What do you mean by 2nd harmonic? Like a 660hz predominantly coming out of 440hz? Wouldn't just it be a coloration?Absolutely! Saturation is about as subjective as you can get! Just think of all the different guitar amplifiers and pedals available on the market. There are those that absolutely love the Boss Metal Zone and those that really hate it with a passion. Same goes for the Ibanez Tube Screamer. Many people think it is impossible to not use it while others hate it.That being said, I think it is ok to have different tastes on distortion algorithms. We don't have to agree
Same goes for tape saturation. Ironically I know a lot of old timers who absolutely hate anything tape, no matter how much I try to convince them how good tape saturation is on various sources, especially drums.. whereas these people who have worked with it most of their life seem to really hate how much their meticulous miking and recording is destroyed by it! Then again these same people seem to really love pushing mixing desks into heavy saturation and get things under control that way.
Kind of makes sense. First they hear what they do through the desk, only to be disappointed by the end results coming off the tape, having to re-do a lot of things before hitting the tape to get it as close as they can to the results they want.
So yeah, if somebody puts FF Saturn on a track, expecting a certain flavor and then get the exact opposite, I can totally understand the dislike. Those saturation algorithms do indeed have a very heavy finger print and it's NOT possible to get rid of it, no matter how much one tries to tweak envelope followers or levels. It's there and you either like it or you don't.
One thing I myself dislike about Saturn is the quite heavy prevalence of a 2nd harmonic that you can not get rid of, no matter how hard you try. Even if you put the dry/wet mix knob of a band to zero, it's still there.. happening before or after (I'm not sure exactly when in the signal chain it happens!) all other processing and it's strength heavily varies between each algorithm. It's most present in all the tape algorithms. This reminds me that I have to send an email to FF and ask about it.. if it's perhaps a bug. Though I doubt they would change it this late in it's product run.
For me Saturn is just perfect to brighten a sound while keeping warmth thanks to a very subtle saturation. I don't like to push it hard. The control you easily have on the dynamic is also perfect on the same plugin. At the end I use it more like I thought I would use pro Q3, for subtle control over the mixing but Saturn is just actually too good at it.
Statistics: Posted by Jac459 — Sun Jun 09, 2024 8:02 am