That’s because it gives mixers a lot of control in an easy-to-use plugin.
This is because the plugin is squashing those really loud transient peaks while adding fullness to the overall signal. But if you check your peak values, they can be quieter than they were without saturation. You’ll most definitely hear what appears to be an increase in overall level. Grab your favorite saturation plugin, load it up, and turn up the drive. It can actually control peak levels on something like, say, a snare drum - a loud instrument with really aggressive transients. One of the less obvious things saturation does is it allows us to increase the perceived loudness of a sound. Best Saturation Plugins: What do they do?