Another free plugin for you today and this one is badass!
Meet Audio Damage’s huge Rough Rider, what the company describes as “a modern compressor with a bit of a “vintage” style bite and a unique warm sound”. I’d just say it fucking rocks!
It’s got to be one of the best free compressor plugins ever, and I’d have no problem using this as my drum buss/parallel comp. Punchy, smacking are words I’d use to describe It’s sound, works best when being slammed. Does tend to roll of the highs a bit, but easy to EQ them back post-comp.
Features:
- Ratio: The ratio knob is logarithmic in operation. Completely anti-clockwise is 1:1, and completely clockwise is 1:1000. The 12 o’clock position is 1:10, so everything to the left of center is single digits, and everything to the right is “atom bomb squish,” essentially.
- Attack and Release: We left off the actual time values, so you’re gonna have to use your ears, like the he-men did it in times of myth.
- Meter: That honking big dial in the middle of the UI is the gain reduction meter. It basically shows how much compression is occurring.
- Sensitivity: usually called “threshold” now, but we think “sensitivity” always made more sense. Turn to the right, you get more compression, essentially. Turn it all the way to the right, and you’ve got a distortion box, the sound of which is tuned by Ratio, Attack, and Release.
- Makeup: 30 dB of gain to compensate for the attenuation caused by the compressor.
- Active: From the front panel, this is simply an off/on switch, but if you automate it, strange things happen..
- MIDI Learn: Like all of our products, the VST version has MIDI Learn. Download any manual from the current product line for an explanation of how this works, as it is common among all our VST products.
