This week’s free plugin is Heatwave from Slate Digital. A multiband saturation/distortion plugin to add grit and aggressiveness to almost any sound while preserving its original transients.

What Is Heatwave?

Heatwave is a fast, effective, and free way to add grit and aggressiveness to almost any sound while preserving its original transients. Add punishing distortion to drum parts without losing the snappy attacks. Beef up a funk bass without softening the slap. Distress an acoustic guitar while preserving the intricacies of fingerstyle playing.

Heatwave employs a minimal but inspiring interface dominated by a single control to “add heat” to the sound. All the magic is hidden behind-the-scenes, so the user doesn’t need to learn anything technical to make skilful use of the plug-in. Heatwave preserves and can even exaggerate transients through a complex use of transient shaping, saturation, compression, and EQ.

How Do I Get Heatwave?

Click the button above to go the the Slate Digital website and log into or create an account to complete a $0 purchase. Open the confirmation email and download the installers. You will be offered the option of installing Slate Digital Connect, Slate Digital’s product manager application but you can choose to download and install the individual installers if you prefer. Authorise using iLok manager

Heatwave is available for windows and macOS as a VST, AU and AAX plugin, Apple Silicon compatible, free iLok account required but no physical iLok necessary.