For overall distortion duties and sound-design, though, this plug-in is highly recommended. The only effects we struggled to find are sterile and sharp digital distortions, which can be needed for certain sounds in harder electronic styles of music.
It certainly makes mixing an easy task as well. No matter what type of distortion you go for with Saturn, it always maintains a creamy and ‘produced’ sound, which in most cases is desirable. In fact, throughout our tests on live and electronic-sounding drums, bass, melodic parts and vocals, we managed to create plenty of either musically suitable enhancements to sounds or use the more extreme settings of Rectify or Destroy as special effects, automating them to move from their cleaner settings through to complete break-up in the signal. We managed to get some very wide sounds working on the side information with medium distortion and then using the Presence dial to raise the high end of the wide signal – great for leads, vocals and drum hits. The mid/side processing is good for raising just one or the other or adding more harmonic information to them. These are controlled via an inner and outer dial on the Drive control, so you can pan a distorted band to one side and have the dry signal panned to the other for stereo width, which sounds nice and retro with the hard-panning approach. In terms of the stereo behaviour of Saturn, you can flick the entire plug-in’s operation between left and right stereo processing or mid/side.
Each instance can modulate two different aspects of Saturn, so there’s no shortage of options here.Īs usual, although you have plenty of possibilities, a few well-chosen options will give better results than going overboard and creating a confusing sound – unless, of course, that is your intention. These can be XY pads, envelope followers, LFOs, envelope generators and MIDI sources. You can add numerous instances of modulation sources, maxing out at 30. The same drag-and-drop modulation assignments are ported from previous FabFilter plug-ins, and this has always been our preferred way of setting up modulation – it’s more intuitive than dropdown menus and the complementary RSI that comes with them…
#Fabfilter saturn distortion mod#
If you’re into using distortion as a means of creating new sounds rather than enhancing existing ones, Saturn’s mod options will be most welcome. You can also use this with negative values, which we found helped in getting some lovely, cabinet-like voicing by rolling off the top end. A three-band EQ enables you to shape the band, while a Presence dial adds some air.
A Dynamics control enables you to determine how squashed the dynamics are, so it’s easy to shape the sound as you want.įor more obvious distortion effects there are more extreme options, including hot-sounding tubes and tape, rectified and guitar amp tones to name just a few.Įach band has a Dynamics dial, distortion type, Drive, Pan and Feedback options, the last of which is good for howl-round effects. We managed to get some nice, round and fat drum tones from single hits and loops using these modes. Each band can have individual distortion types assigned to them, starting with the subtle, flattering and dynamic shaping offered by modes such as Clean Tape and Clean Tube.