Pleatech Audio have released Heat Man, available for $20.00.
We all know the fatal flaw with 99% of saturation plugins. You crank the drive on a snare or an 808, and the algorithm immediately flattens your transient peaks into a lifeless, 2D sausage. Then you waste twenty minutes setting up messy parallel routing chains, multiband splits, and transient shapers just to un-fuck the mud you just created. It’s a stupid workflow.
I got annoyed enough to build something that doesn’t just rely on static clipping. Heat Man uses audio-rate modulation, inverse dynamic expansion, and sub-synced sidechaining. You get the aggressive, screaming harmonics of a blown-out console, but your original transient snap and groove stay completely bolted down.
Features include:
- 01 // DYNAMIC SATURATION: The math compresses the incoming signal, slams it into one of 7 saturation curves (Tube, Grime, Foldback, etc.), and then inverses the dynamics on the output. You get the aggressive bite of a pinned clipper, but your initial punch actually survives the math.
- 02 // PHASE MODULATION: This is distortion through time instead of volume. It takes your audio’s own waveform and uses it to modulate ridiculously short delay buffers at audio speed. It spits out these weird, throat-like formant overtones. Static clippers physically can’t do this…
- 03 // RING MOD SIDECHAIN: This turns your sub-bass into a control weapon. It splits the signal, grabs every individual half-cycle of your 808, and uses it to rhythmically gate and tear apart the top end. Your low-end fundamental stays 100% clean so you don’t wreck your mix.
- 04 // MORPH: A vector wavetable shaper. You draw custom transfer curves using bezier handles across 4 distinct frames. Or just use the factory banks if you’re lazy. You can automate the Morph knob to sweep between shapes with 4x oversampling so the top end doesn’t sound like a broken Speaker.
- 05 // MS DUCK: Mid/Side dynamic ducking. When your kick hits, the Mid channel ducks the Sides sample-by-sample. The stereo field clamps to dead mono on the transient and blooms out wide in the gaps.
You don’t have to pick just one engine. The matrix lets you stack any two algorithms in serial or parallel, and you can switch between them without it clicking and blowing out your studio monitors. I also threw in a Hardware Strip knob. It basically just dumps a bunch of analog garbage onto your signal, circuit asymmetry, gated noise floors, slew rate limiting, magnetic hysteresis. Just in case your 64-bit digital audio sounds too clean and you need it to feel like a neglected console from 1984.
Heat Man is available to Windows users (VST3).
For more information on Heat Man, click here:
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