Audio Plugin Deals offers 76% off the Loc-Ness drum compressor by Tone Empire, available for $19 ($79 value) until March 26th, a saving of $60.
Loc-Ness is a drum compressor plugin for macOS and Windows. Tone Empire describes this plugin as a dedicated channel for processing individual drum hits, the room sound, and the entire drum bus.
See also: Free Saturation VST Pluginsn short, what they have done is bring together the controls they think you need to get a killer drum sound that eludes so many mixes.
When you open the Loc-Ness plugin, two large dials, Crust and Smash, catch your eye straight away. Crust controls the amount of saturation applied to the signal, and there are 4 types of saturation available.
Smash controls the amount of compression applied to the signal, with an on/off switch for the compressor’s attack. Switching the attack off makes the compressor behave more subtly.
All of your processing controls are in the middle of the UI, with pre and post-filters left and right. Visually, it’s neat and tidy, so you know exactly what’s going on from the signal hitting Loc-Ness to the signal leaving the plugin. Both filters are very useful, but the pre-filter especially, as it gives you the chance to alter how the saturation algorithm will react to the signal.
Between the two main dials are a dry/wet mix knob for parallel processing and an output trim knob. The output trim is pretty handy when you are heavy-handed with the Crust/Smash and need to rein it in a little without losing any feeling.
There’s also a phase button to flip the phase of the output. Along the bottom of the interface are a couple of drop-down menus. The first is for presets, and the second offers oversampling up to 8X.
There is a decent amount of presets, mostly for drums, but they cover synths, bass, guitars, and vox, too. I think the presets are very good; even if they don’t get you right where you want to be, they are handy starting points.
It definitely adds some life to your drums/percussion, and I can see myself thinking, OK, this needs that Loc-Ness sound. More so on drum tracks than other instruments, I think, but time will tell.
I didn’t have version 1, so I can’t say how much it’s improved, but I like version 2; it’s more versatile than expected. I also like the name, not just because I’m Scottish, although that’s part of it.
More info: Loc-Ness (76% OFF until March 26th, 2021)
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2 Comments
mx
ondoes it want to be some mixture of soundtoys devil-loc and decapitator?
do you have a guess how loc-ness compares to a combination of these two?
James N
onHey, that might be a pretty fair comparison, but I don’t own/use either of those Soundtoys plugins, so I couldn’t tell you how it compares directly.
From using Loc-Ness and hearing the others, I’d say you can get some very similar sounds; whether or not the Soundtoys pair have more to offer, I’m not sure (I know lots of people absolutely love Devil-Loc and Decapitator). Although, at this point, I haven’t heard anything that makes me want to buy them while I already have Loc-Ness.
I didn’t have Loc-Ness until this offer came up, so if you are considering which to buy, I’d start with Loc-Ness while it’s so cheap. If you don’t think it’s enough, then you haven’t lost much versus forking out for Devil Loc and Decapitator first.