Mixing engineer Andrea Caccese has released Midrange Crush, a free vintage-style saturation and summing plugin focused on the midrange.
Caccese is an artist in the band Dead Rituals as well as a mixing engineer, and Midrange Crush is his first plugin release.
The plugin is based directly on a mixing technique he uses a lot in his own work. As he explains, the idea is to focus saturation more heavily on the midrange for certain instruments, while leaving the low end and top end mostly alone.
This way, you can add density and color without the side effects you usually get from broadband saturation, like the “farty” low-end intermodulation or harsh top-end distortion.
Midrange Crush looks simple on the surface, but I like it when a plugin is designed to do one specific thing well, and that thing is something you’d otherwise have to set up manually with a multiband and some other tools.
It’s not unlike the thinking behind our own BPB Bassaturator, which optimizes saturation specifically for bass frequencies. Midrange Crush takes the same idea and points it at the midrange instead.
Under the hood, the input passes through a three-band crossover that’s intentionally non-linear, creating controlled minimum-phase shifts. The result is a colorful and less-than-perfectly-separated frequency response that mimics the imperfect summing of vintage tube desks.
As a side effect, you also get subtle stereo widening and image shaping that emerges naturally from the crossover behavior rather than from a dedicated imaging tool.
The control set is minimal. There’s a Drive knob to push the input into the saturation stage, and a Trim for output level. The Crush mode doubles the saturation amount for more aggressive territory, and the Open mode changes the crossover behavior for a more relaxed harmonic profile with more noticeable phase interaction.
There’s also a wet/dry blend for parallel-style processing, and that’s pretty much it.
I tested Midrange Crush on drums, bass, and a couple of mix buses, and it’s pretty solid. The midrange focus makes it especially sensitive to snare and tom transients (it can almost work like a transient shaper there), and blending in Crush mode subtly is a good way to add density to a drum mix without overcompressing it.
The Open mode is the one to reach for when you want less obvious distortion.
Midrange Crush is currently a macOS-only release, available in AU and VST3 formats. The download is free, but you’ll need to sign up for the developer’s mailing list to receive the link.
Download: Midrange Crush (FREE)
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Last Updated on May 18, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
