Hey Patrons,
Foal is now available for all paying Patrons.
The manual is written, v1.02 is uploaded, and Foal is no longer only for the higher tiers.
Ok, here's the stupid idea that started the whole thing:
What would it sound like if the waveform were magnetic?
Not metaphorically in some grand mastering philosophy way. I mean more literally. What if the waveform was pulled toward its own highest peak positions, almost as if the signal and its peak boundaries were attracted to each other?
I expected it to sound broken.
And to be fair, it can sound broken.
But it also did something I did not expect. It had this strange, dense, slightly analog-like movement to it. Not transparent, not clean, not “proper” in the normal mastering sense, but very nice. Shimmering.
Since I finished Foal, I have used it on almost every master that has left the studio over the last two weeks. And clients seem to love it.
What Foal does
Foal is a post-limiter loudness tool for mastering.
You place it after your final limiter, when the master is already finished or close to finished, and use it to ask:
Is there still something left here?
Foal looks at the existing sample peak limits of the incoming signal, both positive and negative, and then pulls the waveform toward those limits. The closer the waveform gets to its own peak boundary, the stronger the pull becomes.
So Foal is not just another limiter, and it is not simply adding gain.
It changes how the waveform moves inside the space that still exists between the current signal and its own peak limits.
That can give you more perceived loudness, density, movement, and sometimes a slightly strange sense of energy that is hard to get from normal clipping or limiting.
It can also give you distortion.
Foal is not a transparent plugin. That is part of the idea.
Compress and Clip
Before the magnetic stage, Foal can be driven in two different ways.
Compress is the cleaner way. It lifts the signal into the magnetic stage in a more controlled way. It can bring out some of the things we often like about compression, such as density, air, openness, and movement, without working like a traditional compressor.
Clip is the dirtier way. It reshapes the signal before it becomes magnetic, which can add more saturation, more loudness, and more character.
From v1.01 and later, the clipping stage was rewritten. It no longer uses a simple hard/soft clipping control. Instead, the clipping starts softer when you only push it a little, and then moves more toward hard clipping as you drive it harder, without becoming pure hard clipping.
That made Foal feel much better to me.
Less like a static digital shape and more like something that moves.
Changelog v1.02
There's a manual
Fixed a bug that affected the Result meters.
Cleaned out some unused code.
Formats:
Mac - VST3 & AU
Win - VST3
Demo version:
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Patreon post:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/156978633/
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