Stillwell Audio launches the Rocket and releases Tinman

2 new effects, a compressor and a resonating filter of sort, are available from Stillwell Audio, which are – once again – some kind of different. On top – once again – both can be checked out for free…

The Rocket, as they claim, is yet the compressor with the fast envelopes around. I usually dislike posting company announcements but the Schwa’s definitely know how to kick it

The Rocket is a character audio compressor, singular in its extraordinary speed, responding in mere microseconds to variations in program level. Being in the order of several thousand times faster than most ordinary compressors, we respectfully submit that The Rocket kicks like a mf.

Violation of the laws of physics and digital signal processing remain beyond us at this time, and a single sample at 44.1kHz has a span of 22.6 microseconds. The Rocket’s attack time can be below this level, for absolute certainty that even the very first sample understands that you are its master. Placed on the master bus, The Rocket will effortlessly tame transients almost in the manner of a brickwall limiter.

Discussions of Science and Art are played out within The Rocket ’s ‘Impetus’ circuits, where warmth and aggression exist as DSP, able to take the delicate, musical gain reduction to the extremes of dirty, heavy and slamming rock’n’roll misbehaviour. Aw hell, The Rocket can rock so crank it up!

Then there’s Tinman, “the intelligent resonator” – some kind of wah-wah on steroids. It’s able to create quite interesting results on anything rhythmatic.

TinMan is an auto-peaking resonant filter with multiple pitch detection and individually triggered attack/decay envelopes. In other words, it listens to your audio and makes matching spooky wooo-eeee-oooo effects.

TinMan uses a new polyphonic pitch detection algorithm to isolate and rank the strongest pitches in the input audio. For each detected pitch, a separate resonant filter, or resonator, is peak-matched to that exact pitch (even if it’s off-key), and an attack envelope is triggered. If a pitch slides, the resonator’s resonant peak will continue to track it. If a pitch ends, the resonator will release until fully quiet.

At light settings, TinMan works on just about any dull audio part to add some life and interest.

Both effects have an extremely well detailed UI and as usual fully working evalution versions can be downloaded freely. A full rocket licence sells for 49$ (~38€), and Tinman can be legitimated for 50$ (~38€).