Beef

What it does

A saturation chain in one plugin. An EQ sits at the input, then a noise panel that layers hiss over the signal, then the saturation stage, offering distortion, fuzz, tube, tape and a setting called wreck, each with drive and tone. After that comes a crusher with rate, bit depth and smoothing, a shaping panel, and a limiter. Preset banks cover bass and 808s, drums, mixing and miscellaneous, plus banks by other iOS producers. It runs standalone or as an AUv3.

In the demo

Jade works in GarageBand on early tracks for a horror soundtrack and puts it on nearly everything: a breathing vocal, a death growl, synth lines, a kick and a sampled hand drum. Flipping one patch between fuzz and distortion shows the range, and she pulls it right back near the end to use the EQ alone.

Worth knowing

This is the fuller sibling of the same developer’s Roast Beef, which has only sub, noise and drive. Searching the store for the name turns up unrelated results, so Jade adds AUv3 to the search to find it.