Compressor

Compressor is a weird little beast! If you’re looking for a great sounding, well-behaved, sane compressor, go buy the most recent Logical. This is not that.

What it IS, is Airwindows strangeness in an exceedingly pure form.

You get compression, attack speed, release speed, color, makeup gain, and dry/wet.

Compression includes some makeup gain adjusting. Don’t crank it out unless you want a rude shock, this plugin can put out VERY loud outputs.

Attack speed is faster as the control’s turned up. At slower attack speeds, the plugin’s actually putting a delay on the sensor, like anti-lookahead, to produce bigger transient spikes. This is in effect very early, so one interesting side effect is that the compression artifacts totally stop connecting to the waveforms, especially at very slow values. That’s uncommon for software compressors.

Release speed’s also faster as the control’s turned up. If you crank both, it’s very sputtery while still being unmanageably spikey. Slowing down attack speed gives you big fat chunky attack transients that are instantly suppressed.

Color is like a distortion that can get obnoxious on some sounds. It’s pretty much JUST an overdrive put on the front of the compressor before anything gets compressed. It’ll distort things before the comp gets ’em, if you want to stop the comp from getting knocked back too hard.

Makeup Gain is probably going to have to be set very low. This thing really jumps around when hit with program material. It’s more a suggestion than a straight-up output level control. Dry/Wet is what you’d expect, thankfully.

The biggest strength of this thing is squishing stuff like drums in such a way that the transient spike pokes out unreasonably, and making odd washy floating textures. It’s VERY HARD to control. It does manage a certain ‘fluid’ tone exceptionally well: up to you if you think that’s worth the effort. It’s free, have fun wrestling with the wild plugin.