Denise Audio’s Dragon Fire lets you design your own multi-compressor sound

Dragon Fire is Denise Audio’s new plug-in that uses tonal compression and proprietary Shape technology to tame and colour your dynamics. The compressor’s sound can be fine-tuned with multiple features, whether you’re after a vintage sound or something clean.

Denise’s new plug-in inherits some features from the rest of its family. Most notably, Dragon Fire features push-pull technology found in God Mode. This can be operated in a similar fashion to an EQ, but the result is much more pronounced. By altering the gain of a frequency node, you dictate how much compression is applied to that frequency band.

Then there’s Denise’s Shape technology. This lets you adjust RMS and knee to soften the compression sound, switch between a fast and slow release for an opto-style response, and control the amount of saturation applied based on the gain reduction.

Check out an overview of Dragon Fire below.

Along with Shape and push-pull, Dragon Fire also features a transparent clipper function at the end of the signal chain and the option to use the compressor in single-band mode.

Dragon Fire’s GUI will be immediately recognisable to anyone who’s used Denise plug-ins before. You get a display graph that shows your audio signal, with some sliders just below that radically manipulate the sound. Below those sliders are some more parameters that will let you fine-tune the sound.

This consistent, friendly design is becoming a hallmark of Denise and we’ve enjoyed using it in our previous reviews.

The Berlin-based brand often delivers the goods with its presets. To that end, Dragon Fire comes with a variety of presets covering patches for guitars, bass, vocals and drums.

Denise’s Dragon Fire is available now for an introductory price of €40.50/£35/$49.90, increasing to full price after 1 May. A free trial is also available to put it to the test before you pull the trigger.

Learn more at denise.io.

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