About FabFilter Volcano 3

Nothing beats a vintage sounding, gritty and creamy cut-off filter. And that's exactly what FabFilter Volcano has been known for since its first release in 2005. With Volcano 3, we are further expanding the sound palette with the introduction of characterful, non-linear bell, shelf, notch and all-pass filters, improved modulation options, high quality mode and much more.

New in Volcano 3

The first thing you will notice when you open Volcano 3 is the brand-new look. The completely redesigned interface makes Volcano 3 more pleasant and efficient to work with. All the goodness of the previous Volcanoes is still here of course, together with many new features:

• Fully redesigned, highly simplified interface, with an easier workflow, including a new design of modulation sources and floating slot panel.
• Added new, vintage-sounding EQ-type filter shapes for every included filter style. With the internal drive and non-linearities, this results in truly unique filtering behavior, with lots of character, incomparable to usual, clean EQ filters:
  • Bell
  • Low- and high shelf
  • Notch
  • All-pass
• Added 6 dB filter slope option.
• Improved the sound quality of the filter algorithms.
• Improved modulation quality and of the filter frequency and peak parameters.
• Introduced High Quality option, enabling maximum internal oversampling for the best results.
• Vastly improved the filter display, including a spectrum analyzer, and optional piano display. The display now works much more intuitively, letting you select and adjust multiple filter curves at once.
• Introduced Drive setting per filter, adjusting the internal filter saturation, which allows for much more variety in sound and smoothness.
• Introduced Level/Pan per filter, which is especially useful when using parallel filter routings.
• Live modulation visualization for targets and sources.
• Envelope generators now have a curve slope setting for their attack, decay and release curves, opening up a much wider range of possible shapes, from very snappy and aggressive to gentle and smooth.
• Added Transient mode for envelope followers, which turns them into transient detectors.
• Introducing Slider mode and a range setting for XY controllers. In Slider mode, the XY controller only works in vertical direction, taking up much less space. The range setting toggles between bipolar (-1 to 1) and unipolar (0 to 1) behavior.
• Increased the number of XY controllers/sliders to 6.
• Modulation sources can now be renamed to make their use easier to understand.
• The XLFO Balance and Frequency Offset parameters are now modulation targets.
• XLFO MIDI triggering now offers a new Legato mode.
• The EG Threshold parameters are now modulation targets. In addition, the incoming signal level is displayed in a meter around the Threshold knob, and it's now possible to audition the external side chain input.
• The EGs now have an Range setting, toggling between Normal (a range between 0 and 1) and Neutral Sustain (a range around the Sustain level, where EG outputs 0 when it's in the sustain stage).
• Added the ability to hide modulation sources except for XY controllers and Sliders. This is often useful, since most presets use XLFOs, EFs, EGs and MIDI sources to create certain effects, which in turn can be controlled by XY controllers and sliders.
• The interface now supports resizing and Full Screen mode.
• New factory presets, smartly organized and carefully designed.
• Introduced support for Pro Tools hardware control surfaces

FabFilter Volcano 3 can load presets from version 1 and 2. Due to changes in version 3, they might sometimes sound a bit different. See Upgrading to Volcano 3 for more information.

FabFilter Volcano 3 is available in VST, VST3, CLAP, AU (Audio Units), AAX Native and AudioSuite formats.

Next: Quick start

See Also
Using FabFilter Volcano 3
Upgrading to Volcano 3
VST plug-in versions