Squash

Squash takes the opposite approach to 8TT. Instead of giving you more bands and more controls, it strips the OTT concept down to an X/Y pad. It sounds too simple, but I love how it works in practice. You can drag the dot horizontally to adjust the tone and vertically to control the depth. That’s the entire workflow. Minimal Audio describes it as “OTT reimagined” rather than an OTT clone, and the 4-band architecture does sound a bit different from the classic three-band Xfer version.

The mix knob is phase-coherent, which means blending the compressed signal with the dry signal doesn’t introduce the phasing artifacts that plague most OTT plugins when you back off the depth. The downside is that you have almost no visibility into what’s happening. There’s no frequency display, no band visualization, and no metering. For better or for worse, it’s entirely an ears-only experience. Power users who want per-band control will probably find Squash frustrating, but that’s clearly not who it’s designed for.

I like Squash for quick results when I don’t want to think about settings. It’s super fast, and the phase-safe blending is a huge advantage when working with bass.