Four archetypes, one drive knob, and two controls nobody usually bundles together: a tilt built into the drive stage, and a character morph between second and third harmonic. No automation lanes, no frequency sweep mapping. Just the sound, and two honest pictures of what it's actually doing.
These are my own recordings, off my own rig, and I want to be straight about what they are: they are not raw. They are my own processed tracks with the compression backed off, so you get something that already sounds good to work on without another compressor already doing this lesson for you. The saturator runs 4x oversampled around every nonlinear stage, so what you hear is the shape itself, not aliasing grit standing in for it. Tube, tape, transformer and diode are archetypes, not a model of any specific unit. They teach the behavior. Your own saturator supplies the color.
Asymmetric and biased, so the second harmonic shows up first. Warms without hardening.
Straight diagonal in the middle, bending toward the edges. The more it bends away from the dotted reference line, the harder the drive is working at that level.
Measuring.