W. A. Production has released ComBear, a freeware parallel compressor effect in VST, VST3, and AU plugin formats for compatible digital audio workstations on PC and Mac. The developer is also running a 90% OFF sale on a range of products at Pluginboutique.

ComBear is an easy to use parallel compressor designed for fattening up drums and other elements of your mix with minimum fuss. The plugin seems to be heavily inspired by Dada Life’s incredibly popular Sausage Fattener saturation and compression tool. Taking hints from Sausage Fattener’s animated GUI, ComBear features an animated bear in the upper-right corner of the user interface which will look angrier as you increase the amount of compression.

The compressor portion of the user interface consists of a single knob (labeled Compress) which affects the amount of applied gain reduction. Increasing the value will result in more aggressive compression of the signal and an overall fatter sound on the output. The Makeup Gain slider can be used to push the compressed signal back to the original volume level, whereas the Mix knob combines the clean and processed signals on the output. Mixing the compressed and uncompressed signal on the output is known as Parallel Compression and is a technique often used for fattening up acoustic drums. It also works great on guitars, vocals, and pretty much any mix element that needs to stand out in the mix.

Is ComBear a proper freeware Sausage Fattener alternative? The two plugins share a similar control layout and somewhat similar features. I’m pretty sure that Sausage Fattener applies a lot more processing under the hood, like saturation, and definitely a lot of multi-band compression. ComBear seems to be a much simpler design on the inside, but it can be a useful parallel processing tool despite its more basic feature set.

The plugin can be downloaded from the Pluginboutique product page linked below. It works as a VST, VST3, and AU plugin on PC and Mac. The developer W. A. Production is also running a 90% OFF sale on Pluginboutique, reducing the price of their Pumper and Helper products to just $1 per plugin!

ComBear is available for free download via Pluginboutique (3.9 MB download size, ZIP archive containing EXE installer, 32-bit & 64-bit VST/VST3/AU plugin format for Windows & macOS).