All plugins.

A compressor that saturates hard and distorts harder. The drive hits the detector, not just the tone - so it changes how it grabs, not only how it sounds.

Vintage hardware is loved for its faults - one band gritting up before the rest, drive that leans harder the more you push it, a point where it simply gives up. Denzel lets you design those faults yourself, band by band, and decide whether the damage lands before or after the EQ moves. Then it carries on past anything that could be built: fold a band back on itself dozens of times over, crush it to three bits, aim it at one frequency and leave the rest untouched. Not an emulation of one box - a machine for inventing them.

A reverb you design the faults into. Denzel's whole EQ and distortion engine on the wet - six bands, any one of them gritting up before the rest. The drive hits the sound on its way into the reverb, so the space softens it the way it would a real source. And it only ever touches the wet: the dry sits exactly where it was.

Eight taps, and Denzel's whole EQ and distortion engine on the repeats. Put it after the delay and every echo is coloured the same. Put it inside the feedback loop and each repeat is re-coloured by the one before it - one band gritting up before the rest, a little more grain on every pass - so the tail falls apart further each time round, and still dies away.

Gates set in seconds - it reads the track and places the thresholds for you. Then adds punch on the way out.

De-esses without the lisp, and runs backwards too - putting an ess back when a vocal has gone soft. Saturation from smooth to savage.

Get loud and add harmonic saturation at the same time. The distortion sits before the limiter in the same oversampled path, so it drives the limiter rather than fighting it.

At last, a cheap DI'd acoustic can sound like an expensive mic'd classic. Built for that one job - and its 4-band saturator shapes snares and kicks beautifully too.