New Music Gear Monday: Newfangled Audio Invigorate Buss Compressor And Enhancer

Buss compression has gone from never used, to lightly used, to a basic ingredient of modern mixes, so every mixer is looking for a way to do it better. Where once a mix buss used several processors to get the required sound, now we’re seeing all-in-one processors that can do it all. Such is the case with Invigorate, a unique buss processor developed by Newfangled Audio and distributed by Eventide.

Invigorate incorporates a compressor, limiter, overdrive and EQ in a single processor. Among the things that makes it unique is what Newfangled calls a “Radar” display that allows you to quickly and easily dial in just the right amount of each process.

The Processors

For the compressor/limiter, a Level Detector allows you to dial in the right amount of Attack and Release. Plus, the Anti Pump control allows you to adjust the cutoff of a high-pass filter, which filters the signal before level detection. This gives you the ability to control its presence in the detection circuit and mitigate the pumping effect that sometimes happens when there’s a lot of compression and the release is set too short.

When it comes to the Overdrive section, the Curve parameters provide a lot more control than you’re probably used to. Shape is similar to a knee control on a compressor, as it adjusts how quickly the saturation occurs. Squash controls the amount of harmonics, and interacts with the adjustment of the Shape parameter. Gate makes sure that some of the quiet sections of the playback aren’t effected in the same way as the louder ones.

At the bottom of the plugin UI are three separate tone controls. Each of these tone controls have a low, mid, and high band which are adjustable between +12dB and -100dB by clicking and dragging in the area of each band. Pulling the bands to -100dB basically mutes that band, turning the filters into low pass or high pass filters respectively.

There’s More

There’s a large Mix control in the center of the plugin, but right below it is an interesting Compensate Gain control that allows you to hear what Invigorate is doing to the timbre of your sound without effecting the loudness. With that there’s also Nom LVL and Learn buttons that help the Compensate Gain to work at optimum. A Mute Dry parameter allows you to hear only the processed audio.

There’s a lot more to Invigorate that you’ll want to check out in the free 30 day trial.

Newfangled Audio Invigorate is available for Mac and PC in all plugin formats. It’s currently on sale for $49 until January 2nd, when it will return to its retail price of $99.

You can find out more here, or watch the video below for more details about how it works.

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