module-themonster

“Check this out”, said Jeff, the engineer at a small recording studio built into a garage in my home town of Westfield, NJ.

Jeff proceeded to press all the buttons in on his vintage FET compressor, and then raised the fader on his Mackie 8 Buss mixer. The drums, which were once neat, tight, and slappy, were now big explosive cannons! It was a really cool moment that has stayed in my memory ever since (in comparison, I have no clue what I ate for breakfast this morning).

The ALL BUTTONS IN effect is famous… no actually it’s infamous. The sound is big, it’s rude, it’s extreme, it’s over the top, and when it finds the right source, it creates a monstrous tone that slams out of a mix. And that’s why we call this plugin that recreates that infamous tone, THE MONSTER.

But the Slate Digital MONSTER isn’t content just being a classic emulation of the ALL BUTTONS IN.. no it takes the sound into the 21st Century, with newly added features such as high and low frequency sidechain manipulation, attack processing to add more punch but keep the legendary sustain, and a mix knob to parallel compress right inside the processor.

So go ahead, abuse your tracks with THE MONSTER, and create new and unique sounds that will have people ducking for cover. This MONSTER has some BITE!!

Steven Slate

GR Meter

Displays the amount of the compression in dB.

Attack

Controls the speed at which compression occurs after the signal has exceeded the threshold value. Turn clockwise for a fast attack, and counterclockwise for a slow attack.

Release

Controls the speed at which compression stops, once the signal has fallen below the threshold value. Turn clockwise for a fast release, and counterclockwise for a slow release.

Input/Output

Increasing your Input Gain will result in more compression. To compensate for the gain reduction introduced, use the Output Gain.

Moving the Input or Output Knob while holding the Shift key will inversely link the two controls. Punch Enables an additional attack for adding more impact to transients.

High Pass Filter

Adds a high pass filter to the compressors sidechain.

High Frequency Detection

Pushes a high frequency bell filter into the sidechain to mellow highs.

Mix

Blends between dry and wet signals, which is very useful to achieve parallel compression without any additional routing.

External Side-Chain

The Monster is a dynamics processor with a fixed threshold; you normally increase the Input Gain to apply more compression to the sound. When using the External Side-Chain, it is the Side-Chain Gain that will determine the amount of compression on the signal; increasing the Side-Chain Gain will increase the compression, but the sound may drop in overall volume if you don’t also increase the Input Gain manually. Input Gain itself has no impact on the compression amount when using the External Side-Chain and simply feeds louder audio through The Monster.