Plamen

Sculpt your saturation

The difference between dull and exciting can sometimes be just saturation. But not just its amount but also its character. We believe every frequency band deserves different treatment, and that’s why we created Plamen. This flexible multi-band saturator can add a different kind and amount of saturation to each band, resulting in a balanced tone, and it can even make it in parallel!

Tonal balance in 5 bands: Different frequency bands in audio can have varying levels of energy, and when you apply saturation uniformly across the entire spectrum, it can lead to an imbalanced sound. Plamen allows you to selectively add warmth and harmonics to five adjustable frequency ranges in different parallel levels, thereby achieving a more balanced and pleasing tonal character.

Targeted enhancement: With Plamen, you can focus on specific elements in the mix, such as adding warmth and richness to the bass frequencies, adding harmonics to the midrange to make instruments cut through the mix, or adding sparkle to the high frequencies. This targeted enhancement helps individual elements stand out and contributes to a clearer mix.

Wide range of use: Plamen can be used on vocals and single instrument tracks, but also on master tracks. It is an excellent tool for sound designers and producers looking to experiment and create unique sounds. By applying different saturation characteristics to different frequency bands with different dry/wet ratios, you can create interesting textures, harmonics, and timbres that may not be achievable with traditional saturation techniques.

Simple operation: Although Plamen has many knobs, applying saturation is very simple. Just choose the saturation type, dial the band’s input gain, choose the parallel amount of colour added (MOJO) and balance the band’s output volume. If you don’t get enough drive, use AGC Boost to add an extra 10dB to the band’s input.

Five Types of Saturation: Plamen offers a diverse range of five distinct saturation types for each band, allowing you to choose the perfect colour and character for your audio. Each band can use three classic analogue preamp types, simulation of tape saturation (Magnetic) or clipping (a style of saturation— or distortion — characteristic of many beloved types of AD-driven input).

Tape Wow: In addition, you may add the overall Tape Wow effect, which represents a relatively slow form of flutter (pitch variation) that you may know from vintage tape recorders.

Flexible Crossover: Four crossover points give you enough control of the frequencies you want to saturate. It is your choice what you consider subs, bass, low-mids, high-mids, and treble. The crossover works in two modes. You can switch between the Linear phase or the Analog 6dB/octave type.

All five or one? Each frequency band can be soloed or muted (bypassed). This feature is to be used when you check the impact of a particular band, or you simply want to add saturation to selected bands only. You can use not only driving the input of the bands but also fully parallel Mojo or additional parallel Dry/Wet mix for the whole plugin! And this is all in the Linear phase!

Oversampling for Uncompromising Quality: Plamen goes above and beyond with its 2x, 4x, and 8x oversampling options, ensuring maximum precision and pristine audio quality. By oversampling your audio, you can eliminate unwanted artefacts and aliasing, leaving you with nothing but crystal-clear, professional-grade results.

What does Plamen stand for? SoundDevice Digital team is Czech, and they decided to enrich your vocabulary with a word from their language. Plamen [plah-men] is a Czech expression for “flame” – yes, the thing that makes other things warmer. Although some would say the word “Plameny” (plural) may be more suitable for a multi-band plugin.

Hassle-free software protection: No iLok, no dongle nor internet access is required for activation. Our software uses licence files to activate your software. You can freely use the purchased software on all your computers as long as you are the user.

Realistic 3D yet flexible GUI: The photorealistic graphic user interface of the plugin gives you the feeling you are touching the real hardware. But it easily adapts to your needs. You can always drag the arrow in the bottom right corner to change its size – make it smaller to save valuable screen space, or enlarge it to make it easier to use.

64-bit audio quality at ANY sampling rate: The plugin provides the maximum audio quality you can get. It uses internal 64-bit audio processing and can handle any sampling rate. 192 kHz or even higher.

Smart bypass: The intelligent way our plugins manage bypassing ensures that you don’t get any clicks or harmful noises when automating the parameter. It also compensates for latency ensuring that the bypass states are perfectly in sync with each other.

Intelligent sleep on silence: This plugin intelligently detects whether it makes sense to perform processing at all. And if not, it temporarily turns on sleep mode. In such a state, it requires virtually no CPU at all to save the computing sources for other processes.

Free-for-life updates: Our plugins never get obsolete. We keep track of the current operating systems and DAWs. And you may always update to the most recent version for free. Without paying a cent, a penny, or whatever currency you prefer.