Saturn 2 by Fabfliter | Everything You Need to Know | All New Features Explained

Hey what’s up everybody Joshua Casper back at you the plug-in boutique and today we’re checking out Saturn 2 by fabfilter saturn 2 is a massive update for Saturn 1 it comes jam-packed with new features and I’m excited to share with you in this video you can expect to learn about every new feature and just in general at Saturn 2 is capable of so for reference for people who don’t know what Saturn one was Saturn is a saturation and distortion plugin it’s got multiband capability modulation and a whole host of other features it can go from anywhere from subtle saturation to lightly color sound all the way to distortion and even bit crushing and just really gnarly effects this is Saturn tune on the screen and if you’re familiar Saturn one you’ll know right off the gate that it looks much different and it looks much better this is completely resizable if I click and drag on the sides here I can make it any size I want there’s also if you click right here some preset sizes and even full screen capability so I’m gonna what I’m gonna do is come in and just choose clean for now okay so as I said Saturn 2 is multiband in a way the addo band is to come operate at the top so right now this saturation unit is gonna color cover the full frequency range that comes in to Saturn however if I click this Add button I now have dual control over this crossover point and I can have up to 6 bands come up here I can add up to 6 doosh doosh so you can see I have really precise control over any of these bands one of the new features added to 7/2 is the crossover slope options we can go from 6 DB up to 48 DB there are also a number of other features that are really great for using saturn EV for mastering and that is the linear phase option down here just click it once to turn it on when it’s green it’s on and then there’s the high quality we’ve got good and superb so this is oversampling good is going to be 8 times over sampling and it’s going to be good enough for most applications distortion processing introduces digital aliasing effects you know especially in a higher drive situation and when you enable this high quality mode you drastically reduce aliasing artifacts though it does come at the cost of CPU so that’s why they say in the manual that good is going to be good enough for most people superb is actually 32 times over sampling so good is eight times as superb is 32 times that’s gonna be a massive drain on the CPU so if you’re experiencing aliasing issues and you want to make sure it’s like as least as it could be effectively zero then you want to turn it on superb this in conjunction with the linear phase option is really going to help Saturn to find its way under mastering effects chains now some other additions to Saturn 2 that are geared toward mastering or the subtle saturation subtle tape subtle tube and subtle transformer so those are just really really scaled back or pushed back saturation modes where you just looking to add that little bit of color so again let me come over here and just clean this out and right now I’m going to turn it on let’s turn it on saturation general saturation and I’m going to boost the drive on this piano to bypass it I’m just going to go ahead and turn this off this is what the piano sounds like unaffected very clean natural tones there and I’m using that so you can really hear what this saturation is doing so the default gentle saturation you can see as I increase the drive the actual background here gets a little bit brighter   and at a hundred percent it’s really you know you really can hear it and it’s really adding a bunch of color if I come into saturation turn on subtle saturation and leave that drive all the way at a hundred percent you can see that it’s only coloring it a little bit and that’s the same thing with the subtle tube subtle tape and subtle transformer and while we’re on the topic of distortion and saturation modes inside of the amp section we now have two American amplifier recreations or emulations and two British rough ones so what I’m going to do is just go ahead and flip through those you can hear them I’m gonna leave it to dry on 100%   so as you can hear they’re really nice sounding emulations of amplifiers and obviously throw those on some guitar and you’re gonna get some really really great results other new ones are the entire transformer section here we’ve got three different types the subtle obviously for mastering gentle and then warm   there are also two new effects the fold back and the breakdown I’m go ahead and turn it on breakdown I’m going to control click this to set it down to zero so obviously a really crazy effect that gets going to get a lot of use in breakdowns that’s probably why it’s titled up   very cool and then the fold back   you   some really really cool effects there so one of the biggest focuses for Saturn 2 was the modulation capabilities to add a modulator you just got a click add source down here and a few of these got big updates for example the envelope generators once I’ve added that and by the way all of these are color-coded if I add an X LFO you can see here it’s kind of this light green while this one’s a blue and this is going to come in very handy once you have a lot of modulation going on you want to just kind of visually see what’s modulating what if I take this little disc here and just drag and drop it onto the drive   so you can see that happening you can see the animation there happening if I click this I can actually have my fullscreen view of the modulator itself that’s the same thing with any of the other ones I’m gonna come in here and another new feature inside of the envelope generator is the slope we can now adjust the slope so I have my attack time over here but now I have full control over the slope of that attack now another really cool thing too is if I add a second band or a third band or a fourth band and come over here you can see that I have my normal input to trigger this or I can have my external sidechain to trigger this where I can trigger it through a MIDI input or another new feature for Saturn 2 is the capability to trigger it on a per band basis so if I want to trigger this envelope generator from the low-end content and only the low-end content I just turned it on band 1 and you can see that this modulator is on band 1 over here or the band furthest to the left by this