Saturation/distortion 2021

[Amøbe]

Just watched one of the streams that @Lag (who sometimes frequent this place) makes on twitch. He uses the Scream 4 plugin from Reason a lot, It has a lot of very different models. Does anybody know of an alternative (not a reason user) that has the same broad palette? I often feel like a lot of the distortion I have works really well for some very specific purposes.

[Lost to the Void]

Scream, that old chesnut.

Audio Damage Kombinat Tri has a good set of features and different distortion types.

[Amøbe]

Scream, that old chesnut.

Audio Damage Kombinat Tri has a good set of features and different distortion types.

Thanks Steve! I'll check that out

[mervv]

I got the Blackbox hg-2ms because it was on a steep sale and I had read a lot of good things about it. It pretty much immediately became my favorite bus saturation plugin. I haven't even played around the the m/s features yet, I got that version because at the time it was cheaper than the original non-m/s one.

I wouldn't buy it at full price because full price is insane.

It does sound great, though.

[Bradley1602]

Anyone use trash2?
Got it free few months back, but cant seem to get meaningful disto or sat out of it…

[Ben Kohonays]

Anyone use trash2?
Got it free few months back, but cant seem to get meaningful disto or sat out of it…

I don't use it, but what's the issue - too much, too little, or just unsatisfying tone?

[Bradley1602]

It overloads distortion so fast. And I dont like the tone of the drive sections till now.
It eats cpu.
Too much for what I seem to get out of it.

Its very flexible obviously, but there seems to be so little sweetspot…

[Ben Kohonays]

It overloads distortion so fast.

Have you tried running it in parallel with the original source? Could maybe help with that.

[speen]

there is a wet/dry fader on trash2 but I have to agree with Bradley that is hardly usable for some light or gentle distortion or saturation

i added trash2 to the kick this track i posted yesterday in the members tracks section and you can hear in the beginning how it fucks up the decay of kick - it blends with the rest of the sounds once more comes in but otherwise it has a very agressive gabber sound to me

[Bradley1602]

It overloads distortion so fast.

Have you tried running it in parallel with the original source? Could maybe help with that.

Yes a few times already, I‘d love to like it cause of flexibility reasons. Im dissatisfied with abletons saturator these days…

[Ben Kohonays]

there is a wet/dry fader on trash2 but I have to agree with Bradley that is hardly usable for some light or gentle distortion or saturation

Yes a few times already, I‘d love to like it cause of flexibility reasons. Im dissatisfied with abletons saturator these days…

Ah, sounds like Izotope overcooked it. Often seems to be the case these days.

[Lost to the Void]

The presets on Trash are all overcooked on the output.
You can be quite subtle with it, but it's a really unwieldy plugin with an overcomplicated interface.
Turn everything off and just focus on one module at a time and it makes more sense.

[Bradley1602]

So airwindows console 7 / tapefat / tape / mackity

[HOTF]

So my most used plugins are the stock ableton plugins :
-Saturator
-Amp
-Overdrive
-Pedal
- Redux (the one in 11 is much better than the one in Live 10)
- Driving auto filter
- Driving the echo plugin (turning off the delay)

For third party stuff :
- Izotope Trash2 . Jarring at first but you can get really nice tones out of it.
- Fab filter saturn and volcano 3 with some crazy driven filters.
- Noise Engineering Ruina (the best one to destroy audio)
- Klanghelm IVGI

[Amøbe]

- Driving the echo plugin (turning off the delay)

Do you mind expanding on this?

[over9000]

- Driving the echo plugin (turning off the delay)

Do you mind expanding on this?

Theres a drive knob and you can turn off the whole delay section afaik

[speen]

you can hit the small 'd' button next to the input and then turn down the dry/wet knob and it will apply the input drive the dry signal

[buffered]

The Black Box HG-2 is worth a look

[HOTF]

- Driving the echo plugin (turning off the delay)

Do you mind expanding on this?

Yeah like the others said there is a ''D'' button (d for distortion or drive I believe ). You can crank the input gain and than compensate with output gain to get some nice distortion

[Bradley1602]

Hg 2 black box seems like a very nice 2-bus driver. For “anything from small to large distos / sats“