Soundtoys’ Decapitator, Radiator, and Little Radiator (they’re different!) each is capable of nuanced saturation, compression, drive, and tone for mix tasks. Or you can unleash bloody murder. So if you’re in the need of a way to direct rage into sound for some reason — we’ve got you.
Soundtoys has their spring sale on and has used it as an opportunity to give us a few refreshers on a few of their classics. That’s great, even if you just need a reason to dig into a copy of Soundtoys you’ve already got and get some more out of it. (Plus, if you’re picking up Radiator, 100% of those sales now go directly to the great projects at World Central Kitchen.)
Don’t get me wrong. Despite the aggressive names, these plug-ins are capable of subtlety; most of the time, in fact, you’ll be using them for far gentler coloration or mixing. And Soundtoys has all kinds of examples doing respectable things with recordings of real drums.
I mean, it’s almost childish to just turn the dials all the way up and destroy everything. So… of course that’s something we immediately all do. What’s nice about these plug-ins is that they’ll let you do that and continue to saturate in natural ways, so that even if you get extreme results, those remain useful.
There are four plug-ins here. And contrary to what most of us would assume at first glance, “Little Radiator” is not just a “lite” version of Radiator — it’s actually a different model.
- Radiator is a tube input channel/EQ, based on the 1960s Altec 1567A tube mixer
- Little Radiator is actually modeling the Altec 1566A preamp so — a cousin, but not the same! (and it sounds quite different…)
- Decapitator is a hardware-modeled saturation (with five different models)
- Devil-Loc Deluxe is a compressor based on the Shure Level-Loc originally intended for PAs (but became a music secret weapon)
Here are some very quick examples. Starting with Baby Audio’s Tekno (and a preset of mine), I tour some different extreme possibilities with Little Radiator, Radiator, and Decapitator. Check in particular the amount of variation you can get with tonal controls, in Radiator but especially in Decapitator. That’s the good stuff:
Here’s an even more extreme example working with Unfiltered Audio’s Battalion drum machine:
Devil-Loc is capable of some serious magic — both in the standard version (used here) and Deluxe. Again, I just wanted to show off some extreme possibilities of the brickwall compression and crunch, so we do that here with a Phuture TR-727 pattern.
And here are the pros explaining this:
And, hey, I fully endorse distorted drums as an answer to the question “what do you do with the mad that you feel,” which remains relevant to adults as it did to kids. Mr. Fred Rogers (make a show for kids, but honestly composer underrated numbers like you’re channeling Jerome Kern):
Here’s some of what WCK have been up to: