Rough Rider is a modern compressor
with a bit of “vintage” style bite and a uniquely
warm sound. Perfect for adding compression effects
to your drum buss, it also sounds great with synth
bass, clean guitar, and backing vocals. Definitely
not an all-purpose compressor, Rough Rider is at its
best when used to add pump to rhythmic tracks. Of
course, you can use it however you’d like. The
Compressor Police aren’t gonna come to your house
and give you a citation. Slap it on a track and
crank some knobs.
The front panel layout is done the
same as many hardware compressors, so it will be
immediately obvious how to use it. A brief overview
of the controls:
Ratio: The ratio
knob is logarithmic in operation. Completely
anti-clockwise is 1:1, and completely clockwise is
1:1000. The 12 o’clock position is 1:10, so
everything to the left of center is single digits,
and everything to the right is “atom bomb squish,”
essentially.
Attack and Release: We
left off the actual time values, so you’re gonna
have to use your ears, like the he-men did it in
times of myth.
Meter: That honking
big dial in the middle of the UI is the gain
reduction meter. It basically shows how much
compression is occurring.
Sensitivity: usually
called “threshold” now, but we think “sensitivity”
always made more sense. Turn to the right, you get
more compression, essentially. Turn it all the way
to the right, and you’ve got a distortion box, the
sound of which is tuned by Ratio, Attack, and
Release.
Makeup: 30 dB of
gain to compensate for the attenuation caused by the
compressor.
Active: From the
front panel, this is simply an off/on switch, but if
you automate it, strange things happen…
MIDI Learn: Like
all of our products, the VST version has MIDI Learn.
Download any manual from the current product line
for an explanation of how this works, as it is
common among all our VST products.
Rough Rider is available as a VST
effect for Windows, and an AU or VST for OSX. The
OSX versions are Universal Binaries, and require OSX
10.4.0 or later.
Visit:
Audio damage.
