Roar is another of the amazing new devices that arrived with the major Live 12 update earlier this year. At first glance, it would appear to ‘just’ be another saturation and distortion effect, but look again... Roar combines analogue modelling techniques with extensive modulation and delay capabilities to create something genuinely different and deceptively powerful. As Marco Fink, lead developer of Roar, says: “The saturation curve in the analogue domain is never static.” And that idea of dynamism is something the team have deliberately put at the heart of Roar and extended to its logical limit.

Understanding how Roar works is the key to getting the best from it, and whilst it’s perhaps not completely intuitive at first glance — especially the feedback/compressor stage — it doesn’t take long to grasp what each of the sections do and to start achieving amazing results. Let’s dive in...