Tape hysteresis emulator
Hysterical
Tape-style saturation you can season to taste, light enough to sit on every channel.
- Zero latency
- VST3 · AU · CLAP · Standalone
- macOS · Windows
v0.61 — in beta with testers
$49
Get on the release listWhat it does
Everything you actually want from tape, on any track or bus. Hit it lightly for a little extra mojo. Push a bit harder and the transients round gently while the sound thickens. Or slam it for creative mangling that's magically smooth and sculptable.
Why it sounds the way it does
A plain waveshaper maps one input level to one output level, always. Hysterical doesn't: before it's saturated, the signal is measured against a slower-moving copy of itself, so the same level can land in two different places on the curve, depending on which way the wave is heading. That's the loop in the picture. Turning up Hysteresis pushes the sound harder into the curve, while Match Loudness keeps the overall level steady.
With Split on, as it is by default, the low end mostly stays clean.
To be precise about what this is: a fast mathematical model, tuned by ear for a tape-style sound. It is not a physical model of magnetisation — it doesn't solve the Jiles–Atherton equations and isn't trying to. If you want the physics, the free Chow Tape Model is an excellent implementation of exactly that, and it's open source.
Hysteresis amount:
- None
- Low
- Medium
- High
The interface
The panel is the signal path, drawn left to right. Input, an optional band split, the driven high band in coral and the clean low band in teal, then balance and output. Anything the plugin sets for you rather than you setting it is amber.
Easy on your CPU
Designed from the ground up to be efficient rather than optimised after the fact — and it reports zero latency. No lookahead, no oversampling, no delay lines: nothing in the signal path that shifts anything in time, so it needs no delay compensation and can sit anywhere in a chain.
Zero latency isn't the same as phase-flat. The band split and the smoothing stage both rotate phase — that's not a side effect, it's where the behaviour comes from.
The headroom isn't clever optimisation — it's doing less. A one-pole filter and one waveshaper, with no iterative solver and no oversampling to pay for.
Under the hood
It stays level while you drive it
Match Loudness is on by default: push the drive and the plugin compensates behind you, using a loudness measurement rather than a peak reading. Bypass it and the level doesn't jump, so when you A/B you're hearing what the saturation did to the sound — not just that it got louder.
Two crossover shapes
The gentle one splits at 12 dB/oct and recombines perfectly, so the saturation bleeds across the crossover instead of stopping at it — the bands stay of a piece, which is usually what you want on a full mix. The steep one splits at 24 dB/oct and holds them properly apart: lean on the top end and the low stays out of it, so a kick keeps its shape while everything above it gets worked. Same knobs, two quite different ways to sculpt.
A window you can actually resize
Drag it anywhere from 510 to 1360 pixels wide — small enough to tuck beside a mixer, large enough to work on. The aspect ratio is locked so nothing distorts, and the panel is drawn as vector at whatever size you pick, so it stays sharp instead of turning into a stretched bitmap.
Formats
VST3, AU, CLAP, and a standalone app.
Get on the release list
If you want it when it lands, get on the list — that's the only thing the list is used for.