Review: Sausage Fattener from Dada Life

Dada Life’s Sausage Fattener, is an interesting little plugin, packing an awful lot of punch considering its simplicity. Let’s take a look at this classic.

The plugin has been developed by Tailored Noise, after being approached by Swedish DJ duo Dadalife, who were trying to optimize their own production workflows. After the initial success of Sausage Fattener, the two teams have gone on to develop an additional plugin, called Endless Smile, a fantastic tool for creating build-ups with a similarly amusing yet simple user interface. 

People always ask us how we get our greasy sound…here is the answer. Hook up this fat bastard to your favorite DAW (AU and VST on both PC/Mac) and get dirty. The plugin is already used by Tiësto, Kaskade, Diplo, Laidback Luke and others (see below for more).

The Sausage Fattener only has two knobs. But don’t be fooled. With those seemingly simple parameters you can create loads of different sounds. Use the Sausage Fattener on a single channel with moderate settings as a musical compressor. Turn it up and you have a dirty bastard of distortion. But you can also use the plugin on a bus (for example all the drums and the bass) or the whole track as a mastering plugin.”

Dada Life

This Little Piggy Bought a Plugin

I was put on to Dada Life’s plugin products by a dear friend from Stockholm. We had been working on some songs together and he said to me one day, ”Dan, have you heard about Sausage Fattener? You have got to play with this: it’s absolutely crazy! We need it on the track!” 

I’d been using more hardware than software at the time (SSL & TubeTech compressors, Thermionic Culture’s Vulture etc.), so was going for a slightly different sound. I’ll be honest, I saw the price and thought that it couldn’t be that good, could it?

I figured, “What the hell!”, and bought it. Putting it onto vocals and drums, I was amazed at the sound it created. And it was kind of quirky in an amusing way. The more I used it, the more I liked it. Sausage Fattener has been a staple in my plugin folder ever since.

Happy Little Sausage

So, let’s get into what Sausage Fattener actually does and how it works.

Putting it simply, Sausage Fattener is a variable compressor-type, with saturation and envelope-changing properties. And that’s probably being a little unfair to both Dadalife and Tailored Noise, as it’s one of those plugs that’s difficult to explain exactly what it does under the hood: you just have to play with it and hear the results.

Upon loading the plugin the user is greeted with a colourful interface.

On a yellow background, there is a big cartoon sausage with a face on it. This sausage’s expression changes from comical to gritted teeth, depending on the intensity of the effect parameters dialled in. The rotary controls also shake when audio is passed through the plugin, for added effect. 

So, this plugin is designed to be both fun and intuitive. Similar to the Waves “One-knob” series, Sausage Fattener uses a basic user interface: you’re not going to get bogged down with complex operations here.

The control surface comprises just three controls: 

• Fatness – the more the control is turned, the harder, or more saturated the sound gets. But it’s not just that: the envelope of the audio changes too (the release time).

• Colour – Acts as more of a sweepable high-frequency EQ effect, adding a brightness, band-pass type of effect to the sound.

• Gain – Enables the user to either attenuate or front-load the signal into the plugin, again, in conjunction with the other controls, creating a wide and diverse range of results.

Great Taste, I Mean, Sound

The plugin’s simplicity is very appealing: no excessive amounts of parameters to play with. It’s very good as a “set and forget” effect. But you can also automate its settings, so there are some cool production/performance aspects.

Once you get past the novelty of the graphics, the 3 controls, (well, the 2 big controls) offer some really interesting results.

Applying copious amounts of fatness and colour can create some quite aggressive outcomes but in a good way. That said, excess is possible, and while testing on various sources of either synths, drums, bass, vocals or even full mixes, a modicum of reserve was required to achieve subjectively “good” and useable results.

There are no presets for this plugin, but I’m not entirely sure they would be needed – after all, how difficult can it be to turn two knobs until it sounds good? Just get tweaking.

I like the sound and range of excess that can be applied. The Fatness and Colour could benefit from some additional settings, so you could change the envelope effect, or the sweepable frequency, though I feel that would detract from the simplicity. It would be nice if it was available for ProTools too. But those are just minor niggles.

As to who I would recommend this plugin to? Well, pretty much any producer, composer, engineer, or musician. It is reasonably priced and offers a unique sound that can be applied to pretty much any source to achieve something positive, from obvious to subtle. And after all, who wouldn’t enjoy having a grimacing sausage staring at them whilst they work on their latest masterpiece!?

Find out more about Sausage Fattener