CREOSOTE
The saturation engine.
Tape, tubes, iron and glue, an entire analog record chain in one photographed console. Every knob is calibrated to hardware behaviour. Every meter is a real instrument.
Most saturation plugins give you a color. CREOSOTE gives you a tape machine with ten formulas on the shelf, a tube stage you can re-valve, eight vintage compressors with their true circuits, a summing amp with real iron on the output. And you choose the order they run in.
CREOSOTE is calibrated and available for immediate deployment. The full record chain, every machine and every formula, nothing withheld.
ACQUIRE CREOSOTE · $50 $99The same installer everyone buys, running unlicensed for fourteen days. A licence unlocks it in place, no reinstall.
macOS Apple Silicon · AU / VST3 / AAX
Grab AMBER, COMPRESS or GRIT by its title strip and drag it to a new place on the console. The other modules slide aside, and the sound changes the moment you let go, crossfaded, click-free, with the same latency in every order.
The default runs AMBER into COMPRESS into GRIT: the valves and the compressor printed to tape last, the way a real record chain runs. Put GRIT first and the valves and the compressor react to the tape. Put COMPRESS first and the colour stages work on a steadier signal.
Save a preset in your order and it comes back that way; the factory presets load in the order they were voiced in. Summing, the output EQ and staging always follow, in that order.
Lift a module and it casts a shadow; slide it across and it takes on the light of the bay it is heading into. Every module was rendered in every bay, so the light is baked, not faked.
One section per module, in the default order. AMBER, COMPRESS and GRIT can be dragged into any order; SUMMING, the OUTPUT EQ and STAGING always follow them.
A three-stage valve amplifier you can re-tube, re-bias and re-era.
- · Preamp 12AX7, 12AT7, 12AU7, EF86.
- · Power EL84, EL34, 6L6, 6V6, KT66, KT88.
- · Rectifier 5Y3, GZ34, with era-true sag.
- · Per-stage ERA voicings and, in TWEAK, per-stage condition (new to worn), bias point (cold / normal / hot), plate voltage and load.
- · Hardware modes direct, transformer-coupled and passive-EQ output paths with analog-matched filter responses.
- · A calibrated drive law the whole knob is useful. 0.5% THD at operating level at zero, driven-amp harmonics at full, RMS auto-makeup holding your level steady while the character moves.
- · The models LEVEL CELL (opto, T4 three-stage cascade), BLACK FET (1176), ALL BUTTONS (1176, all in), TUBE MU (vari-mu), VCA BUS (console-bus VCA), DIODE BRIDGE, PWM, ZENER.
- · True topology, automatically each mode runs its hardware’s actual detector circuit. The opto, vari-mu, bridge and PWM units run feedback, with the full loop behaviour: the knee eases in wide, the gain reduction refuses to overcompress (it blooms instead of clamping), and the release stretches after deep sustained reduction. The FET, VCA and Zener units run feedforward. Force either topology in TWEAK to A/B a mode against itself.
- · Always-on lookahead with full delay compensation, sidechain filtering, auto-release, and a real edgewise gain-reduction meter: one needle, accurate ballistics, hot bulbs behind the glass.
- · 7 machines A800, ATR-102, JH-24, MTR-90, MM1200, 280 and a prosumer reel, each with its own head-bump frequency, asymmetry and pre-emphasis character.
- · 10 tape formulas 456, 406/407, 499, GP9, 250, 996, SM468, SM911, SM900 and a master-grade reel, with drive headroom, de-emphasis and hysteresis modeled per formula.
- · Width, speed and calibration ¼" to 2" 24-track, 7.5/15/30 IPS, +3/+6/+9 cal, over and under bias.
- · A calibrated saturator 0 VU = −18 dBFS, hardware-true. DRIVE at zero measures 0.39% THD at operating level, the gentle third-harmonic bloom of a well-aligned deck, and drives to honest tape slam at full.
- · Program-dependent hysteresis the tape warms up under sustained signal and remembers what just passed through it: soft attacks, lingering tails.
- · A real transport wow and flutter with per-channel phase offset, scrape-band noise, head-gap width and dropout aging driven by WEAR, with the motion authored on the AGE LFO oscilloscope page.
- · Record-amp slew limiting in TWEAK: the HF transient rounding of a real record amplifier, referenced to operating level, off to thick.
- · Comb-free MIX the dry blend leg runs through a matched oversampling path, so partial mix never phase-combs against the wet signal. Measured, not assumed.
- · PREGAIN, WIDTH (M/S), BALANCE with twin backlit VU meters on the deck: real needle ballistics, real bulbs.
- · IRON a modeled output transformer (off / subtle / rich) with three voicings, the round British console, the punchy American, the broadcast desk, built as a flux integrator with magnetic remanence and leakage-resonance air rather than an EQ curve.
- · The master bus character saturation, stereo glue and a ceiling clipper, all anti-derivative anti-aliased, all measured. Oversampling from 2× to 8×, clean minimum-phase or vintage character, with the HQ button right on the header.
