PurestSquish

PurestSquishDemo is a compressor Audio Unit plugin for maximum transparency and organic squishiness! I’ve designed it for the 2-buss, but it’ll work for many things. It’s got two basic modes: you can use it very gently to ‘float’ the mix elements in a barely perceptible way, or you can lean into it harder for more textural effects.

PurestSquish is one of the Purest line of plugins, which means certain things. It doesn’t emulate any known hardware device, it just brings the squishiness and fluidity to the sound while trying very hard not to touch the tone color in ANY other way. These are transparent plugins, be careful about over-applying it just to hear an effect. It also means PurestSquish is implemented using 80-bit math internally, with carefully designed algorithms to apply the effect with as few math operations as possible. This is somewhat controversial as the noise floor of these ‘superfluous math operations’ I’m avoiding is very low, but typical plugins waste a lot of CPU overprocessing. The Purest line is about going the opposite direction, as hard as possible.

Finally, one of the things PurestSquish has is a highpass on the sense circuit for bass. Using this, you can bring hugeness to the lows of the mix. Since it’s just on the sense it’s not in the audio path, but because the compressor ‘turns down’ what’s a gain boost going in, the Bass Bloom control can be used like it was a boost: apply the compressor, and then work in enough Bass Bloom to have a giant low end. This, plus the way PurestSquish preserves textures going through it, makes it a fantastic compressor for cranking up the size and scale of electronic music—or any sort of music, really! But the highpass Bass Bloom stuff comes from EDM.

Shoot this out against any compressor, from Airwindows or otherwise. It really has its own sound, it really is exaggerated as far as squishiness and transparency are concerned, and there is a real usefulness to applying just only the compressedness to a mix. You can get your color or ‘classic tone qualities’ in lots of other ways. PurestSquish is distilled squishiness, concentrated to keep the flavors of your mix pure while it changes the texture.

PurestSquish is $50.