Compressor sustainer pedal plugin

HoRNet HCS1 is the faithful recreation of a very famous guitar compressor sustainer pedal effect that has been produced from mid seventies to mid eighties, it’s designed to give smooth sustain to electric guitars, and it does it acting like a compressor.

The plugin recreates the peculiar effect the compressor pedal has on the dynamics and give you that particular sound, made famous by guitarist al over the world, in your computer.

This specific compressor pedal has a fixed threshold and it acts for signal that are both above and below that threshold, in fact if the input of the circuit is very low (like a note that is naturally decaying) the internal volume gets boosted a lot, while if the signal is above threshold (like the initial pick of a note) it gets gradually decreased. This kind of action is very particular and differs from the classic compressor used in audio, the result is a very distinctive sound that works magically on guitar, but it’s also very interesting on other sources (like keyboards or drums).

The effect allows you to tweak just a couple of parameter of the compressor, as we said the threshold is fixed, and the attack time is fixed too. Wait, the knob on the plugin is labeled “Attack” how is this possible? Well the “Attack” knob changes the release of the compressor and this in turn lets you hear more ora less “attack” in the sound, that’s why it’s labelled this way.

The only other parameter you can change (excluding the simple output level) is labelled “Sustain”, this knob actually changes what in a standard compressor is known as “ratio”, turning this control on the right will make the plugin compress more, the resulting sound will be more compressed.

HoRNet HCS1 also models every “analog” characteristic of the plugin including the saturation and the hiss, both of this option can be disabled.

Since the circuit uses some frequency pre-emphasis and de-emphasis to reduce noise, we also modelled a popular modification that removes the de-emphasis filter making the plugin brighter.

We also added a handy Dry/Wet knob so you can use it to dose the effect with more precision and create parallel compression.

The HCS1 compression sustainer is part of our guitar plugin collection and can be also bought as part of our Guitar Bundle that includes also many other guitar effects pedal, including distortions and amplifier simulation.