Softube Drawmer 1976

Softube's plug-in version of the Drawmer 1976 offers three‑band saturation and stereo widening.

My first encounter with three‑band saturation was when reviewing the Drawmer Masterflow 2476 hardware processor, way back in SOS October 1999. That processor that might best be thought of as a TC Finalizer with better manners! Not only did it allow the user to decide which parts of the spectrum to saturate and by how much, but it also enabled the stereo width of each band to be adjusted, and I felt that important. It mean you could keep bass frequencies at or close to mono, helping to avoid any phase issues when playing back over a mono system, while at the same time adding flattering width higher up the spectrum.

Fast‑forward to 2020, and we were reviewing an analogue equivalent of the Masterflow called the Drawmer 1976. This 1U rackmounting product offers three bands of saturation, again with control over the stereo width in each band, and now Softube have modelled it to create the Drawmer 1976 plug‑in. Unlike the hardware, this plug‑in reincarnation has a GUI that appears 2U high, to accommodate the additional features and more precise metering that software makes possible. Saturators are generally used to add musically pleasing harmonics, of course, after the style of tape or circuity incorporating valves and transformers rather than really obvious overdrive, but if you deliberately push this 1976 plug‑in, it can, like the hardware, make its presence known more assertively!

The plug‑in, which can be used in mono or stereo, adheres to the classic Drawmer aesthetic, with yellow and black knobs, a clear layout and clean labelling. Its lower section closely resembles the original hardware, with identical control sets for the three bands covering Saturate, Width and Level plus buttons for Bypass and Mute. Each band also hosts a bar‑graph meter showing how much saturation is being added. Between the bands, the two crossover controls are adjustable from 70Hz to 1.5kHz for the low/mid boundary, and 800Hz to 15kHz for the mid/highs.

At the top of the window are controls for the input and output levels (which are placed on the left and right of the hardware), along with some controls not found on the hardware: a wet/dry mix control is joined by a pair of global low‑cut and high‑cut filters with adjustable frequencies. The low‑cut filter comes before the saturation stage in the signal path, and has a range from 21Hz to 1kHz. The high‑cut filter comes post saturation, so it can tame any harmonics created that way, and ranges from 1kHz to 2.2kHz. Large meters show the L‑R and M‑S output levels for both channels, in 16 steps. A button for Width mode selects either Analogue or Digital: analogue emulates the circuitry of the original hardware, whereas Digital is Softube’s interpretation of an optimum response. There’s also a handy Mono button, providing a fast way to check whether the stereo widening settings are causing any phase problems.

Alongside the Softube logo are buttons that open the input, output and lower panels common to all Softube plug‑ins, showing advanced metering, levels, global bypass, and gain matching either to the input level or to a 0dB output level. There’s also a phase adjustment slider.

Although operation is very straightforward, the input level obviously affects the amount of saturation that’s applied, so if you want to browse the factory presets, you may have to adjust the input level to get the most out of them; the saturation meters are a great help but these things are so subjective, and your ears really do need to tell you what sounds right.

When processing drums or drum loops, adding more saturation to the lows can add an addictive punch to kick drums, while using saturation in the upper mids and highs can lift out snares and hi‑hats. A little high saturation can also add presence to vocals or acoustic guitars. For mastering I like to leave the mids relatively untouched while adding a little enhancement to both the lows and highs. Those width control can help when mastering too, where my default approach is to keep the lows mono, the mids unchanged and with perhaps just a little more width added to the highs.

Their 1976 sounds to my ears just like the Drawmer hardware!

There are so many plug‑ins that you try once and might be vaguely impressed by, but then end up not using very much in the real world. This one, I suspect, won’t be one of those, as Softube have done a fantastic job. Their 1976 sounds to my ears just like the Drawmer hardware!