Sausage Fattener Review – The All-In-One Saturation, Compression, Limiter Plugin

Sausage fattener is a very popular plugin that uses saturation, compression, and limiting all in one very simple and quirky-looking interface.

It is used by many pro producers such as Tiesto, Kaskade, Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike, and many other top producers.

It has a lot less features as many other saturation and compression limiting plugins, but that can also be seen as one of its strengths.

This plugin is about convenience. It has a very simple user interface that can allow you to get very good quality sound in a short amount of time.

This can help you to focus on other parts of your mix and can help you finish trackers more quickly.

What Does Sausage Fattener Do?

Sausage Fattener includes only three knobs in a pretty quirky interface. The cartoon sausage character gets angrier and angrier as you dial up the fatness knob!

The fatness knob increases saturation and can boost the signal by as much as 30 Db gigs. This can quite significantly increase the harmonics in your signal, and it should be used as appropriate to your style (sparingly or generously).

The color knob adjusts the timbre of the signal. It can make it sound a lot brighter by adjusting the harmonic relationships. This can also make it sound a bit more toward the front of the mix.

And the gain knob adjusts the overall volume and does exactly what you would expect.

There’s a clipping indicator to show you when the levels are too high.

If you want to dive deeper into the inner workings of sausage fattener, then check out these articles on: Splice and a Reddit discussion on this topic.

The Pros of Sausage Fattener 

Extremely easy to use

You simply just have three knobs that everybody will be able to figure out within a few seconds. That said, you can still overcook the signal quite a lot with this. So, use it appropriately based on your mix. 

Quality sound

It is a very good quality sound, and this has been used by many top producers. So you can have good confidence in the quality of the plugin.

Convenience

The main overall pro of this is simply just convenience. It is very solid at just doing its job quickly you can dial in the fatness and color of the audio signal with great speed. And you can move on to other things.

Nice design! Initially, when you see this you might think it’s a bit of a gimmick, but it adds a bit of humor to your production process! 🙂

Cons

Not very configurable!

When you have a plug-in that’s so simple that also means that it’s less configurable. So, even though you can tweak these knobs to your liking.

It still does not have the settings and configuration options that will be in most other dedicated saturation and compressor plugins.

Some would argue that instead of spending money on simple plugins, that you should just save up and put the money towards plugin bundles, which can improve your workflow throughout the entire production process.

Impedes Learning?

Some people also see this plugin as an abstraction of actually learning how to use compression and saturation. I’m not sure how much I can agree with this, but if you solely rely on such a factor in your tracks, then you might be limited in your knowledge.

However, if you use it along with a fine understanding of music production and mixing, then I think it’s still a great plugin.

Where should you use sausage fattener?

You can use sausage fattener in many ways. You can add it to lead tracks to bring them forward quite a lot in the mix.

You can also use this plugin more subtly on your mastering chain or for almost any other type of track that you have.

Just make sure that you adopt the fatness and color settings appropriate to your mix! A good rule of thumb with any effects plugin is to dial it in as much as you can hear it and then dial it back a little bit. However, this will very much depend on your style, if you’re going for a heavily distorted type of music, then you can feel free to really push the knobs pretty high for this.

Compatibility 

Sausage Fattener is available in VST and AU format, and it will work on most up-to-date versions of Windows and Mac. 

Summary

That’s our quick summary of sausage fattener and what it is, you will find countless amounts of discussion about this plugin online.

There are just so many people talking about it, and it’s one of the most heavily used plugins in music production today. So it’s certainly one to check out.

You can find it on the Dada Life website, who are the makers of this plugin. If you have any opinions or other information that you’d like to share about this and please write it in the comment section below.