little blue dot if I click that little blue dot I just have my controls over here if I come down here and then you can see the drive has that little blue dot again this color coding really works to help see things clearly if I click that I either have it over here as well and this is where you set your range and you can invert the range and you can also invert the range over here or bypass to see what your effect is   and let’s turn on something like   if I add this LFO to that as well you can see the LFO there that’s that yellow line and when it’s yellow it means it has more than one parameter active though you can see down here which two parameters have been routed and you can also see that up here at the top as well and again we can adjust the range and in fact let me go ahead and just get rid of this and I just want to show you here if I invert this it’s just gonna go down instead of up   so depending on what you’re looking for another new feature the threshold will actually have the input velocity level so you can easily adjust the threshold value while seeing the input signal you can also audition the internal sound if you click and hold the headphones here so that’s the sound that’s actually being used to trigger the threshold you can also turn it on normal or neutral sustain so normal is arranged between zero and one and sustain outputs zero when it’s in a sustain mode the envelope follower also got an update here if I just, in fact, let me go ahead and clean this out I like just to keep things clean while I’m doing these come in here to the envelope follower again click to open it up the envelope follower now has a transient mode if I click right here I can have this feller be triggered by the envelope or the transients which will be helpful for something like a bass with a lot of attack or especially something like drums and also I mean just look at how good this slows we’ve got the envelope follower attack and release times and just looks so good oh another thing I forgot to mention if I jump back into the envelope generator and open it up if-then ads been like an X LFO this threshold parameter is now automatable so if I do that and then do this you know I’m now having kind of modulator x’ modulating the modulator that’s modulating the drive so you can really start to get creative and in-depth of what’s happening inside of here and in fact if I come into the Alec X LFO both the frequency and the balance parameters are modulated well as well and so is the glide so I can modulate the glide I can modulate the frequency and I can modulate the balance the balance is going to be towards the bottom of the dial and it’s that outside ring you can see here I’ve got this and that’s because we’re having this modulate that and that modulate this which is kind of negating what we’re looking for but I’m just trying to show you that these are much label parameters inside of the modulator themselves and jumping back into the envelope follower the same deal if we have multiple bands we can trigger that envelope follower by the normal input by the sidechain input or by anyone of the bands and they’re just gonna pop up here as you add more bands so if I have another one coming here I can use that band as well another cool thing about version two is if I double click I can rename these to keep things really organized and I know really quickly what’s going on another thing about the X LFO is that we have a reit rigger option and a legato option so just to further keep I’m going to come into effects presets and just turn one of these on you can see how gnarly they are you can actually modulate the crossover position as well and I just want to point this out while I’m inside of here is I can easily see what is modulating each one of these bands and if I click up here I can see my entire modulation matrix and I full quick access over the ranges you know I can easily change those I can get rid of them I can invert them I can bypass them it’s really really helpful and I can also see that on a per band basis I can see what’s modulating these crossover positions and any one of the parameters that’s being modulated it has the same deal it’s got a matrix in and of itself just probably the parameter so this is per band up here at the top this is by parameter and then this is the controller itself having it all color-coded and actually seeing kind of these heat maps it’s just a really great visual way to see what’s happening even if you don’t even have any audio playing another new feature are these sliders and in fact, I kind of skipped over that so let me go back into it while we were talking about the modulators slider control and what this is is essentially just like the XY control but click and drag that on to the drive I now have control over whatever range we set again by clicking right here if I want to go 100% ahead now have control over that there and that’s kind of like a really easy way to have a kind of mixing capabilities to get things done quicker and you can have up six of those and those are six sliders or 6 XY controllers or any combination so up to six and this XY controller is essentially this slider but with two controls with it and it down here we actually have kind of a preset where I can turn that slider into an XY one and you’ll see that it’s a little bit different and that’s because I have it from zero to one if I turn it from negative one to zero to one then it then becomes this one and we can have control over the left and the right bipolar as its called and that’s the same thing with a slider if we come down here and turn the back to a slider, if I have it negative 1 to 0 to 1 then I can do it this way as well and I can easily come in and change those however I see fit and then the last thing I want to talk about is obviously we’ve got some new presets inside of here, we’ve got one for coloring Drive guitar lo-fi and effects and then we also have presets for any one of the modulator so if I add let’s say an envelope generator and I click this little arrow next to the title I have some nice presets to give me somewhere quickly if I come in here to the X LFO, for example, you’ve got lots of presets to choose from once I add that if I open it up I’ve got my presets so a really huge update to Saturn – it sounds absolutely phenomenal anyway I’m Joshua Casper I hope you learned something links as always in the video description and I’ll see you in the next video