TLs Saturated Driver

This was a weirdly good saturator for the time. Another hidden gem from TBT.

I'm surprised there aren't more envelope-based distortions, even today. An old trick, especially for warming up sub-basses, is to take a compressor with super short minimum envelope times and drive the signal into it like a distortion. It introduces harmonics because the envelope time is shorter than a single cycle of bass-frequency waveforms.

An added benefit to distorting bass this way is that lower frequencies are distorted more than higher frequencies, which narrows the range in the mix that your bass sits at. It's a great bass distortion to use when you are keeping your mix in mind, and want lower bass to come out better through smaller speakers.

This plug-in is one of the few tools ever made to be designed for this very purpose, and it is still useful today.