Selkie - Transistor Saturator

prerequisites:

plugdata-fx (free, hosts the patch)

saturator that can do anything from gentle, silky saturation to aggressive distortion. it uses a hand-crafted topology designed to emulate the kind of dynamic distortion you can get in fancy schmancy plugins without the CPU overhead, possibly non-ergonomic UI, or licensing BS.

now let me ruin the magic:

drive: increases input gain while decreasing output gain to keep volume levels relatively consistent

bias: constant dc bias for the saturation algorithm, the actual dc offset is filtered out of the plugins output

trans: adds transformer saturation (subtle compression effect, extra saturation in the low end. achieved by adding a bias that sluggishly follows the amplitude of the input signal)

mix: mixes unprocessed input signal and fully processed output signal

satu: selects saturation model

• option 1 - soft saturation curve (atan approx)
• option 2 - silky saturation curve (x - 0.125(x * abs(x)))

trns: selects transformer model

• option 1 - juicy transformer (bias derived from x^2)
• option 2 - respectful transistor (bias derived from abs(x))

docs at (this will be a link to my website when its up. lol)

1.1 changelog: 

added new (default) saturation model that uses an atan approximation

added new (default) transformer model that derives its bias from x^2 

removed unnecessary subtraction of transformer bias signal after passing through saturation stage

1.0

the only meaningful difference that isn't objectively inferior is the subtraction of the transformer bias signal, but it turns out this adds (what i deem to be) unnecessary low-end distortion that does not pass through the saturation stage. if you like this, or are like one of 3 people that might possibly have a project that uses this version you get it in the download too