Musical analog saturation and distortion from the legendary Abbey Road Studios

The sound of classic tubes and transistors, driven hard from subtle to extreme, and excited by the ultra-rare EMI TG12321, the secret weapon of Abbey Road engineers.

Saturation is the heart and soul of analog recording and mixing—from the subtle soft clipping of a tube preamp, which adds warmth and pleasing harmonics to a drum or vocal part; to full-blown console distortion that makes a synth, bass or guitar part ‘sing’ in the mix.

Modeled directly from time-proven saturation chains at Abbey Road Studios, Abbey Road Saturator provides inspiring saturation and distortion unlike any other device. The plugin offers two versatile desk distortion flavors: the crunchy tube REDD sound, and the rounded solid-state TG12345 tone—with the sophisticated input, gain and output stages of both consoles calibrated to perfection by Abbey Road’s engineers.

But it doesn’t end here. Abbey Road engineers were known to experiment endlessly with the wealth of original EMI gear at their disposal—pushing the equipment to its limits and reaching “happy accidents.” Abbey Road Saturator captures the very happiest of such accidents.

In 1962, EMI Central Research Laboratories patented a tape noise reduction system called the TG12321—a “compander” that compresses on input (encoding) and expands on output (decoding).

Features :

• Created in collaboration with Abbey Road StudiosAccurate recreation of crunchy tube & smooth solid-state analog saturation flavors
• The rare EMI TG12321 Compander excites the input pre-saturation: a method pioneered by the 1st generation of Abbey Road pop engineers
• Detailed pre and post gain EQ to shape the distortion character
• Phase knob dramatically alters the distortion soundFlexible control of the Compander’s crossover frequencies
• M/S processing allows distortion to affect just mid or just sides
• Mix control to blend the saturated/distorted signal with the original signal
• Presets by Grammy winning producers & engineers Lu Diaz, Joe Barresi, Dave Pensado, many more

System Requirements

PC

• Intel Core i5 / i7 / i9 / Xeon / AMD Quad-Coret
• 8 GB RAM
• 8 GB free disk space on the system drive
• Windows 10 64 bit
• Screen Resolution Minimum: 1024x768
• AAX Native/Audiosuite, VST3 or Audio Units host
• Avid VENUE or MultiRack SoundGrid

Mac

• Intel Core i5 / i7 / i9 / Xeon
• 8 GB RAM
• 8 GB free disk space on the system drive
• 10.12.6 - 10.15
• Screen Resolution Minimum: 1024x768
• AAX Native/Audiosuite, VST3 or Audio Units host
• Avid VENUE or MultiRack SoundGrid

Demo :

Download the Abbey Road Saturator demo here

Videos