PIRANHA Review

Dark Palace sent me a copy of the their new multi-band distortion effect Piranha. Piranha offers dozens of distortion curves that can be placed onto any of the three bands all packaged in a lovely UI. Speaking of the UI, I love the simple and flat design here with enough color and contrast variety to lead your eyes towards important controls. Everything looks lovely and there’s even some included themes for color variation.

There were some UX aspects that I felt could be improved, but I’ve brought these up with the developer, so hopefully they will find their way into a future update. As a quick example, as it is now, dragging up and down on the middle band does not adjust the bandwidth, additionally I think the wave-shape displays should act as XY controllers for their axis’s adjacent sliders.

The variety of distortions on offer are great, there’s quite a few subtle and utility curves for softer saturation, there’s also many jagged and rough curves for gritty distortion. There’s even three “time modulated” curves that change shape dynamically. I do think a custom curve editor would really be cool for this one, but it’s not a necessity. Each distortion has a control for threshold and bias. Threshold can also be offset with different values for upwards and downwards wave cycles.

Each band can be mixed, soloed, muted, phase flipped or even delta’d. If you are not familiar, a delta ∆ setting cancels out the original signal giving you just the difference (diff) of the two signals. You can even apply delta to the full mix. I think having per-band phase flip and delta is pretty unique, I’ll likely use the difference control from time to time, but I’m not sure how often I’ll utilize phase inversion. One thing I didn’t pick up on at first is that when you decouple a band’s threshold you can actually apply different distortion curves to the top and bottom much like Rift.

There’s a few other goodies here and there, such as linear phase, oversampling, M/S mode and DC filtering. There’s also a couple boost filters pre and post distortion to help shape the resulting tone. Over all, this is a fairly simple but powerful multi-band distortion, it has a lovely UI and sounds great. I’m enjoying what I’m seeing from Dark Palace, especially with the great visual design.

You can pick up PIRANHA from Dark Palace’s website here: https://darkpalace.studio/