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Instruments Updates

Heavy Metal – In Development

A lot of progress is being made on two new plugins which are currently in the works. First and foremost is Heavy Metal (working title) and is a sampled distorted electric guitar designed for mimicking fast heavy metal rhythms. There are several different articulations, controlled through velocity (palm-muting / open-playing) and through MIDI channels (power-chords / single-notes / extra-stuff) for more realism.

The samples are pre-distorted. An ENGL guitar preamp was used in creating the samples. The upsides to this are, no distortion plugin is required so there is no fiddling needed to get a good distortion sound and less plugins/resources are consumed as a result. The obvious downside to this is that you cannot distort any chord you want and the distortion profile cannot be changed, but the sound was recorded direct from the preamp so cabinet emulation can still be chosen to shape the tone to your liking.

Here’s a screen capture of an early test version. Features and GUI may change.

A guitar cabinet impulse should be used along side the Heavy Metal guitar plugin, and so Speakerer was created. Using a specially made impulse response, Speakerer mimicks the full sound of a 4×12 guitar cabinet with very little effort and pairs well with Heavy Metal.

The plugins are already in a usable state, but more work is needed before they can be released. Heavy Metal needs more round robin samples, and is currently lacking hammer-ons. Speakerer is both functional and sounds good but it is very basic at the moment.