Decapitator: Is it really the bees knees?

[_leras]

I just prefer not to take a chance when I can so clearly hear it with my tests, particularly when there are other options.

Have you tried this with any non sin wave type sources?

And... which other options would you recommend that you are referring to here?

I'm always happy to hear new distortions and saturations.

[Junolab]

Just get Kelvin. It's amazing and work with many sources. But there's tons of very fine saturators out there so don't sweat it. All will do the job just fine.

Used to have all Soundtoys but sold it. It's still great but just a bit too many newer alternatives available.

[Burillo]

why would anyone decapitate the bees?

[standalone]

If you think about how many careers have been ruined by aliasing and how many hit records have been made with Plugin Doctor a shiver runs up your spine.

[Michey]

why would anyone decapitate the bees?

No no no... you're making a BIG mistake.

We deal here with bee's KNEES... therefore we AMPUTATE, not decapitate.
Unfortunately, the product "Amputator" (upward compression+ amp sim) has remained in beta state forever and never left SoundToys' office. it remained unrealized, unfulfilled (great) idea.

Shame

[sambaji]

If you think about how many careers have been ruined by aliasing and how many hit records have been made with Plugin Doctor a shiver runs up your spine.

False equivalence. Plugin Doctor is an analysis plugin, not an effects plugin. The same could be said about using multi-thousand-dollar recording equipment, such as high-end microphones. Multi-thousand-dollar microphones don't create hits, artists do. Yet, recording engineers, audiophiles striving for the highest-fidelity audio capture, typically seek this more expensive equipment even though the average listener may not even notice the difference.

The bottom line is if you like the overall sound of Decapitator, then buy it, use it. It may just be the ticket for specific tracks. But if I were a first-time buyer, looking for a general-purpose saturator, I wouldn't buy it. As I mentioned before there are other great-sounding saturators that provide anti-aliasing: Tone Projects Kelvin, Kazrog True Iron, Fabfilter Saturn, etc.). In addition, there are several free saturators, worth checking out, with yes, oversampling--Gsatplus, Chowtape, Voxengo Tube Amp, Melda Msaturator.

[Fendrix]

If you think about how many careers have been ruined by aliasing and how many hit records have been made with Plugin Doctor a shiver runs up your spine.

LMAO

[Fendrix]

Decapitator is great, even though I own many higher-end saturators. Sometimes decap is the best tool for the job.

[Funkybot's Evil Twin]

I think someone else in this thread already made this point too, but I don't think of Decapitator as a saturation effect. Saturation to me is the adding of harmonics for warmth. Tape saturators, preamp saturation, box tone, etc. Decapitator, in my mind, is a full-blown distortion effect. At least, that's how I use it. So comparisons to Kelvin seem inappropriate to me because I'd never drive Kelvin the same way I would Decapitator.

I dunno...maybe it's just my guitar player's mind where we differentiate between overdrive, crunch, distortion, and fuzz, but I think of Decapitator as a distortion box, not a saturator. Other similar plugins would be the Dist TUBE-CULTURE plugin from Arturia, dirt and Driver from NI, Kombinat from Audio Damage, SDRR2 at certain settings, etc.

[_leras]

Just get Kelvin. It's amazing and work with many sources. But there's tons of very fine saturators out there so don't sweat it. All will do the job just fine.

Used to have all Soundtoys but sold it. It's still great but just a bit too many newer alternatives available.

Thanks, I have Kelvin - but I think that's a different thing.

I was looking more specifically for sambaji's list of 'saturators without aliasing' - as he seems to find Decapitar unusable.

[sambaji]

Just get Kelvin. It's amazing and work with many sources. But there's tons of very fine saturators out there so don't sweat it. All will do the job just fine.

Used to have all Soundtoys but sold it. It's still great but just a bit too many newer alternatives available.

Thanks, I have Kelvin - but I think that's a different thing.

I was looking more specifically for sambaji's list of 'saturators without aliasing' - as he seems to find Decapitar unusable.

Hello,
Decapitator may well be very useful for specific cases--particularly, as a distortion effect, as someone else pointed out. However, it wouldn't be my first choice, particularly if I was looking for a general saturator to add subtle "analog" warmth and/or crisp to non-distorted signals (acoustic instruments). I've listed some alternatives in my previous post.

As I said, the bottom line is if it sounds good to your ears, use it. But if you already have Kelvin, do you need Decapitator? Have you demoed the Decapitator against Kelvin, matching loudness? For my uses, I would choose Kelvin over Decapitator.

Some on this thread have made fun of me using Plugin Doctor, spectrograms, and tone generators to analyze and compare the behavior of different "analog" emulating plugins (e.g., saturators). But for me, these types of tools are valuable for learning. Melda offers a great free tone generator, MOscillator, that allows the user to generate either a pure sine wave or a sine wave with harmonics, mimicking a real instrument. Span is a popular free spectrogram.

[zerocrossing]

its aliasing is not an annoying side effect, but an integral part
of its character.

Uh... maybe to you. I've always EQ'd out the aliasing in Decapitator.

Frankly, Decapitator collects virtual dust in my world because of said aliasing. If I want digital artifacts, I'll add them using an appropriate plugin and control how much. There's a lot better stuff out there now and SoundToys should be embarrassed that they've left their plugins to rot for so long. Arturia's EX Collection blows away the Soundtoys bundle in pretty much every way.

[ToMegaTherion]

Decapitator aliases heavily but it doesn't sound that bad if you use it as a bandpassed parallel send to stop the bass farting and treble issues. This makes it hard to be just be something to click through for distortion flavor though.

[Winstontaneous]

Decapitator shines for me as a 'character channel strip', especially on vocals.

Like @ToMegaTherion I often use it as a bandpass (dialing down both HP/LP filters with the bumps engaged) with just enough saturation parallel mixed, so I don't really encounter aliasing.

When good ITB saturation is needed I reach for Goodhertz Tupe, ToneProjects Kelvin, PSP Saturator and Voxengo plugins. I find Soundtoys plugins inspiring even now, but they haven't done meaningful development in maybe 5 years.

[kev2525]

Yeah, both Culture Vulture and ColdFire from Arturia are great. ColdFire is mostly known for insane distortion but can do very nice saturation with some of the subtler analog models.

Arturia seem to have nice saturation algorithms. I got the Arturia plate 140 as a freebie and recently realised that it has a drive knob. You and run audio through the plate with the reverb switched off and gently saturate. I haven't owned decapitater, so can't compare, but it sounds good to my ears...

https://www.arturia.com/products/softwa ... 0/overview