CrystalKarat presents
Forge: multiband saturation that designs its own bands
Multiband saturation that designs its own bands
Play it four seconds of your track. Forge measures where the energy lives and lays out its own crossovers, drive and character to match. Then it hands you six bands, ten saturation characters and a modulation deck to take it anywhere.
VST3 · Windows & macOS · Perpetual license · 7-day trial, no card
Most multiband saturators make you guess where the bands go. Forge listens first.
Four seconds. Then it designs itself.
Press Analyze and play your track. Forge measures every band's level, peak and crest factor, the spectral tilt and transient rate, and a fixed 24-bin spectrum that ignores the crossovers it is about to replace.
Then it decides. Wide-band material gets more bands; bass-heavy material gets its resolution down low, where the content actually is. It never overwrites you: Influence blends between your settings and its suggestion, and Undo restores everything from before the last analysis.
- Freq SplitBand count and crossovers only. One band per two and a half octaves of real content, each holding an equal share of the energy.
- WarmSofter transients and gentler drive. Tube, Warm Tape and Clean Tape, low to high.
- PunchSharpened transients and full drive, with Transformer through the lows and mids.
- CrushDrive at 1.6×: Tube into Hard Distortion into Destroy, at 4× oversampling.
- MasterGentle glue at half drive, light transient softening, Transformer to Clean Tape.
- Character
- Warm Tape
- Drive
- +0.0 dB
- Dynamics
- +0
- Mix
- 100%
- Output
- +0.0 dB
Press Analyze. Forge listens for four seconds, then designs the bands.
The demo runs Forge's own layout and voicing rules, ported from the plugin, on typical spectra for each source.
One knob, or a hundred.
Forge opens on one screen: the display, Analyze, and one big FORGE knob. It adds up to +24 dB of drive to every band at once, on top of whatever each band is already set to, so the whole engine runs hotter while the balance between bands holds.
When you want the hundred, they are one click away: every band carries a tab on the display that opens all of its controls, right where the band is.
FORGE
28% +6.7 dB
Drag, scroll or use the arrow keys. Double-click to reset.
The white line is each band's own drive. The FORGE knob adds the same amount on top of all of them, so the balance you set between bands survives.
45.1% THD
+0.0dB
Measured through Forge's saturation code, ported to your browser. With Auto Gain on, the output tracks the input, so turning up drive changes the character and not the volume. Switch it off to hear how much louder saturation alone would make it.
Tape, tube, iron, amp. Then the dangerous ones.
Any character on any band, mixed freely across the spectrum. Every one is level-calibrated, so switching between them changes the colour and not the volume, and drive keeps a little of its level as it rises, the way an analog stage does.
Bias scales the two halves of the wave apart for even harmonics without more drive. Turn it up below and the even harmonics, drawn in amber, climb.
Transformer
A cubic soft clip on a flux model: bass saturates the core before treble.
Best forIron, punch, the drum bus
Blend it at 50%. Hear nothing cancel.
Parallel saturation only works if the dry signal lines up with the wet one. In a multiband plugin that means matching the phase the crossovers leave behind, not just the latency. It is an easy detail to miss and an expensive one: drag the Mix below to see what it costs.
Computed for Linkwitz-Riley crossovers at 140 Hz, 700 Hz and 4.2 kHz. The deepest dip on the red curve moves with Mix; Forge's dry path carries the same all-pass as the bands, so its line stays at 0 dB at every setting.
Deepest dip -45.1 dBvs0.0 dB
Bands that sum flat
Splitting off a band and then splitting the remainder leaves every band with a different phase. Forge re-applies each later crossover's all-pass to every earlier band, so the whole split recombines flat.
A dry path that matches
The dry blend and the sub-bass passthrough get the same all-pass and a whole-sample delay match, so Mix at any setting blends cleanly instead of combing.
Verified, not asserted
Both are covered by automated tests in Forge's build. Integer oversampler latency keeps the alignment exact at every quality setting.
Six bands. Each one a whole instrument.
Split a band with the + tab, drag crossovers anywhere from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, and every band gets the complete chain: dynamics, bias, character, pulse, clip, tone, echo and its own insert effect, with mute and solo to hear exactly what it is doing.
- Drive
- 0 to +36 dB into the band's character
- Bias
- Even harmonics, independent of drive
- Tone
- ±6 dB tilt around 250 Hz and 4 kHz
- Clip
- A falling ceiling after the shaper
- Mix
- Parallel saturation, per band
- Width
- Per-band stereo width in Mid/Side mode
- Dynamics
- Soften or sharpen transients before they hit the shaper, ±15 dB
- Pulse
- A per-band tremolo up to 500 Hz, into ring-mod territory
- Feedback
- Comb, resonance or echo inside the band
- Time
- 1 ms to 1 s, or locked to the host tempo
- Follow
- Ducks the feedback while the source plays
A complete effect inside each band, after the shaper: a phaser on the mids only, a tempo-synced delay on the air, a compressor inside the low band's saturation. Switching type never allocates, so even the type is automatable.
- Filter
- Delay
- Chorus
- Flanger
- Phaser
- Compressor
- Bit Reducer
Six destinations. Six oscillators. Nothing to patch.
