Stoke Saturator

DRIVE is one sound that deepens as you turn it. Low settings add warmth from the second harmonic, an octave above each note, and higher settings bring in brighter upper harmonics that are held back before they turn shrill. With AUTO on, turning DRIVE up makes the sound thicker rather than louder, with the loudness held steady across the whole range, so you judge the character and not the volume. Stoke listens to how loud your track arrives and calibrates itself, so DRIVE at 40 percent gives the same character on a quiet track around -24 dBFS as on a loud one around -6 dBFS. It settles within about ten seconds, slowly enough that you never hear it pump. Character trim in the menu shifts that point denser or cleaner, with no jump in level. TONE tilts the saturated sound around 800 Hz, brighter one way and darker the other, while the dry part of the blend is never tilted. The dry and saturated paths are lined up to the sample, so any MIX setting stays clean, with no hollow or phasey sound. The glow around DRIVE shows how hard the saturation is working, and POWER switches it out without a click. Twelve starting points are named for the job, from Drum Bus Glue and 808 Weight to Lead Vocal Warmth, Piano Glue and Parallel Crush, and you can save your own. Stoke adds a fixed 6-sample delay at 48 kHz, which it reports to your DAW so everything stays aligned. AU, VST3 and AAX on macOS; VST3 and AAX on Windows. Installs and updates through MuseHub, with no license key. Requires macOS 10.15 or later on Intel or macOS 11 or later on Apple silicon, or Windows 10 or later, 64-bit.