Saturation is one of the most fundamental tools in audio production. It is the sound of circuits being pushed, of tape being driven, of valves glowing hot. It adds harmonics, shapes dynamics, and introduces the musical grit that makes recordings feel alive.

Whether it’s the gentle warmth of a console channel just starting to break up or the full-blown chaos of a cranked amplifier, saturation is woven into how we hear and make music.

Kerosene was built to bring all of this into one plugin. A saturation environment with four
algorithms which cover a range of analog character: the smooth compression of soft clipping, the aggressive bite of hard clipping, the asymmetric warmth of tube circuits, and the magnetic cohesion of tape machines. Each one responds differently to your signal and produces its own harmonic fingerprint that evolves as you push the drive harder.

But saturation is only part of what’s going on here. The integrated noise engine adds analog-style texture that reacts to your signal’s dynamics, ducking under loud passages, rising with transients, or just sitting underneath as a constant bed of character. A built-in compressor handles dynamics after the saturation stage with soft-knee characteristics and its own warmth control, while high and low-pass filters let you sculpt exactly which frequencies get saturated.

The real-time transfer function visualizer shows you what the saturation is actually doing. Every parameter change is reflected live in the curve, and when audio is playing, your signal trace maps through it so you can see exactly how your waveform is being shaped. It’s an incredibly useful tool for understanding the relationship between your controls and the sound coming out.

Kerosene ships with 41 factory presets organized by source material: vocals, drums, bass, guitar, synths, mix bus, creative, and parallel processing. Each one is a starting point. The real power comes from adjusting and combining controls to find what works for your material.

Whether you need transparent warmth on a master bus, gritty texture on a drum loop, tape-style compression on a vocal, or complete destruction on a synth, Kerosene has you covered. And the visual feedback means you always know exactly what you’re doing to the signal.

Specifications

• Available in VST3 and AU plugin formats.

• Apple Silicon compatible

System Requirements:

• macOS 13.0 or later

• Windows 10 or later (64-bit)