Saturated EQ
Slick EQ M is a superb mastering EQ plugin from Tokyo Dawn Labs, which uses a parallel internal topology. This means that bell boosts are created by blending a band-pass filtered signal with the original, while the low and high shelves use parallel low- or high-pass filters respectively.
If it’s enabled, those parallel filters get a touch of gentle, tasteful saturation, too, which adds harmonics to that frequency band. And in a similar manner to multiband distortion, the lower bands will saturate without intermodulation from the higher bands, and vice versa. This helps to keep the saturation delightfully subtle, as you’d expect from a mastering processor, and perhaps helps to explain why colourful, analogue-modelled EQ plugins are popular, even though we now have ‘perfect’ digital EQ available.
But this type of parallel filtering and distortion doesn’t have to be subtle or tasteful. Wavesfactory’s Spectre plugin works in a very similar manner to Slick EQ M, and even looks kind of like a modern EQ plugin (except you can only boost, not cut). However, Spectre allows you to be as drastic or subtle as you like, depending which mode you pick at the bottom of the interface, and how much of the distorted signal you blend in via the mix knob.
You get a choice of symmetrical ‘solid-state’ saturation, asymmetric ‘tube’ saturation or a couple of different tape styles, all switchable on a per-band basis. But that’s not all – you can pick hard clipping digital-style bitcrushing or drastic rectification, making the range of sonic possibilities truly endless.
While it lacks pretty pictures of glowing valves or spinning reels, this is perhaps the most versatile, powerful colouring and distortion plugin we’ve used – from gentle enhancement to hairy-chested fury! And with high quality 4x or 16x oversampling available, it’s just as suitable for mastering as mixing.