Voxengo VariSaturator
Greetings from Australia!
In the last couple of days I upgraded my Elephant to v.5 after not having used it for sometime. It absolutely 'blew me away', I'd totally forgotten how good it is.
I'm using it on my drum buss and stereo buss in Cubase 12 Pro, it really kicks ass(!) and has an amazing set of options and clarity if that's what is needed in any given project.
I also use MSED, Crunchessor, Varisaturator, Span and Transgainer with very pleasing results.
In my opinion Voxengos tools are right at the top with the best, and often better than the very expensive ones.
I'd say money spent on Voxengo products is money well spend, thank you, Aleksey. :)
In electronic music, many sounds are very much "upfront". OTT is what many choose for this purpose.
However, I have found that Varisaturator is much better in place of OTT when it comes to this purpose. Much more controllable and much smoother (even though OTT is multiband compression and Varisaturator is multiband saturation/inflation) In most cases where I would choose OTT, I am using Varisaturator instead for the same purpose and it does the job much better. This small change has improved my mixes for electronic music a lot.
Second thing is soft clipping with OVC-128 on buses to smooth and contain, then followed by high end expansion with Soniformer to rebuild some dynamics and transients is an amazing combination. Smooth, contained and dynamic.
Always finding new relationships and uses with your plugins, thanks!