Click a target, give it a shape and a speed, and set how far it moves. Every target runs its own pattern at its own rate, so a square tremolo on eighths can sit under a slow filter sweep across four bars: two movements one shared oscillator cannot make.
Synced to your host's tempo by default, free-running when you want texture instead of rhythm. Draw your own with Custom, or start from nine ready-made wobbles.
Sweeps a resonant filter around a pivot you choose.
A low-pass rocking on eighths, with a half-note accent on the level.
Then finish the bus in the same plugin.
Stereo, sidechain, filters, a compressor and the engine's quality settings all live one tab away from the bands, on the Master deck.
Flip the engine into Mid/Side and the centre and the sides each get a complete band chain. Saturate the middle without smearing the sides, narrow the lows, widen the air.
An external key is split through the same crossovers as the audio, so each band ducks or expands against its own slice of the key, up to ±24 dB. The display draws every band reacting.
Everything below a frequency you choose stays bone dry and comes back phase-aligned. The low end holds still while everything above it gets worked.
High-pass and low-pass filters, a soft-knee compressor, output trim and a global mix after the bands. Finish the bus without reaching for another plugin.
Clean at 1×. Honest at every setting.
The analog characters are voiced waveshapers, and Forge says so. What makes them sound right is the engineering around them, measured below with Forge's own saturation code.
Antiderivative antialiasing, no oversampling tax
Tape, tube, transformer, amp, both distortions and soft clip evaluate the integral of their curve rather than the curve itself, so most aliasing never happens at the native rate. Bit Crush and Destroy stay oversampled by design.
A 5 kHz tone into Soft Clip at +18 dB, no oversampling. Every peak off the 5 kHz series is a harmonic folded back from above 24 kHz. The fold at 3 kHz drops from -35 dB to -71 dB; first-order ADAA does least right at the top, near Nyquist, which is what oversampling is still there for.
Bass hits the core first, like real iron
Transformers and tape saturate on flux, the integral of the signal, so low frequencies drive the core harder. Transformer and Warm Tape model it. Same level, same drive, two frequencies:
Transformer at +12 dB, both tones at −6 dBFS. Dashed: the same gain with no saturation. The flux model is identity until the shaper bends, so clean signals pass unchanged.
It breathes like hardware
Component tolerance offsets each channel's drive and bias by a deterministic, per-instance amount: the small left-right mismatch that reads as analog width. Sessions recall it exactly, and zero is bit-identical channels.
Hear exactly what it adds
Solo or mute any band. Delta monitor swaps the output for wet minus dry, using the same phase-matched dry path as Mix, so you hear only what the saturation contributes.
Quality you can choose
Off, 2×, 4× or 8× oversampling, minimum-phase or linear-phase, with integer latency reported to the host at every setting. Bit Crush's rate is fixed in hertz, so presets sound the same at any rate.
Everything, at a glance.
- Bands
- 1 to 6, split and dragged on the display; 4th-order Linkwitz-Riley crossovers
- Characters
- 10, any one on any band
- Insert effects
- 7, one inside every band: filter, delay, chorus, flanger, phaser, compressor, bit reducer
- Modulation
- Wobble: 6 targets, each with its own oscillator, 7 patterns, 9 ready-made
- Analyze
- 5 targets, Influence blend, one-step Undo
- Oversampling
- Off, 2×, 4×, 8×; minimum-phase or linear-phase
- Sidechain
- External key, split per band, compress or expand
- Stereo
- L/R or Mid/Side, per-band width, global width
- Master
- High-pass, low-pass, compressor, output, global mix
- Monitoring
- Per-band solo and mute, delta
- Latency
- Reported to the host in whole samples at every setting
- Parameters
- 199, every one automatable
- Format
- VST3
- Windows
- Windows 10 or later, 64-bit
- macOS
- macOS 10.13 or later, Apple silicon and Intel
- Interface
- 1200 × 800, resizable 75–150%, vector-sharp at any scale
- License
- Perpetual. One machine at a time, works offline once activated
Validated with pluginval for every release. Pro Tools (AAX) and Logic Pro (Audio Units) are not supported yet.
- Vocal
- Vocal Air
- Bass
- Tube Drive · Bass Tighten
- Drums
- Transformer Iron · Amp Crunch
- Bus
- Warm Glue · Clean Tape · Wide Glue · Bus Compressor
- Master
- Mastering Glue · Linear Master
- Creative
- Bit Crush · Lo-Fi
Save your own alongside them; they are plain files in your Documents folder.
Multiband saturator
£39one-time
No subscription. No iLok. No dongle.
Secure checkout by Stripe. The trial needs no card. Either one creates your CrystalKarat account, where your key, activations and installers live.
What you get
- Forge for Windows and macOS, as a VST3
- A perpetual license: buy once, keep it
- One machine at a time, moved whenever you like
- Works offline once activated
- 13 factory presets across six categories
- Your key by email and in your account, at once
Before you buy.
Which DAWs does Forge work in?
How does activation work?
How many computers can I use it on?
Why do I need an account?
Can I get a refund?
Does Forge model specific hardware?
Is there a trial?
Stop guessing where the bands go.
Four seconds of listening, six bands, ten characters and one molten core.