Lunatic Audio Rocket Fuel

Rocket Fuel’s X/Y pad can act as a macro control, modulating multiple parameters, and can itself be modulated by the LFOs.

Looking for a new plug‑in to fuel your creative endeavours?

Lunatic Audio obviously have a thing for creative multi‑effects. I reviewed their impressive Narcotic plug‑in back in SOS May 2022 and I’ve made regular use of it since, whenever I’ve needed to add a bit of sonic magic to a sound. Launched at a lower price and with what, at first sight, appears to be a somewhat more straightforward GUI, Rocket Fuel covers similar territory: you get a user‑configurable multi‑effects chain and a huge range of parameter modulation options that combine to provide almost endless creative ways to process a sound source.

Three Screens

Rocket Fuel doesn’t hide its processing potential from the user, but Lunatic Audio have done a pretty good job of organising what’s quite a deep feature set into three main screens: an X/Y pad page, an effects chain/modulators page, and a modulation matrix page. These are accessed using three buttons at the top of the GUI and whichever is selected fills the bulk of the (resizeable) window, while the ever‑present panel on the right contains the preset system, macro controls for the X/Y pad, and the main input, output, mix (wet/dry balance) and filter controls. The last of these targets Rocket Fuel’s processing to a specific frequency range; all other frequencies pass through unprocessed.

Rocket Fuel’s X/Y pad is a familiar modulation concept — having assigned parameters to the X or Y axis of the pad elsewhere in the GUI, you can manually apply modulation by moving the node control. You can also modulate the X and Y axis values around the node’s position using any of four LFO sources, of which more below.

The FX Chain & Modulators page is where the bulk of the sound design takes place. The chain is constructed by combining any of Rocket Fuel’s nine effects modules (Chorus, Compressor, Delay, Distortion, Filter, Limiter, Phaser, Reverb and Utility) in the upper part of the page. Note that most of these effects can only be used once in a given chain, but you do get two instances of the Filter and Utility modules. The module order can be changed by dragging and dropping.

The FX Chain & Modulators page lets you build your effects chain and easily link modulation targets to sources.

Each module has a compact control set that provides plenty of flexibility, and every control can be modulated if you wish. There’s little point providing a full run‑down here, but there are a few observations worth highlighting. For example, the Utility module provides pan, gain and stereo width control — modulating pan and volume strikes me as being a more ‘creative’ endeavour than the term ‘utility’ might suggest, and it does these jobs with ease. All the modules are well...