United Plugins and founding partner SounDevice Studio have announced the Urban Puncher, a new plugin designed to effectively act as a one-knob tool to add “punch” to drum loops (as intended) as well as anything that can conceivably be called a drum hit.
The process of working with Urban Puncher begins by loading the plugin into a DAW drum channel (before or after an EQ or compressor) and then dialing up its punch percentage setting to taste (up to 100). The resulting sound can be mixed with that of the original track using the dry/wet control (up to 100). While that punch percentage setting simultaneously controls several processes, it can briefly be described as an esoteric dynamic process with transients treatment and spectral shaping.
Urban Puncher also includes saturation percentage control (up to 100) to apply an analog-like transformer/tube blended emulation of saturation. Pushing the destroy button triples the amount of saturation defined by the saturation percentage control setting, resulting in a heavier form of distortion.
An output (dB) control defines the overall output volume of the plugin by +/-24 dB while IN (input) and OUT (output) “LED ladders” are also intended to aid judging the processing proceedings from a visual viewpoint. The plugin can also be pressed into playing away, adding punch to other percussive-sounding instruments such as acoustic guitar and piano.
Urban Puncher is available to purchase for a time-limited introductory promo price of €19 EUR until September 20, 2021, rising thereafter to its regular price of €59 EUR as an AAX-, AU-, VST-, and VST3-compatible plug-in (using internal 64-bit audio processing capable of handling any sample rate) directly from United Plugins here. In addition, a 15-day, fully-functional trial version for macOS 10.10 and newer and Windows 8/10 can be downloaded for free here.
Note that no iLok, dongle, or internet access is required for Urban Puncher activation. (All United Plugins software uses license files for activation and owners can freely use purchased software on all their computers as long as they are the user.)
