Ableton Forum

Do you find Live's Saturator plug ok, or found another outstanding 3rd party plug?

When do you use satuaration?

Looking for a bit of guidance.

Thanks

I like Live's Saturator on vocals, but for more mainstream non-guitar related distortion I go to D16's Devastor. For guitars I stick with Guitar Rig 4.

Live's saturator's one of my favourite effects... Dig a bit in the waveshaping parameters and you can get great, controllable saturation to total overdrive/distortion...

Thanks Russ.

I was thinking more in the synth bass and drums area for adding colour, a bit of presence.
Also drums.(Don't use vocals much)

It's something I have not used much, and just wondered where others were using it.

Yeah, often use it on a synth bassline to add character/make it more aggressive...

+1 for D16 plugins.
Also redline preamp plugin is nice too.

Variety of Sounds Ferric TDS was voted KVR's plugin of the year 2009. There's also a channelstrip called Nasty VCS which has a nice saturation device at the input. They're both worth to check...

try Absynth 5's waveshaper,sounds good also.

or URS saturation

or Wavearts tube saturator

or PSP Vintagewarmer

as to when,depends on the material in the rest of the mix for me.sometimes it works,sometimes it doesn't.

esky wrote:Variety of Sounds Ferric TDS was voted KVR's plugin of the year 2009. There's also a channelstrip called Nasty VCS which has a nice saturation device at the input. They're both worth to check...

+1

Don't miss Bootsy's stuff, if you are on the Windows plattform.

C.

Yea I really like abletons saturator, adds some nice punch and a bit of distortion to basses, synths etc... I have never really used a 3rd party plugin for distortion because I like lives so much. As already said, the waveshaping section on the effect can give you some really nice results. Spend an hour or so digging into this if you haven't already.

I would like to try some distortion vsts, just to see the difference. In fact gona do that right now.

Magneto which came bundled with Cubase SX2 and 3 (and is still available as a legacy plugin) is still my favourite by far (you can run it in other hosts as it was licensed from Houpert Digital so long as you have a syncrosoft dongle).

After this, Nebula3 has some great saturation plugins, and Variety Of Sounds Ferric and Jeroen Breebart's Ferox are both very good freeware.

D16's plugins are excellent too.

Live's Saturator for some reason, doesn't quite do it for me ...

TAL Tube is nice too.
D16 +1
Softube Trident A has nice sturation
Overdriving the inputs of the Soundtoys Filter units can be nice too

Soundtoys decapitator - WOW (but CPU beast, I find it more useful for processing group channels / mastering).

More mac ideas are also appreciated

Thanks a heap guys.

I'll start off playing around with Live's saturator and then check out some of the others mentioned.

I have heard good things about Nasty VCS. I'll give it a go.

Oh, I did forget to mention, I am on pc.

Anyone using Overdrive? I've had great results with using Logic's Overdrive and am trying to do the same in Ableton - haven't quite got it tweaked correctly yet - just a touch is the way to go. Logic's Overdrive gives it a nice warm boost and you can take some top end off. Was reading an article with the producer Paul Epworth (Bloc Party and many more) and it seems he does the same:

Recently I've got into sticking overdrive plug-ins on everything, because I think — well, that's what tape does, isn't it? Even if you're recording to tape just as a format, it adds even-order distortion to it, and I've managed to start getting a similar effect to tape using Logic Audio distortion plug-ins, using the tone as a bias, almost.

Soundtoys Decapitator, absolutely luv it. As was mentioned it works great to drive the inputs of their other plugins also.