Direkt Software Releases Hot Potato FREE Distortion Plugin

Direkt Software released Hot Potato, a freeware distortion plugin for Windows and macOS.

Out of the sheer mass that presides in my plugin folder, distortion and saturation plugins comprise a solid third or so of them. So, my ears always perk up a little when I hear about new distortion plugins.

Hot Potato by Direkt Software brings audio mangling to the masses and promises to do so with a minimal set of controls. Does this multiplatform distortion do anything new?

Let’s find out.

Hot Potato First Impressions

First impressions are always important, and Hot Potato has an impressively straightforward interface. All controls are clearly labeled, and there is a grand total of six knobs to learn.

Gain, as it says, increases the gain of the distortion applied. This can go from subtle and sweet to creating entirely new waveforms and timbres out of basic sounds.

Filter introduces filtering to the signal path and functions primarily as a low-pass filter. The filter itself isn’t resonant, and you don’t have control over the steepness of the slope, but it does tidy up some of the more extreme processing.

Clip introduces clipping to the signal path, much like gain it is straight and to the point. It works in tandem with gain to create powerful distortion for various sources.

Power is where the magic happens, and as you increase it to the right, you’ll notice the effects of the distortion itself in short order. More extreme powers on the gain and clipping knobs give way to unruly and wooly distortion.

In and out are just the input and output gain; not much else to say about them. They do their job well, not that overages were an issue, thanks to the clipper.

Hot Potato TLDR And Specs

Hot Potato is a fun distortion and sounds great on drums and synthesized basses. It conjures up grit and snarl that befit more aggressive genres.

Hot Potato is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Supported plugin formats at the time of this writing are solely VST3, and the developer has provided no indication of whether Apple Silicon support is planned in the future.

Download: Hot Potato

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