Kush Audio, the makers of the UBK-1 compressor and Clariphonic parallel equaliser, have announced the release of LG Drive, a 2-stage tube saturation plugin with distortion pulled straight from an AR-1 variable-mµ compressor, which rivals EQ with its ability to mold and shape any sound in your mix.

Kush Audio summarise the plugin…

We didn't invent the use of "Filtered Saturation" as a radical way to shape tone, but we've arguably made the warmest, fuzziest sounding tool for the job.

Harmonic juice pulled straight from the legendary Lisson Grove AR-1 Tube Compressor? Plus an array of fancy knobs which make your life better in every possible way? Yes.

If your bass doesn't cut thru the mix, if your vocal is too sharp (or too dull), if your mix feels like a room full of accountants in grey suits discussing their favorite ways to depreciate office equipment... you need LG Drive. Or a brain altering substance. Or both!

At its heart, LG Drive is an elegantly simple device, a 2-Stage Tube Saturation colorbox whose thick, creamy distortions are pulled straight from the AR-1 variable-mµ compressor. When those distortions are coupled with a simple but powerful set of filters, then blended with the unprocessed signal, the result is a deceptively powerful tone-shaping tool with an ability to thicken and energize anemic drums, dramatically lift and level out dull, unruly vocals, add clarity and definition to murky bass, and fundamentally shift the tone and vibe of an entire mix.

LG Drive achieves dramatic shifts in tone with minimal objectionable artifacts through the use of gentle, cascading phase-coherent filters (not to be confused with phase-linear filters, which are generally unkind to low-frequency transients). The custom filters can be made increasingly steep without invoking unwanted resonant bumps or intense phase cancellations at the crossover points when blended in parallel.

These custom Hi and Lo Cut filters can be used in tandem with the Drive and Tone (tilting eq) controls to isolate the emotional heart of the sound, texturize it, and blend it with the unprocessed input to shape the resulting colorations. Alternatively, the ancillary controls can be left untouched and, instead, nothing but Drive used to infuse tracks with the classy harmonic mojo of Lisson Grove’s tube and transformer circuits.

Pricing & Availability

Kush Audio LG Drive is available now for $89 (normally $99) and is also included in the Complete Kush Bundle which currently packs in over $1400-worth of plugins for $9.99 a month.