Mix Bus Compressor vs TETSUO

This compressor has the lowest total harmonic distortion of any plugin we have seen, including desktop units. At the heart of it is a unique envelope follower design that makes it possible to compress the signal without creating distortion harmonics. On the spectrum of compressor tone that ranges from "vintage analog" to "pristine digital", this plugin sits at the extreme end of low-noise digital clarity, but it is different from other low-noise digital designs because it doesn't use digital look-ahead. Therefore its response time is immediate, it adds no extra delay to the signal chain, and it works great for processing real-time performance effects. It uses no oversampling so there is no phase distortion or loss of high-frequency energy from anti-aliasing filters. It also uses no digital-style filters (FIR filters) and no digital look-ahead, so it adds no additional latency to the signal chain. Although it is not a model of an existing piece analog hardware, every component of its signal path is realizable in the analog domain. We think of it as a digital model of our ideal analog compressor: it could exist as an analog circuit but would be very expensive to build with physical analog electronic parts. The user interface is 100% scalable, designed specifically for iOS, so it looks beautiful at any screen size or orientation, from tiny portrait views in AUM on iPhone to the largest full-screen views on iPad Pro.

TETSUO is a chaotic percussion machine. No samples, no library. One voice built out of a pitched body with noise dragged through it, a resonant filter that saturates the harder you lean on it, a bitcrusher, and a waveshaper that runs from a bit of weight to total structural failure. The sequencer is sixteen unseen slots and STEPS knob decides how many of them fire, adding and taking away hits one at a time in a fixed order, so you can strip a pattern to the bone and build it back and the same beats come home. The SKIP control works against you on purpose, stealing hits at random while it plays, so it never quite settles. MUTATE modulates the pitch at random, setting fire to voices on every turn. You do not program TETSUO so much as negotiate with it. The strip along the top is how you attempt to hold onto anything. Sixty four steps, four turns of pattern, carved into as many as eight sections. Select a section. Find a sound. Hit RECORD, and that section keeps every knob position. Change it, record the next, then hit PLAY and it walks left to right dropping each snapshot in as it reaches it, looping. Drag the dividers to give a section longer or cut it short. It keeps settings, not audio, so the engine is playing live the entire way through. Sections save with your presets and your session. AUv3 and standalone.