Less Tube · free

Valve saturation, drawn open

Saturation plugins call it character and put it in a black box. Less Tube draws the box: the transfer curve on screen, a live harmonic fingerprint, and a bias control that trades even harmonics against odd, predictably, because the curves are symmetric by design.

Less Tube interface

Two models

Triode: soft, even-harmonic warmth. Iron: a transformer stage that saturates the lows first.

Live harmonic fingerprint

The evens and odds your settings produce, at the level you are actually driving, while the music plays.

Loudness-matched auto gain

A/B is about character, not level: the wet path glides back to the input's perceived loudness.

Delta listen

Solo the difference between input and output to hear what the valve contributes. With bypass on, delta plays silence, which doubles as the bypass test.

Multiband drive

Two crossovers, three regions, one latency on every path.

Specifications
FormatsAU, VST3
Latency48 samples, reported exactly
Oversampling4x, polyphase FIR
ModelsTriode, Iron
Factory presets6
Channelsmono, stereo, mid/side placement
Measured behaviour

At maximum drive with a 7 kHz tone, the bare stage keeps the worst alias fold more than 80 dB below the fundamental, and a test locks the full plugin path above 60 dB on every build. Small signals pass at unity in every model.

Two more models, Pentode and Vari-Mu, arrive later as a paid addition. Triode and Iron stay free, and nothing you save today will ever remap: the model parameter reserves all four slots from day one.