PurestFade
TL;DW: PurestFade is just like PurestGain, but with a MUCH smoother fade control.
This is a plugin for one person.
Okay, it’s a plugin that EXISTS because one person asked the right thing at the right time. A mastering engineer emailed me and said, PurestGain is great, it’s just perfect, everything I need except… when I do fades with it, there’s a discontinuity when I go from 0.001 volume on the Slow Fade, to 0. It cuts out abruptly, and that’s a problem. Can you help?
I can!
Thing is, PurestGain is designed so you can whack that control around aggressively. It doesn’t mute instantly, but you can kill a track real fast in a mix, gracefully, without zipper noise. PurestGain is correct for some users. If you needed to have a control on some kind of USB controller, like a NanoKontrol or something (say you’re doing an automation pass) you might well need to trim the overall gain with the top slider, and then assign the hardware controller to the bottom slider and automate. It’ll smooth out the incoming MIDI data and the result will be dynamic and aggressive, will feel like you’re yanking faders around on a real board. That’s the design intent for the ballistics of PurestGain.
PurestFade is totally different. If you are at full crank and snap it instantly to zero, you’ll get an automated fade of about eight seconds or so. It gets subtler and subtler the quieter you go, until at the point of silence you literally can’t mess up the fade: it will always smooth out the last tiny bit.
If you drag it slower than ten seconds you can do any slowness of fade you want, smooth as you like. And, an interesting thing is that if you need a faster fade than the automatic one (of just going fully to zero in an instant and letting the plugin do it) what you can do is manually drag it down faster than that. It’ll chase your fade speed, which means if you’re doing an unnaturally fast fade it’ll be trying to smooth you out a bit but it will let you do that. I think it’s the ultimate smoothed fade.
And, in mixing (since it’s still PurestGain at heart) I think you can decide which you prefer, and if you’ve got a style then you know which one is right for you. Probably won’t be both. If you need to do abrupt, dynamic things it’s PurestGain you’ll want… but if your fader moves are generally more subtle, invisible, then you’re probably going to always want PurestFade for everything. (The top control will still give you more rapid moves if you need them)
Which one is the right one for you? Most likely you already know which one you’ll be using, just from the descriptions.
All this is supported by Patreon, which makes so many things possible. I’ve got an update on the Chord Organ firmware I made, and I should be able to do a better video: I’ll test the new firmware out Tuesday and Wednesday, and then if all goes well I’ll have a video that demonstrates all the new things you can do with the new firmware, and explains the underlying tech better. And then I’ll get back to plugins, which are never far from my sight :)
Weird this should show up today, I was trying to find a vst for fades where you could set the minimum and maximum volume (say -3db and zero) and then have another fader that slides between the two preset points without going above or below the allocated levels, Do you have anything that can do that?
Nice one, Chris! This is definitely useful. Thanks!
Works perfectly! I love that it “does its thing” and you work with that. Buttery smooth!
I am feeling incredibly grateful for this, thank you so much.
[…] PurestFade […]
Been using your plugins for a few years now. Really appreciate what you do. I process just about every bit of music I make with these babies!
Greetings Chris .. There’s a topic on Gearslutz discussing the rarity of a channel fader which can be inverted & linked to enable cross fades in daws. The topic is …DJ-style crossfade between tracks in Pro Tools?
An enhancement of one of your faders to perform this task would be very desirable.
Hi Chris, I came across you Purestfade plugin and am wondering if it will work for me. I’m using Serato Studio. This S/W allows VST plugins to be applied.
https://serato.com/studio
All want to do, is simply fade a track out at the end automatically over a 5 to 10 sec (approx) period. Serato were unable to help me !.
I cant believe this is so difficult to achieve. So hence my quest for a plugin.
Do you think this plugin would work its magic for me ?
Hello, I came across your website while looking for auto fade plugin. It seams like something that would be straight forward and easy to build, but noone has done anything like that so far. I’m using Reaper DAW for live performance along with live instruments and I’m looking for a simple VST plugin that would do an auto fade-out triggered by a single MIDI button press. So in case something goes wrong with the set and I need to kill the tracks- I could fade them out smoothly with a single button click instead of stopping abruptly. Is this something you could create?
Hi Chris! Thank you for all that you do – recently discovered your work and am blown away (and slightly overwhelmed in the best possible way – ‘how many plugins did this guy put out?!?’).
PurestFade – this is something I have been longing for, so first, again thank you for creating it.
There is just one small issue: it seems that if I want to use the plugin to fade in a track using automation – say on the master channel and fade in the beginning of a song for a simple example – when rendering (and also when playing back in the DAW), PurestFade doesn’t start at silence. Even though the automation says we should be at silence, it seems to need a second or so to realise this, and then we’re already on our way up. This obviously messes up the fade-in. I guess in all cases where you do not start a track with a fade-in from bar 1, this issue wouldn’t cause any problems, but in this case it does.
It would be the sweetest thing to have this resolved at some point. But needless to say, I am already beyond grateful for your work, and for you continuing to tweak and improve upon your creations, and leaving all (or most) versions available – I just love exploring the different personalities of the ToTape’s for example, and finding which one is most suited for the task at hand. Hats off to you.
Warm wishes,
Ludvig