FabFilter’s Volcano 3 boasts a hot new look and old-school sounding filters
The creative filter plug-in erupts with per-filter saturation and various routing solution in stereo, L/R and M/S modes
FabFilter has dropped Volcano 3, the third iteration of its creative filter plug-in, built from the ground up with a streamlined GUI and new, powerful filters.
The most immediate update to Volcano is the new user interface, which FabFilter claims is more intuitive, thanks to the high-resolution spectrum display, visualising incoming audio. Plus, the new filter control panel allows you to simultaneously work with multiple filters using a unified response curve with stereo separation.
Modulation signals are also visualised in real-time with animated collars, with the source flow area providing an overview of all active modulations. In addition, floating slot panels offer a glance at all modulation targets. FabFilter says the darker colour scheme is easy on the eyes during long production sessions, too, and can be resized to fit your screen.
Under the hood, Volcano 3 boasts better-sounding filter algorithms with vintage-sounding bell, high/low shelf, notch, and all-pass modes. There’s also a 6dB/octave slope option for each curve, and you can even fine-tune the drive, saturation, volume and pan of every filter. You can also go beyond stereo processing and enable mid/side filtering, and enable a high-quality 4x oversampling mode.
Elsewhere, FabFilter has included attack, decay and release envelope stages for each curve with an envelope follower transient detection mode. For even more creativity, you can employ 16-step XLFOs, XY controllers and MIDI sources to your heart’s content.
An overhauled preset library offers quick inspiration, along with support for earlier Volcano presets if you’re an owner of previous versions.
Volcano 3 is available now for £94/$129/€109, for Windows and macOS in VST, VST3, AU, AAX and AudioSuite plug-in formats. iOS users can also download Volcano 3 from the App Store to use as an AUv3 plug-in. Owners of the previous version of Volcano are eligible for “very attractive discounts”, FabFilter adds.
Learn more at fabfilter.com
