New Music Gear Monday: New Fangled Audio Punctuate Saturation Plugin

Sometimes a product has just one feature that everyone latches onto as most desired, which then becomes a product in its own right. That’s what’s happened with New Fangled Audio’s Punctuate plugin, which started its life as a feature on the company’s Elevate Mastering Limiter.

Punctuate is a multi-band transient modulator based on the critical bands in the human ear. Its intelligent algorithms allow you to control the transient emphasis or suppression of 26 critical frequency bands with just 4 controls. This makes for an incredibly powerful, but very easy to use, transient modulator.

Transient shapers are typically used by mixers to either crank up or soften the transients or elongate the sustain of instruments. Traditional transient plugins work on the entire frequency band of a signal at once, but Punctuate uses a model of the human ear to run a set of transient shapers across the whole spectrum of human hearing. This allows you to tailor the attack of a whole range of instruments, busses, and full mixes a lot more precisely without messing with the entire frequency range.

Punctuate is an excellent addition to a mastering buss because it allows you to accomplish a number of tricks that can prevent having to remix. You can do things like turning the drums up or down in the mix, bring instruments like acoustic guitars and pianos forward in the mix, pull a high-hat out of a snare track, and much more.

The plugin provides control for all 256 frequency bands, including the ability to solo each band, along with Transient Emphasis, Transient Strength, Adaptive Transient and Adaptive Length parameter controls. There’s also a scrolling meter display that shows the transient modulation in each band, and a Mix control for parallel processing.

The plugin is available for both Mac and PC and all plugin formats, and has a special introductory price of just $49 (regularly $99). You can find out more here, or check out the video below.

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