Introducing the Vee Guitar Amp from Viper ITB – a tube guitar amplifier simulator designed to give your tracks an authentic vintage sound. This plugin is ideal for shaping clean, crunch, and distortion sounds in a warm, lo-fi style, adding a realistic vibe to your electric guitar or even piano parts.
Features and Functions
The Vee Guitar Amp is not just an amplifier, but a comprehensive solution with a range of built-in features that allow you to deeply shape the sound.
Amplifier and Dynamics
- Tube Preamp: Equipped with an overdrive circuit, it sensitively responds to playing dynamics – the stronger the signal, the more harmonics and distortion appear.
- PAD and BOOST Switches: Use PAD (-9dB) to attenuate an excessively strong signal or BOOST (+15dB) to amplify it. The combination of both gives +6dB gain. BOOST effectively bypasses the built-in noise gate.
- GAIN Knob: Allows you to precisely adjust the preamp signal level and the degree of overdrive.
- Hidden Noise Gate: Automatically mutes the signal below -55 dBFS, ensuring sound clarity between notes.
- Hidden Limiter (Brickwall Limiter): FET compressor with a 20:1 ratio. It is an integral part of the amplifier’s sound, adding harmonic distortion and clipping under heavy load, which significantly affects the shaping of crunch and distortion.
Equalizer
The plugin is equipped with a semi-parametric equalizer. The Low Shelf and High Shelf controls work independently of the Low Mid and High Mid Peak. The signal is divided into two identical streams and combined again after the equalizer section. This technique is known as “parallel equalization,” often used in analog devices.
Cabinet and Space
- Hidden Cabinet (Speaker Cabinet): Emulates the sound of a 2×12 cabinet recorded with a microphone in the “off-axis” position. The driver’s operating range is classic 75Hz-5kHz. The cabinet is designed to suppress problematic frequencies, reducing the risk of resonances and helping to obtain quality sound without excessive use of external equalizers.
- Studio Ambience Emulation: Adds a realistic “room” atmosphere to the dry signal, creating the impression that the cabinet was recorded with an additional condenser microphone.
Modulation and Time Effects
- Spring Reverb: Built-in “VeeSpringVerb” circuit, emulating a mono spring reverb.
- Flanger: Stereo flanger effect. Its main purpose is to transform a mono signal into stereo and color it with a classic flanger effect.
Unique Widener Effect
Original “VeeWide” circuit (also available as a separate VST plugin). The idea of the effect is simple and widely used in the 80s. This control delays the signal in the right channel by 0-2000 samples, using a certain psychoacoustic phenomenon: the human brain does not distinguish echoes if they are delayed by 20-50 ms from the main signal.
- When used on strings or pads, it creates a “widening” effect, giving the illusion that the sound is coming “from everywhere,” tightly filling the entire stereo image.
- On guitars or keyboards, it creates doubling and slapback effects.
Interestingly, when turning the Widener knob, it seems as if the signal is “moving to the right.” This is just an illusion – the L/R levels remain perfectly aligned. Combine this effect with the flanger (which, on the contrary, tends to “shift” the signal to the left) to create unique and interesting stereo effects. Experiment and enjoy!
Application
Vee Guitar Amp is designed to add realistic vintage coloring to your recordings. It will perform wonderfully when processing electric guitar parts, adding warmth and the character of a tube amplifier. Thanks to the flexible gain settings and built-in effects, you can achieve a wide range of sounds – from crystal clear to saturated with distortion. Also, as the developer notes, the plugin can be successfully used to process piano parts, giving them an unexpected and interesting lo-fi touch.
Overall, Vee Guitar Amp is a compact but powerful tool for sound design and processing, allowing you to easily achieve a warm, vintage sound with a pronounced character.
Developer Viper ITB is grateful to Antress for the provided tube overdrive algorithm, FET compressor circuits, Low and High Shelf equalizers and interface elements (knobs), Christian W. Budde for the VST Plugin Analyzer, and David Gibson for the classic delay trick used in the VeeWide plugin.
Install Vee Guitar Amp and immerse yourself in the world of vintage tube sound!
