GrindAmp
TL;DW: GrindAmp is a heavier amp sim for many purposes.
Hi! I’m back home (well, one of ’em) and though I am delayed and scrambling to get my stuff together, I am full of ideas and have a new plugin for you.
GrindAmp is a followup to FireAmp, and you’ll hear them back-to-back in the video. And where FireAmp is all about that midrange howl and rawness, GrindAmp is a different style: heavier! Thing is, you must understand how these work. They’re distortions voiced to work with guitars, into filtering and truncated, undersampled cab emulation that has dynamic processing. When I say truncated I mean it: there’s very little cabinet rumble or any over-hang beyond the immediate sound. Also, the dry/wet control both brings in dry AMP sound against the cab sim, and also dry guitar sound against the amp sim… at the same time.
So GrindAmp is every bit as much designed for a Rockman-type, extremely direct and dry tone, as it is for an amped, miked tone. It’s sort of a hybrid. Why would you ever do this? For the same reason Def Leppard used Rockmans on Hysteria: you can use this kind of tone to bring in a part without getting in the way of everything else. You can arrange with whole instruments, bringing in stuff to emphasize certain qualities. If you used FireAmp you’d be bringing in extremely raucous midrange, if you use GrindAmp you have a lot more low-end punch and the ability to push the gain a bit higher (though I think it’s at its best when you’re allowing it to be kinda percussive)
Neither of these have chorusing and delay/reverb… but hey! I’ve been putting out plugins that do that, and I bet Chamber will do the slapback thing on a guitar very well, and there’s always PocketVerbs Spring: Airwindows plugins are deeply modular and you already have literally hundreds of them so if you wanted to go full Rockman with GrindAmp (or FireAmp: more to come) then nothing’s stopping you. And they’re free, so nothing is stopping you. And they’re open source, so if you really really REALLY wanted to build them into one plugin… amazingly, you can! Or you can let me make ’em for you :)
Hope you like GrindAmp, and though things are a little scattered around here I think it is a sign of inspiration for more to come. And I’m excited to see where it leads. I’ll keep you posted, and should be able to return to my weekly plugin posting schedule, perhaps with more things snuck into the week as opportunity permits! :)
download StarterKit.zip for just the basics
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.
I just discovered Def Leppard Hysteria a few weeks ago (I knew 2 or 3 songs before). Not my favourite album, but still very good imho, the guitar sound rocks. Thanks :)
Really pleasant sound, immediately came up with a My Bloody Valentine inspired demo after hearing it