Slate FG-Stress $49

I am also looking at this. I haven't bought anything Slate in a long time, this might pull me in and the price is right. I hate subscriptions.

IK has their Distressor thing out too now, wonder how that compares to the Slate...

I have the Arouser and dig it. I'd recommended grabbing both to demo and compare.

I had the Slate version for a while. It sounds great, I just hated how it's embedded in the slate rack. I don't have any other Slate plugins, but had to always pull up the entire rack with the entire catalog, sift through to find the one plug that I owned. I'd inevitably hit the wrong one. I jumped over to the UAD version when it was on a super sale and I had a coupon. I also just picked up the newest version of Arouser when it was last on sale. I have a pair of HW Distressors that I've been mulling over selling.

Re-demoing FG-Stress. It's good, I really like it. I'm just not sure if I want to get back into the game of having the VMR rack shell everywhere. What am I mixing with? I dunno, just a bunch of "VMR" all over the place...who knows what's going on up there...

Granted, if all I was using was FG-Stress then "VMR" would just be a proxy for FG-Stress. Still kind of annoying though having to always be looking at that mostly empty rack.

If you want a more 1:1 DSP option for a Distressor, I think FG-Stress is worth a demo.  I didn't find Arousor to be all that much like the hardware Distressors I had.  Arousor is kind of its own thing, intentionally I think.  

Then again, I'm sure you don't really need FG-Stress...  

Arousor was way too bright and pingy for me. I already owned Presswerk, which does the Distressor thing and more without the plastic.

I think of our hardware Distressor as kind of plasticy, especially when compressing hard. It can work, but it does this thing.

I don’t think any plug does what the distressor does or even what a dbx 160 does. Maybe the Unisum Hygge FET preset from Lagerfeldt is the closest I’ve heard to a Distressor in the box in terms of getting that bright plastic, shiny polycarbonate timbre but it doesn’t enhance body to drums like Distressor hardware and other plugs. Unisum Hygge FET preset really splats them against the back of an old crt TV screen more than a Distressor. By splat I mean spread out the hit in the stereo image more than bring the body of the drum into focus with the plastic top end.
 
For Presswek, Just remember to use the lookahead when you really want to flatline something. Presswerk fuzzes out transients instead of punching them down in a flurry like a good FET but it does add body. It does not brightly eviscerate them like a cheap FET or VCA and is certainly is not a distressor with deliberate solid state distortion like a guitar pedal. Its saturation feels closer to Satin or even sort of if you could imagine what Uhe and Sascha Eversmeier wanted a Fatso to be. Meanwhile it doesn’t compact the image like Eversmeier’s earlier and still cool Blockfish. The image is just phased a bit like a tape.

The almost tape saturation doesn’t warm transiemtsout of existence like DC8C3. Arousor feels like it just keeps the ping of the hit with the hit gone while meanwhile being mixed with an aliased digital clipper. It’s not a terrible clicky pos like Waves or Black Rooster 1176.


Other plugs that can peak limit drums behave totally differently. Kotelnikov squishes cleanly like a fader rider that will also take down all the transients without eviscerating them, Faraday Limiter really feels like it’s smoothing them over until you turn on the analog and it feels like it’s transformer saturating them out in a weird bright way, Silika sounds like a cool clipper,, Neold V76U73 converts them into pushed tube harmonics, etc.

To where my taste come from, Molot used to be my favorite compressor for anything not fast attack and now I think Molot GE is the greatest plugin compressor ever made but it’s a Russian nuclear powered death ray that can turn, I mean vaporize, a drum into a smoking pile of ash on alpha. I often need to add back in high end with a cool shelf but the whole process makes everything sound cooler even if the result sounds like it’s covered in dust and dirt. It’s a 180 degree turn away from the timbre of a Distressor or a bright 1176 clone.

On a tangentially-related note, I'm about to graduate and I've been trying to use up any student discount stuff that I may not have access to soon and one thing I bit on is a year of Mix with the Masters. Half price for students but you have to have a currently valid student ID, not just a .edu email. ANYWAY, it comes with a license for Arousor (for as long as your MWTM is active, so at least a year for me). So I'll be comparing it to FG-Stress and giving it (Arousor) a fresh chance.

Shit I didn't think of checking with FF...

They've already got me on Pro-Q3, Pro-C2, Pro-DS, Pro-MB, Pro-R, Pro-L2, Saturn2...

Congratulations, Ragan! You’ve done something really significant. Kudos x3 for all the hard work, late nights, extra effort while still posting here and making some excellent music as well. Much appreciation for you.