The transient shaper lets you independently adjust the levels of the ‘attack’ and ‘sustain’ portions of the sound, with an additional Hold control allowing you to set the duration of the former.

Drive and Threshold knobs let you dial in the right amount of filth, and you can also apply a high-pass filter to the input and a low-pass filter to the output, ensuring things don’t get either too flabby or too fizzy.

The saturator also offers three different ‘flavours’ of distortion. To the expected Threshold, Ratio, make-up gain and time constant controls, for example, the compressor adds three different circuit models, a side-chain high-pass filter, and a Mix control for parallel operation. These are arranged around what looks like the mouth of Hell, but is actually an oversized macro control.Įach of these processing modules offers a pretty well-judged selection of controls, enabling them to be versatile yet not over-complicated. Said options comprise five individually switchable modules: a compressor, saturator, transient shaper, equaliser and limiter. In creating their brutal, unnatural and scary virtual instruments, the Heavyocity team apparently lean heavily on a variety of ‘secret sauce’ analogue devices, and the idea behind Punish is to present the same processing options in modelled form. Punish is a conventional audio processing plug-in, available for Mac OS and Windows in VST, Audio Units and AAX Native formats.

Their latest release is a bit of a departure, not because it isn’t brutal, unnatural or downright scary, but because it’s not a virtual instrument. Specialising in the brutal, unnatural and downright scary, New York-based developers Heavyocity have made quite a name for themselves with virtual instruments targeted at the modern media composer. If your audio has been particularly naughty, perhaps Heavyocity can give it the treatment it deserves.

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