This is FabFilter at it’s most basic, it has very few controls, but hey, sometimes all you need is a little filtering. It consists of two filters, the same as the other FabFilter products, there are three characteristics to choose from: FabFilter One, Raw and Gentle. Each filter can be set to high pass, band pass or low pass, they can also be turned on or off and you can of course control the peak and frequency values as well as the slope (the options are 12, 24 and 48). With FabFilters incredibly smart graph you won’t have to touch any of these switches, knobs or buttons though, other than the characteristics menu. Just click and drag the filters in the graph to change the frequency and the peak values, shift-click them to change slope and cmnd-click them to change between band pass, high pass and low pass. All changes made without a hiccup. This makes Simplon incredibly quick to work with.

It also has input and output gain controls, a mix knob (kudos for that!) and a midi learn function. Lovely. Finally, if you hold the cursor over any control, a help bubble shows up which sort of eliminates the time you spend with the manual.

Volcano

I started describing Simplon because its type of filters is a recurring theme in FabFilter products. Volcano features the same graphs and similar controls but is much more advanced than it’s smaller brother.

To begin with, Volcano features a modulations section containing two LFOs and an envelop generator. If you know how to approach Volcano, then you won’t have much trouble distinguishing them, however, at first look everything looks pretty messy. In the middle we have the filter graph which you should be familiar with now, everything to the left controls the first of these filters and everything to the right controls the second. With me so far? The top controls are filter controls, the controls directly beneath the graph are LFO1, below that LFO2 and below that is the envelope generator. Next to these, both on the left and the right side, are three columns of knobs next to each other, frequency, peak and pan. If you just keep in mind that each row here corresponds to the modulation source in the middle on the same row, then you won’t get lost.

Volcano might be the more advanced of the two filters, but I discovered a great flaw in it compared to Simplon. Remember how happy I was about that Simplon could be controlled almost entirely from the graph with shift- and cmnd-clicking? Guess what, that’s not included in Volcano, while you can still drag them around to change peak and frequency, the filter and the slope changes have to be done with the regular switches. I really hope to see this changed in a future update. Otherwise it has the same good bonus features, such as midi learn, the helper, a mix knob and loads of presets. Volcano also have more filter character settings than Simplon, seven instead of just three.

Both Simplon and Volcano sound pretty good, I’ve heard these being referred to as sounding analog, I don’t know about that, but they sound pretty good. Volcano really benefits from having more different characters to choose from though.

Conclusion

While you can do much more with Volcano, I kind of like Simplon better. I like how easy you can control the graph and how incredibly quick it is to work with. If you’re a real filter-freak though you’ll probably find that it lacks lots of features, which Volcano most likely has. Volcano simply is much more flexible and has possibilities of creating a much wider range of effects.

FabFilter