Analog Obsession Tone Shaper is a free plugin designed to change the tonal balance of your tracks without adding saturation or extra coloration.
In this quick demonstration, I put Tone Shaper through a few different situations, including a drum bus, the master bus, and a vocal, to see how its simple controls affect the sound.
A Simple Approach to Tone Shaping
Tone Shaper doesn’t try to overwhelm you with a huge collection of controls. There are just three main controls: Tone, Body, and Output.
According to Analog Obsession, Tone Shaper uses a passive design with no nonlinear elements. The idea is to let you change the tonal balance of a signal without intentionally adding the saturation or harmonic coloration you might get from other analog-modeled processors.
The Tone control lets you move the sound from darker to brighter. The default setting gives you a starting point, and you can double-click the control to return it to its default position.
The Body control focuses more on fullness and weight, giving you another way to shape the character of the signal.
And finally, the Output control lets you compensate for any level changes after making your adjustments.
Testing It on a Drum Bus
For the first demonstration, I ran Tone Shaper on a drum bus.
This is a useful place to try a simple tone-shaping plugin because even relatively small changes to the overall frequency balance can change how the drums sit in a mix.
I played with both the Tone and Body controls to hear how much difference they could make without introducing obvious saturation.
Hearing It in the Mix
Next, I put Tone Shaper into the context of a full mix.
This is where a processor like this can be more useful than judging it in isolation. A tonal change that sounds dramatic when you’re listening to a soloed track might be exactly what you need — or far too much — once everything else is playing.
I also pushed the controls a little further to see what happens when you go beyond subtle adjustments.
Master Bus and Vocals
I also tested Tone Shaper on the master bus of one of my own songs that I’m currently working on.
From there, I tried it on a vocal to see how the Tone and Body controls affected the voice.
The plugin isn’t trying to be a full channel strip or an analog console emulation. It’s a very focused tool for making broad tonal adjustments with only a few controls.
Final Thoughts
Tone Shaper is a good example of how sometimes a plugin doesn’t need dozens of
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