Roast Beef

What it does

A small saturation effect with three controls: sub for weight underneath, noise for texture, and drive for distortion. Arrows step through the presets, an initial patch returns everything to neutral, and anything saved lands in a user folder. All three parameters are exposed to the host, so an LFO or MIDI CC can move them. It runs standalone as well as an AUv3.

In the demo

Jade puts it on a drum pattern first, using the sub to add body to the kick before pushing the drive, then on a sampled piano and a synth line. A long middle stretch is a walkthrough of connecting an external LFO app to the noise amount over MIDI CC, which applies to any app with exposed parameters. She finishes on distorted vocals.

Worth knowing

This is a cut-down version of the same developer’s Beef, which adds saturation types, EQ and a limiter, so three knobs is the whole of it here. With no EQ, the drive lands across the entire signal rather than a chosen band.