Baby Audio Parallel Aggressor

Parallel processing is a great way to capture the flavour of heavy processing and this new plugin wants to make it easier than ever before

Baby Audio is an LA-based boutique software developer with a handful of plugins, including Comeback Kid, which is a highly flexible delay with in-built transient shaper, tape saturation and modulation, and Super VHS, which is a multifaceted tape saturation and noise effect. Last year they released I Heart NY, a flavour-filled black box-style parallel compressor designed to quickly inject some classic Stateside punch and colouration into your sounds. Emboldened by the success of this simple plugin, their latest release, Parallel Aggressor (AU, VST2, VST3, AAX) sticks with the parallel concept (see boxout) but ups the ante, extending it to two separate processing chains.

Parallel Lines

Parallel Aggressor’s two processes are the compression (Spank) and saturation (Heat) which alongside the original dry signal are balanced using a 3-fader mixer. This includes a handy solo feature so you can listen to each individual element, although you can’t mute the faders, which would have been handy.

Much like with I Heart NY, the specifics of each process are hidden and you simply use the respective knobs to set the intensity of the processing. However, unlike on I Heart NY, you get four Style settings for each process and these provide additional tailoring to expand the basic effect.

Spank is very similar to the I Heart NY effect but with improved sound quality and signal detection. The four style options are transient shaping (Extra Punch), more aggressive effect (Extra Smack), fixed low-cut for the sidechain, and a mono option. Heat meanwhile uses an optimised version of their Super VHS tape saturation algorithm. The style options add more distortion (Extra Hot), add mid-range bite (Tone) and apply high and low-pass filtering at 150Hz and 7.5kHz respectively.