Desperately seeking distortion

First of all thanks a lot for this concern. It’s really kind of you to keep this in mind.

You have really fair points here and they are easily acknowledged. Especially on the more guitar-centric part of the platform.

On this part (first to last), I took a quick listen and it sounds quite interesting. Maybe @falkTX and @jesse can take a look here and put a bit more thought into it. I will ping them (again) :slight_smile:

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I took the liberty to email the creator of NaLex amps, and unfortunately, they have a different plan for their plugins (possible commercial release). Sorry for giving you a fruitless lead, and you’re welcome for the time I took to reach out to him :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway, I’m gathering some other leads for good amp sims that could find their way to Dwarf. I’ll create a separate topic for that soon-ish.

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I see…it would be a nice addition anyway. Who knows in the future when the MOD platform becomes a standard :slight_smile:

Suggestions are always welcome :slight_smile:

I also find that distortion is one of the few weaknesses in the mod system. There are quite a few of them, but actually all of them are not on par. Most of them buzz unpleasantly. Some are too bright or too dull, but especially the buzz is a real problem. From my point of view, too, the DS-1 is the only usable one, but then unfortunately only HighGain.

With the Dwarf, Mod has gone strongly in the direction of guitarists; in my view, it is now necessary to provide for the most important of all effects: distortion. A gap should be filled here.

But!!! The mod platform is so great with its possibilities that you just have to live with or compensate for a disadvantage sometimes. I got myself a midi-enabled distortion pedal and no longer use distortion in the Dwarf itself. I control the distortion pedal via the Dwarf (Midi). The mod platform is always worth taking a little extra pedal with you, I don’t see any problem there.

And who knows what will come? The beauty of open source is that many people are involved. That can always bring surprises. Maybe tomorrow someone will come up with a distortion plug-in that will blow us all away.
And @Jon, the Titan really makes a lot of noise.

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You may try the new CollisionDrive:

Note that you need to enable testing plugins in the store in order to see it.
It is a clone of the Horizon Devices Precision Drive.

As well I’ve a HarmonicExciter pedal in the pipe which allow, when placed before, to drive Distortion/Fuzz pedals harder without increasing the gain/noise ratio. I hope that will coming soon into the testing area.

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ok, sounds cool! I will test it this evening! The HarmonicExciter sounds good as well. Looking forward to that! Thanks for the post!
…and as already mentioned… the Mod platform is alway fine for surprises…

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@brummer @dbiddle

This is a good one! I can seriously recommend the CollisionDrive! It has good sustain and warm sound. You can use it for light to heavy distortion (not really HighGain but enough for rockers). There is one thing that could be improved (I am now complaining on a high niveau, the distortion is really good already): If you let a sound decay, the distortion should have less influence on the sound. At the moment it remains too linear, the sound gets quieter, the distortion remains at a similar level, at least that’s my opinion. But as I said: I find this distortion plug-in is the best of all up to now.

What I particularly like is the idea of the knobs. They can be operated very intuitively, you can produce the sound very easily, although the assignment of the knobs is somewhat unusual for me (all the more amazing that I find it so easy to produce a good sound). It is very nice how the plug-in reacts to the knobs. That is very realistic

  • The Drive control not only increases the distortion, it also makes the sound louder (nothing new so far).
  • The Attack control: If you turn it down, you not only get a softer attack. The sustain becomes clearly longer the further you turn it down. You have the feeling that the power is not put into the attack which means less power in the sustain, but goes “wider” into the sustain. I find this more than optimal and it feels very realistic! You shouldn’t change this any more when it goes into the alpha. This is the best attack control I know.
  • With the Bright control you can create a buzzing sound, you can also remove the buzzing that I found so annoying in the other plug-ins! That’s really cool!

I’m glad I put my two cents in on this forum post, because I learned about a great plug-in today. @brummer I don’t know exactly how you did it, but that’s really good work! I have to sell a distortion pedal now and replace it by that plugin…

Also fine is the combination of that CollisionDrive with Sigmoid Booster or DS-1 (in series or parallel). Nice sounds!
I also have one wish: It would be amazing to have a HighGain unit, based on this CollisionDrive. :grinning:

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I need to spend a bit more time with the pedal but my initial impressions were positive. I definitely managed to dial in some usable tones.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but while searching the internet for more LV2 amp options, I think I managed to find some of your creations:

I didn’t know if they were any good (no demos) but the CollisonDrive makes me hopeful. Any chance you could make those available in the MOD store as well?

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@Kim I totally agree. Although the classic combination TubeScreamer(level max, drive min)and onyx gave me the sound i was expacting. There is a lot of amp and pedals to go through to find a combination that fits. But that’s the case for almost all the plugins. Some of them behave different than you expect or there are some minor things like knobs are inverted or the mix is only at the detailed view.

Kudos to @brummer for the CollisonDrive - I don’t own the original but it works pretty well in combination with the supersonic - even for high gain stuff.

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Overall and personally, I tend to agree with you on both affirmations. Yet, in the end, is not a matter of acknowledging it (I think all of us do…and we have quite a few guitar players in the team), it’s more a matter of time to get it fixed, that’s why…

…it’s cool that MOD is an open platform. It has its blessings and curses, but @brummer here took a great opportunity to show some blesses :slight_smile: (Also great and smart opportunity to promote the CollisionDrive :wink: I still need to try it myself!)

On this, to be honest, I use it on a super distorted high gain sound where I kind of want it to really scream, so perhaps for this reason I don’t really notice the noise that much because it’s part of what I want. I think I use it in one or two more pedalboards, but surprisingly enough for clean sounds. Not really because I love the clean sound of the Titan, but because I was layering the sound to enrich it and felt the cleans of the Titan on that specific case were good enough.

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One of the tricks i tried and worked for me is to use an amp in front of the amp as a drive.

Eg, using onyx as the main amp, running a titan in front of it as a distortion ‘pedal’.

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@jon
The noise indeed comes up with Highgain. In clean mode it is not there.

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@JamKid
Good idea! Let me try this as well. But since yesterday there is also the collision drive. For me personally this is already fine. But I will try your trick, by pushing the amp with an amp. This sounds interesting!

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Ok…I need to take a look on my more hardcore pedalboard with it or perhaps simplify it to understand how much of a issue I can feel it to be on my side

I’m not really happy with them, there must be a error in my analysis as they produce to much fizz. There is a other one I’ve done which I like a way more:

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Thanks for your detailed analysis. Good to know that I’m not the only one who find this one well done. :innocent:

As for the HighGain mode, that’s were the HarmonicExiter will be a game changer. I’ve send out a pull request for it already, now it’s up to @falkTX to accept it and push it to the testing store.

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Oh… That sounds brilliant! So I am looking forward to the HarmonicExiter. And I decided to sell my external Distortion pedal after testing the ColliosionDrive over the last days. I have a clear view now on this Drive. It is really a brilliant one and it is even better than my pedal! So many thanks for your good work brummer!
I will test the HarmonicExiter as sonn as this is available in Beta and write my comments to this as well. Looking forward to this!

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@brummer sorry, forgot to answer directly

Thanks to everyone who has responded to this original post. I tried the collision drive today and it has some promise. I just need to strike the right balance with it. The HarmonicExciter sounds interesting and I’ll try that when it hits too. I’ll keep trying things as their posted. Hopefully we’ll keep adding to this for people who have distortion issues.

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@falkTX When will be the beta of the HarmonicExiter available?