High Impact
HighImpact answers the question: can you be distorted/slammed and thin at the same time?
This plugin combines two kinds of saturation curve, one that’s a distortion and another that’s the opposite. As you increase the slider, the top of the dynamic curve gets more distorted and punchy, but the quiet parts of the sound don’t come up as they’d otherwise do.
The result is like a gatey overdrive. It lets you dial in the amount of lean, gutsy punch you want, and it adds impact and aggression without increasing fatness or fullness. It’s not just things like drums that work with this, basses and guitars and pretty much anything can be made shockingly aggressive with High Impact.
It’s an unnatural waveform-transformation, so be cautious if you want natural results. Also, since it’s distorting the transfer function in a special way, High Impact isn’t super compatible with phase rotation, like on FM radio. On the other hand, the dynamics it produces will survive phase rotation just fine, it’ll just alter the tone making it a bit grungier but just as punchy dynamically.
If you know that ‘fatter isn’t always better’, High Impact is for you.