Too Phat to go to the beach?
Most of us with heavy-duty studio tans and physiques carefully honed through hours and hours of sitting on our behinds while running a console could stand to lose some weight, so why would we want to know about something that is designed to make everything Phatter? I know I don't personally need to put on any extra bulk, but if you want to talk about some of the sounds in my mixes, well that's another story altogether, and that’s where CamelPhat comes in.

Do you need some extra poundage on your kick drum sounds? (Get, it POUNDage? Phat-Drums… poundage… pretty good pun, eh?) Or maybe you want to take that guitar lick and just thicken it up a bit to make it pop out in a mix so that your guitar hero antics sound just like store-bought ones? Well, you could do a lot worse than give $85 (USD) to the good team at planet Camel. If you spring for both CamelPhat and CamelSpace (see my other review for information on CamelSpace) you get them both for $149. If that's not attractive enough, if you are a student or a teacher, Camel Audio will give you a 50% discount, which makes the argument for buying pretty compelling. If you are in school, for about the same price as a couple of CD's, you get a simple to use, but very effective plug-in that will keep you happy tweaking for hours, allowing you to develop that indoor tan to glossy perfection.

CamelPhat, like all Camel plugs, comes in both VST and Audio Unit flavors, and it is sold as a download through their web-site using Share*It as the payment mechanism. It’s a quick and easy process to download, install and authenticate the software, and I had no troubles at all with their process. All those double-challenge, dongle-crippled software vendors take note, us software consumers like simple authentication processes like this that don't get in the way of using the toys we just paid good money for!

Once installed and fired up in the host of your choice, you will quickly come to grips with what this animal is all about. As it says in the .pdf manual, "CamelPhat's user interface is quite straightforward, and to a large extent what you see is what you get."

What you will see are 7 panels surrounding a nice big Main Display. The Main Display shows a read out of the exact value of the parameter you have just selected, and although you can't edit the value by punching in a number here, it gives precise, legible, feedback while you are tweaking. The Main Display also has a nifty X-Y controller. I think interface ideas like this are great. Simply assign any two parameters to be mapped on the X-Y grid (by using the easy to read selector fields at the bottom of the Main Display) and you can use the cursor in the grid to dynamically control their relative values. Having the X-Y grid is almost like having another pair of hands, because you can move two different parameter values around while listening to the effect on your sound. A quite useful feature of CamelPhat is that you can also assign a MIDI controller to the X-Y grid's cursor – thereby giving relative continuous modulation possibilities to two parameters via MIDI automation. The Main Display is also where you load/save presets through a basic but functional browser pop-up.

The other panels in the interface give you control over CamelPhat's 6 effect modules, its two (independent LFO's) and the Master Volume/Mix. CamelPhat is a sort of Swiss-army knife aural treatment effect unit. The effects include a Band Pass (BP) Filter, Distortion, Multi-Mode Filter, Flanger, something Camel likes to call the 'Magic EQ', as well as a Compressor. The BP filter takes up most of the left-hand side of the GUI, while the knobs for the other effects run around the Main Display.

It may seem a bit old hat to have yet another BP filter, but Camel's BP-ing benefits from the unique approach to the way in which you set the lower and upper limits of the BP frequency. The interface has two sliders running in parallel- one for the low frequency boundary, one for the high frequency boundary. You use your mouse to slide them up/down and the led-like read out in between them shows you the frequency band that will be passed. This provides an intuitive and clear visualisation of the effect that the BP filter is having on your sound. As you move the sliders, you also get a frequency-specific read out that tells you precisely what your settings are. The sliders can be linked, in this mode the band of frequencies that will be passed can be moved as a whole, rather than just moving either the high or low boundaries. There are independent Resonance Controls for each slider to boost or accentuate the frequencies around the low/high cut-offs. Finally, you can also control the level of the rejected signal that is passed through CamelPhat (any BP-rejected signal bypasses the rest of CamelPhat's effects and comes out 'clean').

The Distortion effect, while serviceable, is nothing to write home about, but it is worth noting that you are given you 4 types of distortion to choose from. There is Mech, Tube, Bit Crusher and Xcita. Of these, I found Xcita to be the most interesting. While the Xcita has not been engineered to compete with full-blown exciters, it can, when coupled with some of the other effects, do a pretty good approximation of effects that would cost 10 times as much in a hardware unit.

The Multi-Mode Filter follows essentially the same configuration as the one in CamelSpace, so if you have read that review, you can save yourself 1 minute of reading time by skipping this paragraph. The MM filter has Low, Band, and High Pass filtering, as well as Peaking, Notch, Comb and Ring Modulation. All of these do what you would expect them to do, with controls that all pretty common and straight-forward. The controls for the MM Filter allow you to manage its envelope followers, cut-off and resonance settings. CamelPhat's MM Filter also has special Low, Band and High Pass Filters with added fat – that is, they produce a slightly edgier sound compared to their no-fat siblings.

