Retro ‘groove crackle’ dither with fuller sound.

If you like truncation and artificial vibe, try this!

Single pole highpassed TPDF dither.

TPDF is the industry standard technically correct boring dither. It does nothing strange or interesting, makes no effort to optimize the sound in any way (generally if you make it better for something it’s worse for something else: even Naturalize only has a limited amount of output bits to work with.)

TPDF uses two sources of noise to make what’s called a Triangular Probability Density Function, which gives it its name.

The ‘One Weird Trick’ perfect boost/pad, with a catch!

High-res noise shaped gain, with smoothed fader.

Sound design or reverb far-away-izer.

Distance is specifically set up to mimic through-air high frequency attenuation.

Surge and flow dynamics plugin.

It comes from an experiment, where I had to find a way to make a behavior useful: SurgeTide runs on three different compression time constants stacked onto each other like the waves in an FM synthesizer. You don’t usually see a compressor work with the rate of the rate of the rate of change, because for normal sounds and time constants, the result sounds bizarre and unmusical.

Explosive transient redesigner.

Point is kind of like a ZVex Fuzz Factory or some such mad hardware device: the range of settings DOES include ‘out of control’, and it’s such a simple ‘circuit’ that it does little to restrain things when you Go Too Far and operate it in a state that will explode.

Drive hides nothing. It’s all about grit and crunch, not smooth. Go ahead and try it and see. If your sole purpose for an overdrive plugin is to make stuff ‘big and fat and thick’ then you want Density. But if you’re reaching for a distortion because you have some sound, a bass, a snaredrum, and you just want to make it sound ANGRY: not so much fat or forward or gritty or edgy, but just plain straight up pissed off… then you may want to have Drive around.

Phase rotator/allpass filter.
In radio, there was the need for a phase rotator, to make waveforms more symmetrical for loudness maximizing. In reverbs, you get a thing called an allpass filter (a kind of feedback delay at a specific calibration) which diffuses the sound so it can be fed to delay banks and seem more spatial. Turns out these are the same basic thing! It’s also in phase shifters (mixing the phase-shifted part against dry, or inverse dry).

What happens? When you use an allpass filter, what you get is all the frequencies exactly as loud as they were before, but the phases of the frequencies are all different. Specifically, lows get delayed relative to the highs producing an effect where tones are ‘smeared’ across a time stretch, even though the spectral contents are exactly the same. The frequency information’s unaltered (nothing’s out of tune or darkened/brightened) but there’s a blur, possibly a large blur. PhaseNudge is set up to produce delays from really short (normal for a phase rotator) to unusually long, in case you’d like to treat it as a kind of slapback/echo effect.

Super old school compressor for high definition transients. Adds no fatness, just energy.

Pyewacket is a strange beast. It’s inspired by how much I love the 60s/70s recordings out of London’s Olympic Studios, which had and used Pye compressors on many of my favorite classic and prog-rock records.

It’s literally the smoothest saturation you can have in a plugin: the transfer function’s a sine.
Density runs multiple stages, allowing it to bulk up the tone into an overblown, insanely fat and saturated distort-fest. And then you can highpass just the distorted stuff alone, and trim its output gain, and mix it with the unfiltered dry to produce lots of tonal possibilities.

Lowpass gives rich textures, Highpass timewarps your tone.

These are mixing EQs. They’re complementary: the one is the inverse of the other.

Mastering grade very low Q tilt EQ.

It produces an extremely transparent ’tilt EQ’ with a controllable corner point. And, it’s implemented in such a way that you can set it to null out (at extreme high boosts) and then bring in only the brightest highs (shown in the video). Quirky, maybe, but it broadens the ToneSlant toolkit.

A lowpass filter you probably don’t have in your DAW, with a distinctive tone!

This plugin is an exploration of a fascinating filter type that, I think, is really underrated. It’s a straight-up extremely simple averaging filter. If you set it to integer values, it exactly averages that number of taps on the input audio (adjacent samples). If you pick in-between values it interpolates, causing the ‘frequency’ of the filter to smoothly blend between the values.

Limit or wipe out the highest frequencies, near the Nyquist frequency.

Slew2 doesn’t act anything like Slew. What it does, is it puts a particular behavior on the extreme highs. Set to an intermediate value, it’s an acceleration limiter. Slew2 produces a very natural-sounding brickwall filter exactly at that frequency, with the response falling off faster and faster until it’s totally gone when you hit the Nyquist limit (digital sampling theory: at 44.1K (CD quality) it is 22.05K where the treble cuts off).

With this buss compressor, sub-lows get bigger the harder you drive it.

Instead of passing through the bass, it transforms it in a way similar to FathomFive, and uses that live, active signal to modulate what the compressor sees, where in turn the compressor’s output is modulated by the intense lows.

Minimalist 2-buss safety clipper at -0.2dB with powerful anti-glare processing.

The Airwindows compressor, malleable into many forms if you know how. Version 4 brings new functionality that has never existed in Pressure before: the stereo version (default for VST, and the Audio Unit that doesn’t specifically say ‘Mono’) uses a special linked mode based on diade bridges in hardware compressors. That’s not to say that it is ‘analog modeling’ because it isn’t. From the beginning, Pressure has been made out of a lucky algorithm with a particular organic, pleasing quality, and part of Pressure4 is knowing what to strip down, how to simplify that algorithm until it lets all the music through.