Eight bands of dynamic EQ drawn on a machine-tool chart: cream card, blue graticule, red pen.
- · Dynamic architecture per-band frequency, gain and Q, plus dynamic gain with attack and release. Each band can duck or expand itself against the signal.
- · Drag-anywhere nodes including high-pass and low-pass bands.
- · Visual feedback pre and post curves displayed together, the dashed blueprint and the live red line, with the dynamic delta filled between them.
- · Decramped, analog-matched filters standard digital EQs cramp against Nyquist and lose the top octave at 44.1/48k. CREOSOTE’s shelves and bells are matched to their analog prototypes to within 0.16 dB at 20 kHz. The air band behaves like the circuit, not like the sample rate.
- · INPUT / LEVEL honest gain staging in and out.
- · TONE a direction-aware tilt. Darkening reaches into the presence region, it warms rather than dulling the top octave. Brightening lifts the air band above the harshness zone and gently tightens the lows. Different corner frequencies per direction, chosen by measurement.
- · LIMIT a lookahead ceiling with its own vertical gain-reduction instrument: reduction pours top-down, oil-damped.
- · AUTO LEVEL one button, unity out.
Every module opens onto its own TWEAK page, where the calibration lives: bias and formula behind the tape, valve condition and plate voltage behind the tubes, detector topology behind the compressors.
Two LA-2As off the same line compressed differently; two channels of one console rolled off at different corners. Pick UNIT 1 through 16 and the instance adopts that unit’s component tolerances: filter corners drift up to ±5%, drive points shift fractions of a dB, the channels mismatch just slightly. Deterministic, recall-safe, and loudness-matched to ±0.005 dB. Set VARIANCE from off to vintage, and tell your collaborator to use unit 7.
Heavy drive usually costs you your transients. PUNCH detects onsets and momentarily eases the drive into the saturators, level-compensated and wet-path only, so the crack of the stick passes clean while the body stays thick. Measured: attacks pass around 1.4 dB cleaner at FULL with sustain character unchanged.
Every audible improvement ships behind a DSP version gate. A session recalls bit-identical, not close, identical, module order included, while new sessions get the newest behaviour. One deliberate exception: sessions saved before module ordering existed open in the new tape-last order. Enforced with an automated audio regression suite of 44 measured pass-bars and golden renders on every build.
Marketing says warm. We say: 0.39% THD at 0 VU on a calibrated deck; alias floors driven down 16 to 35 dB by ADAA; EQ matched to analog prototypes within 0.16 dB at 20 kHz; presets loudness-matched to unity; comb-free wet/dry blending verified by null test. The measurement rig ships in our repository.
The interface is not a picture of a console. It is a console, photographed. Every panel, cap and instrument is rendered in Blender Cycles under one locked studio light and baked into the plugin.
The VU pair, the edgewise gain-reduction meters and every slider tile are backlit by modeled bulbs behind translucent glass. Power a module down and its glass goes dead, its lamps go out. Nothing fades; hardware does not fade.
Drag AMBER, COMPRESS or GRIT by its title strip and it lifts off the rack with a cast shadow, its neighbours slide aside, and it carries the light of each bay it passes through.
Lit lamps and lenses cast their glow onto the panel around them, from a dedicated plate-level light layer. A phosphor oscilloscope carries the AGE LFO: dark green CRT, amber etched graticule, blooming trace.
Bronze selector caps with dial-lamp values, cream pushbuttons with engraved legends, an emerald mains switch. Pressed, they travel; unpowered, they sit dark in the room light. The full chain runs around 6% of one core at 2× oversampling, and powered-off modules cost essentially nothing.
Two new light skins, PAPER and PRESS, join HYBRID and GREEN. Pick one in TWEAK > MASTER > CHASSIS.
Your skin is saved for you, not in your sessions: every CREOSOTE window follows it, and loading a preset never changes it.
An era-anchored factory library, voiced from classic recording chains: CLEAN PUNCH 82, BRITISH PROG 73, WORN TAPE 77, NATURAL SOUL 76, COLD MACHINE 75 and more, plus the THETA artist set.
Every factory preset loads in the module order it was voiced in, loudness-matched to unity against bypass, so you audition character and not volume. Your own presets remember the order you saved them in.
- Sample Rates44.1 to 192 kHz; behaviour verified by measurement at 48 and 96 kHz.
- Oversampling2× / 4× / 8×, clean minimum-phase or vintage character.
- CPUAround 6.6% of one core, full chain at 2× / 48 kHz. Bypassed modules near-zero.
- InterfaceResizable 50% to 200%, crisp at retina resolutions.
- FormatsAU · VST3 · AAX
- PlatformmacOS (Apple silicon and Intel)
- LatencyFixed and fully host-compensated (lookahead plus oversampling)
- Module OrderAMBER / COMPRESS / GRIT in any order, drag to reorder, click-free with the same latency in every order
- Session SafetyVersioned DSP, sessions and presets recall bit-identical, module order included