The last three effects are the Flanger, Magic EQ and the Compressor. I won't tell you anything about the Flanger, except to say that it, guess what, FLANGES! The Magic EQ is modelled on analog EQ's – Camel were aiming for a softer saturation than you would normally get in a digital EQ. In my initial listening tests I thought that this effect was not going to turn me into Harry Potter, but then I tried it on sounds it was designed to deal with – bass/kick drums. Ahhhhh, sweetness! I now think that I can get that diploma from Hogwarts. The Compressor is also pretty good little module. I haven't tried it on lots of different kinds of sounds, so I can't say for sure how it would handle trickier jobs, but as an easily controllable compressor for things like guitars, it did a really good job of enhancing the perceived loudness without introducing any unwanted muddiness or other artefacts you can often hear when applying low-cost compression plugs. I predict I'll be using this module often –probably on its own at times as just a straight-ahead compressor.

CamelPhat also has two independent LFO's that you can use to modulate various target parameters. There are 7 different waveforms to choose from, and there is a rate sync function that allows you to tie their tempo to your host's tempo. Triplets and dotted note values are supported, giving a reasonable palette of rhythmic effects. As far as I could see, each LFO can only modulate one parameter – which is a pity, because it limits the possible complexity of tempo-based effects.

Time to go on a diet?
There isn't anything that I'd really complain about with this plug. There are a couple of problems with Digital Performer that Camel are working on – one is a problem that causes a crash when changing pre-sets while it is live, and DP's by-pass button doesn't work as it should (these problems also manifest themselves in CamelSpace). Because Camel has a really good track record of supporting and developing their products, I fully expect that they will figure out these issues, probably by the time this review gets published. Either way, none of the problems I am aware of are show-stoppers, it's pretty easy to work around them.

Camel's demos do currently have two really annoying limitations. First, the signal level drops out completely every 30 seconds or so, and then the whole plug will time out after only 15 minutes. It runs for a 15 minute session each time you start up your host, so if you like re-starting your host, you can extend the auditioning time. I can understand that Camel need to make their demos unusable for production (they do have to make a living too after all!), but I don't think that they should make their demos more unusable for evaluation. I much prefer limitations like that put on CronoX 3, where you get a breeze of white noise at random intervals. With that sort of protection, you still can't track anything with the demo, but at least you can give the demo a right good thrashing before you fork over your money. In fact, while waiting for my serial from LinPlug to arrive, I kind of grew fond of those washes of white noise…

The manual is pretty brief, but then again, if you can't figure out how to use this plug in an hour or so of fiddling, you might want to think about taking up some other profession or hobby, because the interface is so well laid out.

Speaking of the manual, it doesn't tell you (at least not anywhere I could find) that clicking on the Camel logo fires up your browser, taking you to the CamelAudio.com site. You may very well ask why I was randomly clicking around the interface and why I think this is a negative thing about Camel products. I would answer by saying that it's really no big deal, but that you oughta be warned that this will happen. When it happened to me the first time, for a moment I thought everything was crashing all around me, and that creates such a yucky, sinking feeling in my Phat gut that I felt some not so insignificant ill-will to the Cameleers who programmed their interface to act like that. But, I got over it pretty quickly, and I have learned to leave that Camel alone.

Is this full-cream, or lite Phat?
Well, its verdict time. I gotta admit it, I really like this plug. It does exactly what it promises, and it does it both at very high quality and a pretty low price. My advice? If you want a good and robust audio sweetening plug that doesn't take a science degree to figure out, you should plump for the Phat. (Get it… plump for the…??? Oh man, me very funny today!)

If you have read any of the other reviews I have posted recently, you will know that I have a bias towards independent developers. In my experience, the smaller dev houses really look after their customers, and I have to give Camel a huge pat on the back in this area. Ben Gillett (head Camel trainer) maintains a very active dialogue with his customers through his forum on KVR Audio and other sites, and from what I can tell from his posts and the way his customers relate to him, he has got this side of things 100% right.

Is it ever over if the Phat plug won't stop singing?
Just thinking about this for a minute, I think that if you are the market for this sort of kit, the best thing to do is to get both CamelPhat and CamelSpace in that bundle deal I mentioned at the top of this review, that way you can save money by spending only a little bit more. (That's my own brand of reverse economics there; I think you can follow my logic, right?) If you don't think I know what I am talking about, just go grab the demo(s) and try them yourself. Trust me, you will be convinced in no time at all. If you don't feel like buying them, well, then it might be over for you, but here in my little studio, the Phat plug is just going to keep on singing and singing and singing…

The Verdict (5 star system)
GUI/Interface… 5/5 (Not bloated, nice and trim.)
Stability… 4/5 (Couple of glitches in DP. )
Manual/Tutorial... 4/5 (Short, but sweet, not too much fat here.)
Sound... 4/5 (mmm…. phatty!)
Value For Money... 4/5 (If I could get the education discount this would be 6/5.)
X Factor... 4/5 (This plug will make your life taste richer, with 0 calories.)

For more information, see www.camelaudio.com

Review set-up:
OS X 10.3.9
Digital Performer 4.12 (As an Audio Unit)

Bye-line
BK is justa guy trying to make his way in the universe by making dangerous modern art.

Apart from access to a review copy, the Cameleers have never given me anything, but I am thinking it might be nice if they would let me have a ride on their pet camel some day.