Review: Fabfilter Saturn

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to review an interesting Saturation plugin: the Fabfilter Saturn.

We have already talked extensively about Saturation processors and their role during mixing (click here for a dedicated article): the basic idea is to add to a dull and lifeless sound some warmth and harmonic excitement to make it pop out more in the mix without changing too much its shape and equalization. 

The difference between Saturn and the majority of the other Saturation units it's the versatility and the number of features, which is very rich like all the other Fabfilter products: we can choose between a wide range of saturations, from the gentle saturation of a warm tube to the most extreme bit crusher (click here for a dedicated article), which will completely twist our sound. 

The plugin also features an "Amp" mode, in which we can add to our clean guitar sound some warmth from the tube clean style to a high gain lead, and the tone can be furtherly modified with a 4 band eq similar to the one of a Mesa Quad Preamp (but with one band less).

The thing that makes this plugin more versatile than the other ones is the multiband saturation: you can split the signal in different bands and process only the selected ones, or process each band in a different way, if you want; this provides a level of control rarely achievable from a single plugin.

Last thing, you can add some modulation effects to the single bands or to the full signal, via the "Modulation" button.

All in all this is a very complete saturation plugin, with features that cannot be found anywhere else, and once again a Fabfilter product that will shorten your vst chain, since it has inside many features that before could be achieved only with more than one processor.

Key Features:

- Sixteen different distortion styles, from subtle saturation to heavy guitar amps and bit crushing

- Multiband processing (up to 6 bands)

- Per-band drive, mix, feedback, dynamics, tone and level controls

- Mid/side processing

- Endless modulation options, with all the 16-step XLFOs, XY controllers, envelope generators, envelope followers and MIDI sources you will ever need

- Over 150 presets

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