What's your 'go to' distortion/saturation plugins?

[multree]

Wavesfactory Spectre
Klevgrand REAMP (would sometimes like some higher oversampling)
BabyAudio TAIP (would love some oversampling since I can get sounds with this I can't get anywhere else)
ToneEmpire ValveKult2 and TM700V2
Kazrog TrueIron

[nilhartman]

ApShaper, Powershaper, Kelvin, Michelangelo and Roar.

I really love Spectre.

Do you prefer Michelangelo over Spectre? If you’ve tried it that is.

My other recent fav is Cassiopeia. Great low cost, high quality, low cpu load, simple tube saturator. Sounds perfect to me. I don’t always want to load up something major like Kelvin or Coldfire.

I have Spectre but never use it. The way I hear and use it, I much prefer how Michelangelo sounds and behaves. The advanced panel is a wonderful addition, you can be as subtle / program dependent or heavy handed as you need. I use it often during mastering sessions and it’s actually incredibly flexible.
I’ll add that I gel with Tone Projects plugins and beta test for them, though I’d use TP plugins no matter what.

I forgot to list LTL Silverbullet, fantastic plugin.

[acousticglue]

I will still say Cytomic the Drop is great for use in this way.

[LaserLobes]

Ulfradé

[whassup]

Saturn 2, NAM Universal, several Airwindows plugins, SDRR2, Feenstaub, KClip.
It's hard to learn to listen with the ears alone and not with the GUIs or the coolness factor of who made the plugins or who is using them or the price of them. But it's possible. Still not fully through the process.

[Uncle E]

NAM Universal

Has anyone used it on studio gear?

[Lotuz2019]

Tubetizer looks interesting.

https://www.kiiveaudio.com/products/tubetizer

[bmanic]

Any Logic users have thoughts on the new-ish stock plugin Chromaglow?

It is extremely good. It's the plugin that shows deep learning AI is indeed the future for these kinds of things.

I’m not too sure about Chromaglow. I note a fair bit of aliasing (guess it’s not internally oversampled just like the rest of the Logic plugins) which is quiet poor for things like tube emulation in 2024. I have plugins developed with old fashioned coding which sound way more pleasant to me with little to no aliasing (UAD), but I don’t have your golden ears so I could be wrong.

It is indeed aliasing quite a bit (and obviously that's not at all ideal for an analogue emulation!), that is it's only downside. However, the upside is the extreme program dependency of it. It's just way more "alive" than most other saturation plugins. Something that AI deep learning seems to do exceptionally well. If you look at the hammerstein plot of these AI plugins you can see just how incredibly complex the saturation is.

You can slightly fight the aliasing by doing your own pre/post EQ processing, where you force stuff around 10kHz to be at least -12dB in volume going into the plugin. Naturally this will shift the harmonics a bit and not be the ideal output any longer but at least you can push the extreme aliasing down a little bit. As long as you send it program material that doesn't contain a lot of stuff above 5kHz you should be fine without any further tweaks, or if the sounds are momentary only (like kicks and snares) .. but yeah, probably not a good idea to send it cymbals or open hihats.

Unfortunately oversampling is something that seems to be really difficult to do correctly with AI deep learning algorithms. I don't have the technical know how of why this is the case but it just is.. nobody seems to be able to match sample rates 1 to 1 as the behavior seems to always change a bit (sometimes drastically as is the case with Tone Empire plugins.. like +/- 12dB at some frequencies and the harmonic series completely changes).

Still, these are exciting times! It can only get better from here.

[EfreetiSultan]

Plasma

[bmanic]

NAM Universal

Has anyone used it on studio gear?

I have used it for some 1176 captures (not the compression though, just the "mojo"). It's not ideal. The original NAM version still sounds way better. I'm not sure what they screwed up in the Universal version but it just doesn't seem to produce the same output. Maybe that's been fixed now? Not sure..

[kiksogue]

I think he's passionate and sincere. He's supposed to have a top developer working on the plugin. I'm very optimistic l. Even the AI captures played in Genome sound really good, imo. The new Genesis plugin is supposed to have 96k captures, also. It's new tech so it's to going to have it's rough edges, like Acustica in the beginning, buy it's developing quickly.

[wayford]

Pulsar Mu can be used as saturation and it sounds really good.

[simon.a.billington]

Along with the rest of my collection I have Heavyocity Fury now and I've recently rediscovered Berzerk, can't remember if I mentioned that.

The cool thing with those plugins as well as something like Coldfire is you get several types of distortion in the one plugin. Meaning you don't have to load up half a dozen plugins and try them before you find one you like. You can just load in one and easily change the type to quickly narrow down the sound you're looking for.

[DCrown]

Waves NLS at the moment

[Lotuz2019]

Along with the rest of my collection I have Heavyocity Fury now and I've recently rediscovered Berzerk, can't remember if I mentioned that.

The cool thing with those plugins as well as something like Coldfire is you get several types of distortion in the one plugin. Meaning you don't have to load up half a dozen plugins and try them before you find one you like. You can just load in one and easily change the type to quickly narrow down the sound you're looking for.

Then I'd also try Cyberdrive.

https://unitedplugins.com/cyberdrive?ut ... ce0a18b8fb