The first saturator built around key tracking
Every band follows the pitch you play, in real time.
You choose what to saturate.
Phaeton. A key tracking saturator, built to follow the harmonics.
Every other saturator works at a frequency you choose and stays there. That is fine until the music moves: the note changes, and the harmonics you carefully placed are now landing somewhere they do not belong.
Phaeton places its zones against the note instead of against the spectrum. You set a band while the part plays, and it remembers the relationship, whether that is the third harmonic, an octave up, or wherever you put it. Play a different note and the zone travels with it.
The result is saturation that stays musically in the same place no matter what is played.
A bass plays A1, 55 Hz, and you set FREQ to 165 Hz, the third harmonic. The plugin stores the ratio: 3.0. When the player moves to D2 the zone moves to 220 Hz; on A2 it moves to 330 Hz. The zone stays on the third harmonic of whatever is played.
serve.command from this folder and open http://localhost:8765 instead.
web-demo/index.html next to this page, and it needs to be served over http rather than opened as a file. Serve the whole folder, for example python3 -m http.server in it, then open the address it prints.
Frequency, width and edge steepness per band: 20 Hz to 20 kHz, 0.05 to 4 octaves wide, edges at 12, 24 or 48 dB per octave. Gentle slopes blend into the mix, steep slopes stay surgical on a single harmonic.
The first five are subtle: Clean, Warm, Tube, Tape, Transformer. The last five let you destroy the sound: Crunch, Diode, Hard Clip, Fuzz, Fold.
Every mode can be pushed towards even or odd harmonics, so the same curve gives you either weight and body, or edge and bite. X‑DRIVE multiplies the drive range by four when maximum is not enough.
Low and high cuts on each band shape the harmonics the band generates and never the main signal. Add weight without mud, add air without sibilance.
The zone is already in position when the note starts instead of sweeping into place. Reported to the host and compensated. Turn it off for live monitoring.
Drive the tracking from the played note instead of the audio. For polyphonic or noisy sources, and for anything with a weak fundamental.
Solo exactly what the plugin is adding, per band or for the whole thing. The fastest way to hear whether a band is landing where you think it is.
A/B with its own undo history, 80 steps per slot and 80 more per band, so you can step back on one band without touching the other. Copy between bands, gain match in one click.
Pitch detection runs on a background thread from 25 Hz to 1 kHz. After 250 ms with no pitch a band returns to the frequency shown on its knob. Anti‑aliasing is antiderivative based, so there is no oversampling and no added latency.
Audio Unit, AUv3, VST3 and standalone. macOS 11 or later, Apple Silicon and Intel. Mono or stereo, 44.1 kHz and above.
Logic and GarageBand cannot route MIDI into an audio effect, so a small companion plugin, Phaeton MIDI, ships alongside and passes the note across. Everywhere else the host sends MIDI straight into Phaeton and the companion is not needed.
Pro Tools uses AAX, which is not built yet.
Phaeton runs unrestricted for 30 days. Put it on real work, in your own sessions, and find out whether it earns its place. After that the audio keeps processing exactly as before, so old projects still play back correctly, and the controls unlock again with a licence key.
Plain language, no traps. What you get when you download or buy Phaeton, and what we ask of you in return. Last updated 28 July 2026.
Perfect Pitch Audio LLC ("we", "us") makes Phaeton, a key tracking saturator for macOS, delivered as Audio Unit, AUv3, VST3 and standalone application. These terms apply to the plugin, the free trial, and this website, including your account at perfectpitchaudio.com.
Phaeton runs unrestricted for 30 days from first launch, on real work, with nothing locked. When the trial ends, the audio engine keeps processing exactly as before, so old projects still open and play back correctly. The controls lock until a licence key is activated. The trial is for evaluation; one trial per person and machine.
A Phaeton licence is a personal licence for one person on up to two machines at the same time. Moving to a new computer is fine: deactivate a machine inside the plugin or from your account page, and the seat frees up. The licence covers all 1.x updates at no extra cost.
What we ask in return: keep your key to yourself. Do not share, resell, sublicense or publish it. A key that turns up in public or in circulation can be suspended; if that happens to you in error, write to us and we will sort it out.
Purchases are processed by Gumroad, our payment provider; your payment details go to them, not to us. Prices can change, and introductory pricing is exactly that: introductory. All sales are final: there are no refunds. Phaeton has a full 30-day free trial with nothing locked, so you can test it in your own sessions, in your own host, on your own machines before spending anything. Buy it after the trial has convinced you, not before. If something goes wrong with the purchase itself, a double charge or a payment error, write to us and we will fix it.
An account on this site stores the minimum needed to run licensing: your email address, your licence keys, and which machines are activated (a machine name and an anonymous identifier). We do not sell this data and we do not use it for advertising. If you want your account deleted, ask, and it will be.
We work hard to keep Phaeton stable and bug-free, and we fix reported problems. Still, software is provided "as is": we cannot promise it will be free of errors, or that it will suit every setup, session or host. To the extent the law allows, our liability is limited to the amount you paid for the licence. Nothing in these terms removes rights that consumer law gives you and that cannot be waived.
If these terms change in a way that matters, the date at the top changes with them, and continuing to use Phaeton after that means the new version applies. We will not change what you have already paid for.
Questions, purchase problems, licence trouble, or anything unclear: support@perfectpitchaudio.com. A human reads it.
