Antresol

Many argue that today’s music sounds a bit too clean and overproduced. It’s obvious that digital instruments have advanced tremendously, surpassing the capabilities of the tools from the analog era, but taking away some of that warmth that was actually created by analog devices’ imperfections. This is why many developers design instruments and plugins with the specific purpose of emulating analog sounds.

In rare cases, the emulations manage to expand the capabilities of the analog design while staying true to the original sound. This may very well be the case for Antresol, a plugin labeled as an “analog BBD stereo flanger”.

D16 Audio Group Software are known for their excellent effect plugins and instruments that often emulate the analog sounds of old. Antresol is no exception; though it’s presented as an emulation of a BBD based analog delay line, it can do so much more than delay (or flanger, for that matter).

The bucket-brigade device (or BBD for short) is a small chip that was used to create the first analog delay units, at the end of the 1960s. Before that, all musicians had were tape delays, which weren’t that easy to transport due to their fragility. But the size of the BBD chip meant that delay could now be achieved through more compact units. Antresol’s photorealistic design tries to imitate that of those classic units, but also offers you plenty of other features.

I’ve already mentioned delay and flanger, but it seems that Antresol can also be a chorus, bit crusher, vibrato, or distortion unit. You can start by browsing its presets (which are neatly grouped into the aforementioned categories) or try to create your own effect.

The interface is quite easy to navigate. You have parameters like offset, rate, and depth for both the left and right channels, which can be linked or used differently for a more creative stereo sound design. A lot of the plugin’s power also comes for the LFO which can be used in three modes: Mistress, Linear, and Concave. While a lot more can be said by this apparently simple plugin, I’m going to stop here and just recommend it to any producer who is trying to add warm and subtle analog effects into+ their mix.