Smack VU Compressor NEBULA

Team ARCADiA | 19 January 2026 | 86.75 MB

An early VCA based compressor, considered by many to be among the best of its type for drums, bass, vocals, and more. It’s not without its detractors, with some considering it to be a simple one trick pony, mainly due to the original hardware’s lack of adjustable attack and release controls. The Nebula programs I’ve made here do have added attack and release controls, making it much more flexible. By default the programs load on settings that represent the hardware closest. From there you can adjust the controls and get different behaviors that weren’t possible with the original hardware, while retaining the rest of the original characteristics that got the original labeled a character piece.

The attack control allows you to set slower attacks than the hardware allowed, which lets you to actually enhance the ‘knock’ effect heard on drums even beyond what the hardware did. The release control can be set faster or slower than the original, allowing a range of different behaviors, from intense pumping to more subtle compression. You can get over 30dB of compression and it still sounds great.

Programs were all sampled in stereo (using 2 units), providing left and right channels that are very subtly different, adding to the analog imperfections that most of us came to Nebula looking for. There’s also a ‘pass-through’ program done like the typical Nebula preamp style programs, for getting some tone (very subtle) of the hardware without any compression.

JPN has done some really nice skins for N4, and N3!

INFO/DEMO/BUY: https://mage.si/smack
Smack VU Compressor For NEBULA-ARCADiA
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