The Intelligence

Are you a music producer or engineer looking for some tasty analog modeled saturation? If you haven’t explored the Soundtoys Decapitator yet, it’s about time to consider it! This plug in has a unique flavor that can beef up vocals, drums, guitars, synths and more. Today, we’re going to take a deep dive on it’s capabilities and sonic characteristics.

Styles

The Decapitator has 5 different modes, each of them with a unique signature sound that you can run audio through. This will determine the color of the saturation. The five buttons on the bottom labeled A, E, N, T, and P are the different modes that are available.

Each of these modes is modeled after a different piece of analog gear, which to purchase alone would cost several thousand dollars each. Luckily, we can skip that and still get the sought after sonic characteristics that they provide! Try these all on different source material to experiment with! I feel that drums are some of the most noteworthy contenders for the use of this plug in, especially to hear most clearly what it’s doing, but certainly I find myself using it on a variety of material to give it a bit of thickness and warmth.

The first mode, A, is an emulation of the Ampex 350 preamp. This is the most subtle/smooth of the styles. You’ll notice it tames the sound a bit, reducing the low sub frequencies while also giving it a bit of brightness, but tapering off some ultra high frequencies. The next one is E, a model of the Chandler EMI TG Channel preamp. You’ll notice that this one has a bit more thickness in the low end as well as brighter highs.

The N is modeled after the Neve 1057 preamp, which the manual declares as phenomenal for guitars. I find it also very smooth and similar to the sound of the A style, with a bit less brightness and more thickness, more low end is retained here. The final two styes, T and P, both emulate a distortion unit called the Culture Vulture, but representing two different modes on the unit. The T is the triode while the P is the pentode distortion, and both of these offer a grittier sound than the other modes. They each sound a bit different and the best way to understand the difference is to simply test them out!

Drive

The juice of this plug in is in the Drive knob, and can be even further accentuated with the use of the Punish button. The drive is a gain control, increasing the input signal into the unit. This will cause the style you’ve chosen to saturate the signal much more, which also increases the volume output. There is a switch next to the output knob that is on by default called “auto“, and this sets the output for you to try to match the signal’s volume before using the decapitator. You can also turn it off and manually adjust the output.

The punish button adds an additional 20dB of gain coming into the unit, which is where things will likely start to get distorted to the extreme. You can then drive it even more with the drive knob as well.

Tone

The bottom three middle knobs, Low Cut, Tone, and High Cut, are applying EQ to the signal to change the tonal characteristics. The Low Cut is applying a low cut filter to the signal before the saturation, which can help clean the end result if you have a lot of low end in your signal. The switch next to it called thump adds a resonant peak right at the cutoff, which boosts low frequencies. The Tone knob also affects the signal before it gets saturated, turning it more towards dark reduces the high end and increases the low end, while bright does the opposite. The High Cut knob affects the sound after the saturation, and cuts off the high frequencies. By default, it’s a 6db / octave slope, but if you switch on steep, it becomes a much more aggressive 30db / octave slope.

The final knob is the Mix knob, which applies the saturation in parallel with the dry signal, resulting in less extreme saturation. You can use the mix knob to apply a very extreme saturation but at a less apparent level, while applying simply a less extreme saturation will have a very different sound.

Closing Thoughts

This plug in has been a staple of my production process for some time, and once you get familiar with it, you’ll know exactly when you want the kind of color it offers, giving you even more control of your sonic palette while creating! If you want to hear some of my work, I am a drum and bass producer and you can check that out on all platforms here.

Stay creative my friend!

-Ryahu