In this week's Friday Free Plug-in, we are featuring FETISH from Analog Obsession, rather than being a niche peccadillo this is a FET style compressor plug-in.

1176

In James' recent roundup of 1176 style plug-ins he identified 13 alternatives 1176 plug-ins and he was aware that there were more. However FETISH only has one real equivalent in that list because the only other free plug-in in that list was the ubiquitous BF76.

Having used it, FETISH isn't going to stand up against the UA 1176 or the Softube FET compressor, it works well enough but, like BF76, it doesn't quite have "it" whatever the 1176's "it" is. However, to compare a free plug-in to premium plug-ins isn't at all fair. FETISH works every bit as well as BF76 and in use I found it addressed my biggest criticism of BF76, the metering. I've never liked the ballistics of the BF76 VU meter. Sound-wise I'll leave that to others as it is free. if you want to know what it sounds like then download it and try it out!

Slow To Fast Or Fast To Slow

Controversially the FETISH's attack and release knobs work in the opposite way round to an 1176, which work the opposite way round to every other compressor in existence, however they do label them slow and fast, otherwise this could be as confusing as using a real 1176 for the first time!