The original version was an asymmetrical saturation plugin to get the kind of distortion associated with vintage class A pre-amps. You can choose which kind of saturation you want for the positive side of the waveform and the negative side independently. Increasing the Q point dials in those juicy even order harmonics. You can see what this does by looking at the big sine wave. The wave is unrelated to your input signal. It shows you the exact transfer function which is happening internally but instead of showing the output signal, which would be a hectic incomprehensible mess with most musical signals, you see the effect on an extremely slow moving, big sine wave.

Because that's quite simple on its own, for the original release, I threw in a magical banana. This is a 3D object XY pad which, when the banana is selected, becomes a delta derived resonant proportional Q bell boost which is sent in isolation through the saturation side of the plugin and then blended with the original dry input signal. If that sounds too technical, don't overthink it, it basically just makes cool EQ sweep noises.

But there needs to be a way to deactivate the banana. You do that by selecting the XLR cable. This is enabled as default and doesn't do anything. It just routes your input signal into the saturation algorithm. But if we have two objects, we might as well have another, so there's also a piece of toast. This does the same thing as the banana effect but instead of doing that as a parallel process, it applies the effect to the entire input signal and then routes it into the saturation model. Again, if that sounds too technical, don't worry, it's similar to the banana but with a slightly different character.

As of version 2, a number of interesting features have been added. The most notable is the addition of the trout object. This is an 8×8-point (x64bit) 3D waveshaper using a Catmull–Rom spline for Z-axis interpolation. That sounds super technical but if you are interested, the version 2 release video explains exactly what it means, and it's not even all that hard to get what's going on if you ignore the actual math. So when you select the trout, it deactivates some of the regular saturation controls because the waveshaping effect is a completely different effect to the original class A saturation effect. When you move the fish upwards, it makes the effect more intense. When you spin the fish left and right, it morphs through the 8 waveshaping grids. You can see the exact transfer function applied on the big screen.

Because more saturation is always better, there's a gain boost button. When this is engaged, it doubles the range of the input and output gain. So instead of going from +/-24db it doubles to +/-48db. But this causes an issue with the metering... if you are really driving the input signal, the meters are just pinned all the time and you can't really see what's going on. So in an absolutely serious and obviously non-satirical development, I invented the curly meter, which works exclusively in combination with the gain boost function and solves the issue of the meters getting pinned at 0dbFS. When it curls back around and hits the bottom, that's +12dbFS, and curling around a second time and finally maxing out happens around +24db. Of course this isn't enough for extreme gain situations so in future versions I might make an infinite fractal meter.

There's also gain linking next to the gain boost button, which turns down the output gain when the input gain is increased and vice-versa. Lastly, the delta button polarity reverses the input signal with the output signal. To hear the effect of this, you need to get the gain structure right, so the output loudness is the same as the signal coming into the plugin.

You can also automate the objects, control them with the vertical sliders, double click them to reset. There's 4x oversampling as standard which can be turned off in the raw parameters view (depends on your DAW how you access that).