What it does
Drive and the grille
Drive is the big knob in the centre. It takes you from clean all the way to 48 dB of push. Behind the grille sits the inside of a valve unit, with its valves, transformer and capacitors half hidden in the dark.
The valves are the light. The left one follows what comes in and the middle one how hard VARDE is working. The right one follows what goes out. Every hit makes them flare, the harder you drive the hotter they burn, and their golden light shines out through the grille over the copper glow behind it. Push it hard and the middle valve shows a faint blue haze, just as a real power valve does.
Auto Gain holds the output level steady while you turn, up or down, so you hear the character of the sound, not extra volume, and you can automate Drive into a drop without the level jumping.
Bias shifts any character off centre for more even harmonics and a fuller edge.
Seven characters
Seven ways to break a sound
Each character is its own way of shaping sound, and all seven are level matched, so switching between them is a fair comparison.
- Tanh
- Rounded and smooth, adding odd harmonics. The same curve behind the Tanh mode in IMPACT Engine, and it shines on a full drum bus.
- Tube
- Led by the second harmonic, thick and warm from the first touch of Drive. Hit it hard and it gives a little, then blooms back as the note fades.
- Tape
- The softest of them. It warms the sound and gets darker on top the harder you push it.
- Transform
- Weight. The low mids saturate first and the bass pushes the whole stage harder, while everything below about 45 Hz stays clean, so the sub keeps its punch on a big system instead of turning to mud.
- Diode
- A guitar-pedal clipper. It tightens the lows, pushes the mids into the clipper and softens the fizz on top, so the result is buzzy, forward and made to cut through.
- Fold
- A wavefolder for metallic, synthetic tones. Past its peak the wave folds back on itself.
- Rectify
- Flips the lower half of the wave up as you push it. Around the middle of the Drive knob the octave above starts to growl under the note, and at the top only the buzzing octave is left. Great on bass and synths.
Hear it
Off and on, same loudness
Every pair is matched to within 0.1 LU, measured. A demo where the processed version is a decibel louder will always sound better and tells you nothing, so this one is not.
909 drums
Bass
303 synth
Full mix
Everything you hear was made with DOLMEN
Multiband
The grille slides open
Press MULTIBAND and the grille opens onto a live spectrum of your sound. Split it into as many as eight bands and drag the dividers to place them.
Every band gets its own character, drive, bias, mix and output, so you can push the mids into Tube, put Rectify on the top end and keep the lows warm with Transform. Mute, solo, bypass, or listen to just the distortion a single band is adding. Choose how steep the splits are at 12, 18 or 24 dB per octave.
Left untouched, the bands add back up perfectly flat. Opening the multiband window changes nothing about your sound until you decide it should.
In detail
The parts worth knowing about
Bass Protect
Pick a frequency between 20 and 300 Hz and everything below it passes through untouched while the rest gets driven. Kicks stay punchy and bass stays solid at settings that would otherwise turn the low end to mush. The split is clean, with no bump or dip where the two halves meet.
Tone and Air
Tone tilts the saturated sound darker or brighter around 800 Hz by up to 6 dB. Air lifts the very top above 10 kHz by up to 6 dB. Both shape only the distorted signal, so whatever clean part your Mix is letting through stays exactly as it was.
Delta
Press DELTA to hear only what VARDE is adding, with the original signal taken away. It is the quickest way to know what a character and a drive setting are actually doing. In multiband, every band has its own.
Mix, aligned to the sample
Blend clean and saturated for parallel saturation without setting up a send. The two paths are aligned to the sample, so any blend sounds full and solid instead of thin and phasey.
Interaction and Softening
Interaction makes Drive follow your playing, pushing louder moments harder and quiet ones less, the way real hardware behaves. Softening rounds the attack of transients before they reach the saturation, for smoother drums and a gentler onset.
Mid/Side
Switch Stereo Mode to Mid/Side and the centre and the sides saturate separately. Weight goes into the middle while the stereo image stays open.
Under the hood
Why it stays clean when you crank it
Distortion creates new high frequencies. The ones that land above the top of human hearing have nowhere to go, so they fold back down into the audible range as harsh, out-of-tune noise. This is aliasing, and it is why a lot of distortion sounds brittle rather than loud.
VARDE runs its saturation at a higher internal sample rate to keep those frequencies where they belong. Eco is 2x and saves processing power, Normal is 4x for everyday mixing, Ultra is 8x for the cleanest result on bright, heavily driven sources. Every character also carries its own layer of anti-aliasing, so even Eco holds up.
Switching Quality crossfades, so you can change it while the music is playing and hear the difference directly.
Zero latency
No delay at all, so VARDE is ready for recording and for playing live.
Linear phase
Keeps the phase of every frequency intact through the processing. It costs about a millisecond, which your DAW compensates for on its own. Use it when VARDE sits in parallel with other tracks, or on a mix bus where phase matters.
Auto Gain that follows you
Auto Gain listens to the sound and keeps the level where it should be. It also knows in advance how much quieter each character gets when Drive comes down, so a quick pull from full Drive to zero stays level and does not dip and fade back in.
That makes Drive safe to automate.
Getting it running
In your DAW
Logic Pro
On any audio track, a bus or an instrument track, click an empty Audio FX slot, then Audio Units → Takt Audio Labs → VARDE. Choose Stereo, or Mono on a mono track.
The first time it opens, paste the licence key from your receipt.
Ableton Live
In Settings → Plug-Ins, turn on Use VST3 Plug-In System Folders and rescan. In the browser sidebar click Plug-Ins, open Takt Audio Labs, and drag VARDE onto a track.
If Audio Units are switched on in Live as well, it appears twice. They are the same plug-in and either one is fine.
Privacy and updates
Offline by default
No account, no cloud, no telemetry, no analytics. Nothing you make with VARDE is sent anywhere, and it works with your network switched off.1
How you get updates
When an update is available, VARDE tells you in its settings menu and points you back to this page. The download link on your original receipt always serves the current build.
Your licence carries across untouched, and a session written with one version opens in the next with every setting where you left it.
Launch price until 3 February 2027
Secure checkout by Lemon Squeezy
| Formats | Audio Unit, VST® 3 |
|---|---|
| System | macOS 11 or later, Apple Silicon and Intel |
| Windows | Mac only for now. Windows is planned |
| Licence | One purchase, up to three machines, moveable |
| Activation | With the key from your receipt. No account, no ongoing checks |
| Updates | Announced in the plug-in when one is available |
| Support | support@taktaudiolabs.com |
How activation works. Your receipt includes a licence key. Paste it into VARDE and it activates. Activating needs the internet, and so does releasing a machine from inside the plug-in. At no other time does it check your licence, so it works with the network off.
Until a key is entered, audio passes through untouched. Three machines per licence, and if you sell a Mac or a drive dies you can release the slot from inside the plug-in yourself.
- Once a day the plug-in asks taktaudiolabs.com whether a newer version exists. That is a request for a public file and carries nothing about you or your machine. If you are offline it doesn’t ask. Nothing else leaves your computer, and any network monitor will confirm it. Back to the text