Safari Pedals Zebra Clipper & Bull Sub Machine

Powerful, creative tools lurk beneath these plug‑ins’ playful graphical interfaces...

Safari Pedals were founded by Tel Aviv‑based mixing and mastering engineer Noah Levinberg, who wanted to create audio tools that gave musicians and producers the creative feel of using guitar pedals when producing and mixing. In a relatively short time, Safari’s range of plug‑ins has grown into a full‑blown menagerie, with plug‑ins that combine a bold ‘wild animal’ aesthetic with a simple feature set, focused on ease of use and creativity. I’ve had access to their catalogue for a few months now and have enjoyed throwing these colourful tools onto my mixes with abandon.

Dirty Animals

This is the first time we’ve looked at Safari’s plug‑ins, so I’ll quickly introduce the range (currently 17 plug‑ins) before reviewing the two newest releases, Zebra Clipper and Bull Sub Machine (from here on Bull Sub). Each is competitively priced, and bundles even more so. Most are similar in their styling and controls, and resemble stompboxes. Yak Delay and the Ladybug and DirtyDog reverbs offer creative and colourful spatial effects, and of these DirtyDog (created in collaboration with Joe Chiccarelli) really stood out: it combines saturation with reverb and is especially good for spicing up dry‑sounding drums. Alongside these obviously creative tools are some slightly more conventional offerings, with, for example, Owl Control providing four modes of compression, and Dragon EQ.

There’s much more to be found on this Safari, and the full bundle represents great value for money.A few are styled differently, like the Rhino Reverb, which is based on the Pioneer SR202 spring reverb, and there’s a Roland 501‑inspired Fox Echo Chorus. The Cobra Fuzz, looking like a larger vintage‑style pedal, is unapologetically unsubtle in its attempts to mangle and distort your audio. I enjoyed using these three a great deal, especially the Cobra Fuzz, which offered me a distortion flavour I didn’t already have — it sounded great on drums and could lend a nice ‘edge’ to a vocal.

Some mixing jobs require specific tools, but I also like having plug‑ins I can throw onto a track to change a part’s feel, even if I’m not quite sure what I’m looking for, and this is where Safari’s ‘pedals’ excel. One of Noah’s first creations, Gorilla Drive, is a great example of what these plug‑ins do well: you have input and output controls to add drive and extra weight to your tracks, along with a single tone control and bypass and polarity flip switches. Time Machine, meanwhile, allows you to quickly audition different filters and compression styles loosely based on sonic eras: the ’50s setting sounds like much of the high frequencies are rolled off and allows a source to feel more ‘set back’ in a mix. And while I’m rarely a fan of developers building in authentic noise and hiss, I often found myself blending in a little of the tasteful ‘crackle’ offered by some of these plug‑ins. Such vintage/analogue‑esque flavour is a common theme throughout the range but the simple, well‑thought‑out controls mean you always feel in control and can take it precisely how far you want to go.

I’ll conclude this whistle‑stop tour here, but hopefully you get the idea: there are numerous tools and flavours to choose from and I’d say it’s well worth trying the fully functional 14‑day free trials. So let’s now move on to the newest releases...

Zebra Clipper

Clippers have become increasingly popular in recent years and rather than turn down the peaks that exceed a threshold, as a limiter would, they ‘shave off’ those peaks. Zebra Clipper is intended to sit somewhere between a conventional clipper and a more soft‑clipping style of compressor. Unlike many clippers, Zebra offers no visual cues to indicate how much you’re clipping your audio, and I suspect that’s deliberate: it directs you to make decisions with your ears. Its three ‘style’ controls offer distinctly different tonal options, with Analog sounding softer at the top end and Modern sounding more bright and defined. A Round option sits somewhere in between, and often ended up as my preference. As with the rest of the Safari collection, the additional controls are few but tastefully judged: Mojo ramps up the sense of saturation and Sub Boost helps to fill out the low end (which is often lost when you squash your audio like this). At the time of writing the Zebra was very much my plug‑in of the moment, and it works superbly on drums for adding a sense of solidity and vibe. The only down side is that it is very easy to overdo it!

Bull Sub Machine

Bull Sub is a collaboration with mix engineer Leslie Brathwaite, who is probably best known for helping shape the sound of bass‑heavy productions for the likes of Cardi B, Pharrell and Lil Uzi Vert. As the name suggests, it’s focused exclusively on the low end: it’s intended to beef up your kick drums and bass parts, and to suggest creative ways of blending your parts into your mix or production. And as always, there are few controls, but they’re really well judged.

There are plenty of plug‑ins for adding sub‑harmonic content to your tracks, but I find that you often have to use them in conjunction with other plug‑ins to get their output to really gel with your tracks — it’s often as easy to ruin a mix as improve it! Bull Sub addresses this challenge superbly, with just the right amount of control for dialling in the frequency range you want to add or exaggerate, along with a Drive control to add some saturation and grit that can help your bass parts cut through a busy mix or be audible on smaller speakers. The Resonance control is an excellent addition that makes it easy to extend or shorten the length of kick drums — a sort of onboard transient designer. Lastly, we have Punch, the details of which are scant but it’s modelled on Leslie’s analogue chain and is intended to offer a little extra ‘oomph’ when that’s needed!

Bull Sub is hands‑down the best tool of this style that I’ve played with.

You do need to tread a little carefully with Bull Sub. It’s very addictive and easy to overdo, especially on less accurate monitoring setups. But Bull Sub is hands‑down the best tool of this style that I’ve played with. I found using the blend control the key technique for getting it to work in a mix, but it took mere seconds to beef up a limp‑sounding kick drum I was working with!