Soundtheory Kraftur

Soundtheory Kraftur main screen.

Want to add power, energy and excitement to a source? Kraftur can help...

Soundtheory’s Kraftur is named after an Icelandic word for strength, and it’s a multiband saturation plug‑in with some really nice touches. Applied in the right way, multiband saturation — a technique whose potential I really began to discover back in the ’90s when using Drawmer’s Masterflow hardware — allows you to add a sense of power to a sound in a really focused way. For instance, you can put more energy and edge into the highs without increasing peak levels. Similarly, you can often add weight to the lows, without clouding the all‑important midrange, or keep the lows clean while ‘inflating’ the mids. There’s another benefit to this multiband approach too, relative to conventional full‑band saturation: while there’s obviously plenty of harmonic distortion going on, the process causes less intermodulation distortion, which means it often delivers more ‘natural’ or ‘effortless’ results.

Kraftur is authorised using an iLok account, and supports all the common plug‑in formats for macOS and Windows hosts, including AAX. It can run at any sample rate up to 384kHz and oversampling (between 392 and 768 kHz) is used internally to minimise aliasing artefacts. A switchable Match function keeps the output at the same level as the input to make evaluating the effect easier.

Orientation

Kraftur adds to the multiband saturation concept in a couple of useful ways. First, it offers control over the intensity of saturation in each band. Second, rather than a conventional wet/dry mix control, it provides a very practical, intuitive triangular blend pad, that allows the user to control the contribution of three different audio paths: the dry sound, full‑band saturation and multiband saturation.

For the multiband path, Kraftur splits the signal into three separate bands, with user‑adjustable crossover frequencies. You have control over each band’s individual distortion characteristics. To the left of the screen are controls that affect the saturation, and Drive determines the signal level that’s fed into both the single‑band and multiband processors. While the sound is generally pleasing, I did find that if Drive was set too high it could introduce unwanted distortion, so you do need to listen carefully as you set that.

The shape of the transfer curve is affected by both Offset and Knee controls. The Knee does what you’d usually expect in a dynamics processor, while offset allows you to create a lower‑reaching, gentler curve before the knee, for a smooth transition. The position of the curves for each band (low/mid/high) is controlled by three Shift sliders that can either be operated independently or, if you prefer, as one, courtesy of a link control. Bands can also be soloed to help you fine‑tune things when setting up each one, though obviously the result in the context of the recombined sound is all‑important. Finally, a soft‑clipping stage, with adjustable headroom, comes after the output gain control, the idea being that it can be engaged at the output to catch any ‘overs’ that result when the bands’ signals are recombined.

The level meters display both RMS and peak levels as dBFS (decibels relative to digital ‘full scale’). Peak shows whichever channel is highest and a peak hold line shows the peak values for two seconds, while RMS levels are averaged across all channels. That leaves the large central display, which shows both the split and full‑band curves along with histograms showing peak levels. It makes excellent use of colour for clear visual feedback, with the colours becoming more saturated to reflect what’s happening to the audio. There’s also a choice of several alternative colour schemes if you don’t like the default.

Sat Tests

Some might find it unusual that Kraftur doesn’t come with any presets, but it’s not an oversight — the results depend so much on both the level and dynamics of the incoming signal, along with its spectral content, that presets would be of little use. But even beginners shouldn’t let that put them off: Kraftur is really easy to operate.

Anywhere you might be tempted to use a conventional saturation plug‑in, you can try Kraftur, and you’ll probably find that it affords you much more control over the results.

What matters most, of course, is the sound. I have to say that Kraftur scores well in this department generally. For processing overall mixes or submixes, I usually found that subtle settings worked best — it tended to be a case of using little or no processing on the mids, and then adding targeted enhancement to the highs and lows, depending on what I wanted to achieve. Things like drum busses and rhythmic loops can be treated more aggressively, though, to add punch or attitude, and fairly assertive settings can also help to make bass sounds seem more dense or more present in a busy mix. In fact, anywhere you might be tempted to use a conventional saturation plug‑in, you can try Kraftur, and you’ll probably find that it affords you much more control over the results. There’s a free trial period so give it a shot.