Phathom

Phathom is a bass preamp plugin targeted towards modern fuzzy / growly bass guitar tones. Featuring an dynamic transformer-like saturation algorithm, and pre-distortion bass and treble filters to change how it reacts to picking dynamics and input timbre.

Demo

{See video at top of page}

Demo bass guitar played by Rich Gray @annihilatorbass on Fiverr.

Features

• Hysteretic stateful saturation. Instead of a static waveshaper, the distortion / saturation here reacts to a combination of current and past input levels and frequencies, similar to a tape or transformer. This gives the distortion an organic element, it reacts to playing style, dynamics and timbre.
• Pre-saturation low or high boost or cut to change the character of the saturation.
• Optional wet signal polarity inversion and dry signal equalisation.
• Automatic oversampling. Host sample rates under 80kHz are oversampled 4X and 80kHz to 160kHz 2X.
• Resizable UI, right click to select UI size.

Parameters

• Input - Input level boost or cut, with overload indicator.
• Drive - Sets the input level into the saturation module.
• Mix - Dry / Wet mix.
• Out - Output level boost or cut, with overload indicator.
• P - Flips the polarity of the distorted signal, changing how it mixes back with the dry signal. Use this with caution, while it can create interesting scooped tones, in some cases it may cause some loss of bass frequencies. The nature of this bass and low mid loss may be desirable and so this should be judged by ear.
• Dry EQ - Apply the pre-saturation signal path to the dry input signal. This can be useful if feeding into other distortion effects.

• This project is built using the Steinberg VST 3 SDK. VST is a trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.