Caelum Audio offers the Roast Beef saturation plugin as a FREE download until December 16th, 2022.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales have concluded, but Caelum Audio is still in the holiday spirit. Roast Beef is a mini version of Caelum’s own Beef, a saturator. Roast Beef contains only a handful of controls, a festive angry bull, and some massive overdrive to get you in the holiday spirit.
This holiday-themed distortion unit is light on controls but big on sound. The three knobs are labeled sub, noise, and drive, and their function is clearly labeled.
Sub focuses on sub and bass frequencies, adding some needed heft and harmonics to the low end. The sound of the low-end focus sounded comparable to Tone Project’s free Basslane. It lacks the stereo width controls for making the bass mono, but it certainly seems to pull and focus the low end to the ear. The character of the low end is pleasant, and it can easily go to growling extremes when pushed to maximum value.
Noise uses fixed-rate modulation to introduce some grit to the sound. Like Goodhertz’s Tupe, the noise knob acts less like a noise generator and more like increasingly intense modulation to further distort the signal. This worked best on basses, synthesized and live, adding some intrigue and presence to an otherwise low-end heavy sound.
The final control, Drive, is exactly what it says on the tin. Drive acts as an overdrive circuit and provides a massive wideband boost to the gain of a signal. With up to 35dB of gain on tap, Roast Beef’s drive control can certainly cook a signal to well beyond crispiness. Sadly missing from the drive section is some form of tone control, but this is present in the full paid version of Caelum’s own Beef.
Roast Beef is free until December 16th, with the plugin becoming a paid plugin at the retail price of $0.99.
On Windows machines, Roast Beef will run in VST3 and AAX formats. It is also available on macOS in AU, VST3, and AAX formats. For mobile users, this is one of the rare seasonal freebies, with Roast Beef available in iOS for AUv3 hosts.
Download: Roast Beef
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Last Updated on January 24, 2023 by Tomislav Zlatic.
