MIXING & EFFECTS

Fruity Blood Overdrive

Fruity Blood Overdrive is a distorter that is specially designed for the needs of digital-audio musicians.

Blood provides overdrive distortion and handles it using classic techniques that give it the compressed and soft sounds, as opposed to the harsh sound produced by many guitar overdrive plugins. The integrated bandpass filter gives the ability to overdrive non-guitar audio that would otherwise produce poor results.

Parameters

PreBand - Sets the amount of band filtering that is applied to the audio before it is overdriven. Use this to improve the effect quality that may result from overdriving audio with a broad frequency range.
Color - Sets the frequency of the band filtering.
PreAmp - Overdrives the audio in order to achieve distortion. As you increase the PreAmp parameter, you need to compensate with the PostGain knob.
x100 - Increases the power of PreAmp a hundred times. This is normally only useful on single instrumental tracks.
PostFilter - The preamplified audio is low-pass filtered at the frequency specified by this wheel. This is another option for cleaning up the distortion.
PostGain - Final gain reducer (at maximum leaves the gain at its original level after distortion). The preamplifier boosts the output considerably, so you need to compensate with this parameter.

Tips and Notes

The order in which the filters are applied is: Band Pass Filter (PreBand) > Preamplifier (PreAmp) > 2-Pole Low Pass Filter (PostFilter) > Reduce Gain (PostGain) > Final Digital Clipping.
If the output is too loud, do not try to reduce the input to the plugin, reduce it with PostGain (otherwise it will remove the distortion).
After the audio has been preamplified and clipped, the signal still can be up to 300% out of range. When it is clipped after PostGain, normal, (harsh sounding), digital clipping is used. Therefore, a better sound is achieved if you take care to always compensate for PreAmp by reducing PostGain.
Playing a mix through the plugin, (even without preamplifying), causes upward compression on the independent frequency bands. This gives overall upward compression and flattens the equalizer. This can be used to improve some mixes, and can even be used to master some projects (the compression is caused by non-linear signal response similar to vacuum tube compressors).

Plugin Credits: David Billen