AdHd - Levelling Tool

Our free plugin this month comes from AdHd Audio Tools. Levelling Tool is a tube levelling amplifier that is 'inspired by the legends' and promises to deliver that always-popular analogue sound.

The compressor has a nice warm tone and is especially well suited to vocals. The UI looks good, and we see all of the controls we'd expect to; gain, peak reduction (threshold), attack, release and ratio. 

In addition, there is a dry/wet control that will allow you to quickly dial in parallel compression, as well as a couple of slightly more unusual features. The first of these is a sidechain high-pass filter that adds a high-pass to the signal that the compressor is listening to. This can help to make your sidechain compression a little more transparent and is useful for reducing the pumping effect on bass-heavy material. There is also a rotary drive control included here, allowing you to dial in the required amount of tube saturation to your signal.

The tube drive effect is built into the compressor and will also increase when you push the gain level higher, but it's nice to have the extra control over this feature that the drive dial provides.

AdHd Levelling Tool is available for Mac and PC. The plugin runs at 32 or 64 bit in its AU, VST and VST3 versions, and is 64 bit only as an AAX. It is available for free download now at the AdHd Audio Tools website.