Every Mastering Compressor you’ll ever need
Switchable pre-emphasis filter modes
Switchable feedforward / Feedback topology
Drive, Sag and Parallel Compression
Unique ‘Bomb’ mode
Bombardier is our most ambitious project to date – a premium quality buss compressor, tailored for smooth and musical processing of complex audio such as drum groups, vocal stems and your full stereo mix, lending a controllable sense of weight, fluidity and cohesion.
Due to its RMS compression engine (and unlike The Rocket, which uses peak compression), Bombardier is ideally suited to final mixdown and mastering usage, Bombardier is also ideal for those who like to set up buss dynamics first and then mix ‘into’ the buss compressor.
If you don’t know your detector routing topology from your RMS window size, we don’t believe that should necessarily stop you getting truly great results.
Let’s be honest with each other: compression is not about using presets, its about balancing what your ears are hearing with what the meters are telling you.
However, Bombardier is extremely flexible and we acknowledge that a well chosen preset can serve as an excellent starting point. Perhaps the names of a few of the comprehensive list of included high-quality presets will give you an inkling of what to expect:
2Buss – Glue it up
2Buss – 2-inch in my cupboard
2Buss – Final Cut
Buss – Drum Power 3 – Dark-n-British
SD – Mojo Bomb
Bombardier gives a nod to the non-linear and frequency-variant subtleties of a wide range of Grade-A hardware buss compressors, and should you wish these can be pushed almost into the realms of a character compressor.
Bombardier’s party piece is the new and unique ‘bomb’ processing algorithm which, when selected, gives attack and release settings that are effectively instantaneous while yielding exceptionally smooth gain reduction. Bomb mode is sure to become a firm favourite with mastering engineers the world over, but can also give extremely satisfying results in single track and buss applications.
With Bombardier’s core processing sounding so very good, it would have been sheer cruelty to skimp on those additional features that would unlock the full panorama of its potential. So we didn’t!
4 x Oversampling – if you can spare the CPU power, try quadrupling the internal sample rate when mastering delicate audio, or if you’re asking for particularly rapid gain changes and can perceive slight aliasing artefacts.
Full sidechain functionality – feed the detector circuit with its own separate stereo audio input.
Automatic Release modes – in a choice of ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ flavours.
An evaluation copy may be download for free. It becomes legitimate when you purchase a licence.