According to Samin Nosrat and Netflix, there are four things a great recipe requires. Salt, Fat, Acid, and Heat. I'll figure out later which three other snapins will round out this strained metaphor for me, but the spitting, crackly, luscious, flavour-enhancing richness in your mix has got to be Faturator.

And just like your lipid foodstuffs, there's no end to the variety of methods and usages. From sweet creamed butter in a choc-chip cookie to bacon-fried-fried-bread with bacon and fries, Faturator covers all your needs when you're cooking up a special in the studio.

Ok, I'll stop that now. Food-talk paused.

Faturator, a dynamics-preserving distortion effect, offers warm analog-style drive in addition to bright digital fuzz, blendable to your liking, along with a wet/dry mix knob for parallel processing. But the addition of the 'color' and 'stereo turbo' controls really make it a must-have.

'Colour' is a filter acting on the incoming signal to boost your choice of frequencies before hitting the distortion. This means you can tune your growls to suit. 'Stereo turbo' slightly delays the left or right channel to induce a stereo image in your distorted sound for added massiveness.

Modulating any of these features in our snapin hosts (Snap Heap, Phase Plant, or Multipass) allows you to get complex and creative quickly.

In the video below, for example, I try out a dynamic vocal drive, which increases supernaturally with the volume of the incoming signal for an exaggerated seared peaks effect. Also we modulate the 'color' control of a Faturator in Phase Plant to make a pleasingly organic envelope filter sweep on a synthesized harp/dulcimer sound, and push a kick drum to its limits with the standalone Faturator plugin before zoning in on the perfect sound for the track.

But this barely scratches the surface of what you might create with Faturator. Open up your own audio restaurant and start designing the tasting menu. I'm sorry. Couldn't resist.