It's just a cpu thing from my experience.
And I don't know the answer because I'm miles away from having a cpu good enough!

 

before you reach for a saturation plugin, try the following first:
lower the vocal fader a few dB, scoop out the low mids or give the mids and the top end a bell boost, compress it.

 

Last edited: Feb 9, 2021

My go to for a long time was Fabfilter Saturn.. has lots of presets to chose from, for some pretty cool effects.

Now, I just mainly use Soft Tube Saturation Knob. Nice and simple interface, but it sounds pretty good by my ears.

 

voxengos ovc maxed on multiple channels is fine for me not to many issues.
16 core ryzen

 

avid lo-fi

 

Round about 2x BPB Saturator which is free, so you can compare yourself.
The Tape saturation produces almost identical harmonics and aliasing, but OVC adds more compression and sounds snappier.

 

Rso extreme punch and warmth are nice for adding saturation the sausage is good one to

 

Softube Saturation Knob is one of the best saturation plugins I've used. Extremely simple as well. Just a beautiful sounding plugin. Other ones I really like are FabFilter Saturn and Soundtoys Radiator

 

I heard you can just take a rusty box cutter & gut your monitor to get that crunch.

It's what metalheads do to their cabs.

If Noisia can Scotch tape a fart to a speaker then you can rusty box gut your monitor, imo.

Don't quote me & don't @ me when you didn't receive the fun you wanted because you didn't read the instructions right.

 

I'd like to add my 2 cents to the thread. Well, I have a DAW Acoustica Mixcraft 8... I don't use it ( not my cup of tea), but its plugins
are something special, and of course, the saturator TRW - 1 (Pentode Audio).
This is how it looks:




It has few presets and the controls seen on the picture.
And these are the tracks where I used TRW - 1 on drums, back vocals and piano:





PS. Sorry for the off top, but Acoustica has also X-Bass plugin which
makes your thin ugly bass rich and fat...
and not forget to mention vsti Pianissimo which I count as the
best piano plugin

 

Klegrand DAW Cassette is amazing, if you want some nice 90s Hiphop Vibe in your drums

 

Isnt that like, using and vintage Table Knife with a Heavy Hammer to cut your Steak?

what like waves maxxbass?

Compared to what? whats your second fave?

 

Maybe, but I don't have waves maxxbass, so, can only assume

Compared to any other stock plugin. Second is old good Edirol Superquartet which has several pianos, epianos, rhodes, basses and drums,
by the way, sometimes even those expensive mega Gb Kontakt libs lose to the listed above tiny vsti, it depends on your mix

 

theres a lot of people on here getting confused between the differences betweenan frequency enhancer a distortion plugin a clipper and a tape plugin there different things so let me clarify.
Soundtoys radiator is a tape amp plugin
fab filter saturn is a multibanded all distortion unit thaqt can do saturation
sasuage fattner is a clipper not a saturation plugin
x bass is an exciter no way near a saturation plugin its more of a low end exciter/compressor.
stienberg quadra fuzz is a waveshaper

 

Arturia 1973 Pre or Analog Obsession BritPre if you want to add that "analog warmth" to your tracks. They're fast and they get the job done. That's basically what do in the analog world: record through a preamp and an eq/compressor and then finalize tracks on a console during mixing (using onboard processing).
Sometimes I go for iZotope Ozone Exciter for master buss multiband saturation.

 

way ahead of you
one of the coolest of them all is the mighty mda epiano!
no gui like airwindows. just needs the the right room/reverb
sounds very "musical"

 

if you want clean saturation or distortion just push the signal 6db in the redzone and there you have it saturation or distorion or both actually saturation or distortion is just distortion

 

Not really, 'Radiator, a dual drive tube input channel and EQ, based on the classic Altec 1567A tube mixer from the 1960s.'

 

Howard Benson Vocals very easy to get good results on vocals without too much hassles.