What it does

Salt is an enhancer made from one half of a companding noise-reduction circuit. The encoder was built to brighten quiet high frequencies before tape and the decoder to take them back out afterwards. Salt runs one half on its own, so the level-dependent correction becomes the effect: quiet passages open up, loud ones are left alone, and nothing turns harsh. I put it on vocals, acoustic guitars and drum loops when the top end needs air but an EQ boost makes it brittle, and on bass and synths in Fat mode to give them some low end girth. A simpler version of Salt lives inside JJG Vocals as the SALT module, with one knob and the two curves. This is the full one: both curves, both directions, and the Flavor control that lets you set where it starts working. The circuit was painstakingly modeled from the hardware so it behaves the way the real thing does.

• Two curves: Kosher, one gentle sliding band, about 10 dB. Pink, two staggered stages, about 20 dB, wider and more dramatic
• Two directions: Acid brightens the quiet moments, Fat darkens and thickens them
• One Flavor knob for the amount, reading your material’s level instead of a fixed threshold
• Mix and output trim, click-free bypass, click-free curve and mode switching
• A/B compare, undo, preset browser, MIDI learn
• Includes a Lucas Arens preset pack, with more on the way from today’s top producers and mixers
• Zero latency
• New in 1.0.2: a click loads a preset in every DAW, preset rows highlight on hover, and Save and Rename dialogs open on top of the plugin. On Windows: no more DAW freezes when the plugin is removed, activation fixes, and it now shows in a proper VST3 folder

Specs

What people say about Salt

“To quote Phil Rosenthal’s dad Max: “I like Salt, ok?!” A plugin I didn’t know I needed badly. Also, as an outspoken hater of a certain vocal plugin, I welcome JJG Vocals as a much needed improvement upon the old.”

“Salt just has everything you want out of an exciter and then some. The dynamics features are so useful and the interface is streamlined and incredibly fun to use. I love plugins that get me to where I want to go intuitively and this is definitely one of them.”