Slate Digital Submerge

Submerge with the Sample Rate effect triggered using the Special Shape.

If the classic side‑chain pumping effect is your thing, Submerge can do that — and a whole lot more!

We’ve all heard these effects before: side‑chaining a compressor or gate to create rhythmic ducking and chopping effects has been a popular technique for a good couple of decades now, particularly in hip‑hop and dance genres. But while you can achieve these effects with pretty much any compressor/gate that supports side‑chaining — meaning you probably have the necessary tools in your DAW already — setting up the routing and timing to your satisfaction can take time. There are now a number of plug‑ins available that can both remove that hassle and offer more features to help you shape the effect.

The latest such plug‑in to make it to the top of my review queue is Slate Digital’s Submerge, and I have to say that first impressions have been great. As I find so often with Slate Digital’s plug‑ins, it provides enough features to makes it useful and different from the competition without overcomplicating matters too much. As you can see from the screenshot, it has an elegant GUI that allows you to achieve most of what you’ll want to do most of the time, using only a few core controls. The expected effects are all present and correct too, but there are also some useful twists that give you access to some really fun, creative effects, particularly if you’re prepared to use a MIDI controller or your DAW’s automation system.

The Sub Way

The GUI puts two main panes in between vertical input and output meters and gain/level controls. The first section, on the left, is called Shape, and this is effectively an envelope/LFO source. To its right is an Effect section that determines what action it is that your selected Shape parameters control, and above are various controls that determine how and when the Shape is triggered. It can be tempo‑sync’ed, to start on any beat of any subdivision (from 1/4 to 1/32, with triplets an option), or you can choose to go freeform, setting the cycle in Hertz rather than beats. There’s also a delay slider to offset the cycle start point. In Auto Trigger mode operation is triggered by DAW playback, but you can instead trigger it using MIDI notes (whether from a keyboard or a MIDI track in your DAW), or an audio side‑chain input, with a threshold slider determining at what level the plug‑in responds.

There are three main Shapes to choose from: Natural, which is good for classic ducking effects; Extreme, which is good for gate/tremolo/chopper‑style effects; and Special, which defaults to a parabola‑like shape, causing some ducking just before the beat as well as after. Click a second time on one of these Shape selection buttons, and you invert the curve of the selected Shape, giving you six starting points. The Morph control can then be used to manipulate the Shape, steepening and/or moving the S‑curve for Natural (akin to changing the release time on a compressor); pushing Extreme’s curve forward or backward in time; and narrowing and/or distorting Special’s curve shape. The Depth knob sets the strength of the effect.

Using the Extreme Shape with a low Depth setting, sync’ed to 1/32, to inject some movement into a pad with a resonant low‑pass filter.

There are eight different effects to choose from, some conventional, other less so, and a Tweak knob controls one effect‑specific parameter. First up is a level effect but with a twist: the Tweak control determines how much the Mid and/or Sides components of the stereo signal are affected. With Tweak fully anticlockwise, just the Sides (so any wide, out‑of phase ear candy in an EDM tune, for example) are ducked, while at the opposite extreme it’s just the Mid, and in the 12 o’clock position the full stereo signal is ducked. A cool‑looking meter above shows clearly what’s going on when.

Then we have various filter‑based options. Beneath Gain, are high‑ and low‑shelf ducking options, and for each of these the Tweak knob sets the turnover frequency. To the right are four more filters, with Tweak setting the filter resonance for each: high‑ and low‑pass filters, and two combinations of them, one creating a band‑pass filter and the other a sort of broad notch filter or ‘closing curtains’ effect, depending on the Tweak value.

Finally, we have the icing on this plug‑in’s cake: Sample Rate. This reduces the signal sample rate for a dirty, crunchy old‑school gaming sort of sound. Tweak controls ‘smoothing’; essentially, how much crunch and splatter you hear.

Move & Groove

It’s super easy to get started with Submerge. If you want to keep things super simple, all you really need to do is decide what elements to put Submerge on, and explore the presets. The classic EDM quarter‑note side‑chain pumping effect is to hand, along with many more options. Used in this way, the one thing you have to be a wee bit careful of is that if what you’re processing has no Sides information (a dual‑mono loop won’t, for example) then it may seem that the effect isn’t working — in that scenario definitely adjust the Tweak control to see what happens. And if your aim is simple, for example to let the kick through loud and clear in a mix, it’s easy to select the Natural Shape and apply it just to the Mid, then use Morph to dial in the ducking just a fraction ahead of the drum.

There’s so much fun to be had when you start manipulating the controls during playback.

But there’s so much fun to be had when you start manipulating the controls during playback and, for me, this plug‑in becomes way more interesting when you investigate what it can do with faster cycle rates of Extreme controlling filters or the Sample Rate effect. For example, using Extreme set to 1/16 to control resonant filter effects can add some great movement to boring pad sounds, or more predictable spot effects such as filter‑swept noise. You can quickly spice up a transition like that. And if you then look at automating the Depth and Tweak controls to increase the complexity of the effect as that whoosh progresses, you can create some truly enticing ear candy. Add another instance of Submerge, with a Sample Rate effect, and the complexity increases... You get the idea. Best of all, you can map a MIDI controller to these controls and have lots of fun ‘performing’ with Submerge, as you write automation in. That really could be a great way to liven up that humdrum house track! The same effects work well when used more subtly in other genres, by the way: I was able to restore a bit of life into some over‑distorted rock guitars, for example.

Sublime?

I’ve been genuinely impressed with Submerge. It sounds good and it’s super easy to use. On occasion I wondered if more features might be nice — maybe a range limiter for some of the controls, to prevent accidents when tweaking in real time, or an LFO to modulate some of the controls — but on the whole, Slate Digital have got the balance between features and ease of use just right. Submerge is a great route to some really enticing effects, and could be used to liven up pretty much any production.