Now, it’s easy as 1-2-3. Just grab a stomp and move it around.

Coming in the next version.

Vandal with some custom 'carpet' & amp overlay images

OK, we all know, Vandal qualifies pretty well for the term ‘custom amplification’. It’s got enough of what it takes for that job.
Now people can go a step further and skin the thing a bit more to their liking.
With the next version, we allow for putting ‘overlay’ images over the stomps’ carpet as well as the guitar amp’s front cover. Using maximum opacity and an image of the same size, you can even fully replace carpet & amp cover.

The plugin accepts PNG files, with transparency. All you have to do is create a nice image, put it into a dedicated folder choose it from the list.

Imagine the plugin popping up with your band or studio logo. Or with a polaroid of your girl. No… we *don’t want* to know…

We might provide a bunch of nice images on vandalamps.com as soon as time allows. Although… probably no girls.

The last weeks, 4 new stomps saw the light of day, all quite original approaches, no copycat-lookalike stuff:

The bass distortion has pre- & post shaping, ready for deep fuzz as well as super-transparent growl. Kicks some bottoms, definitely.

The tube compressor is not a cheap compressor circuit with a waveshaper/distortion feature…. naaaahh. It’s indeed following those ancient variable-mu design principles, where a (push-pull) tube circuit compresses the audio by varying its own amplification factor (mu, µ). But you can drive it greatly into mild overload, and achieve massive & fat tone. Sometimes, it won’t even sound overly  compressed, although it is. Weird.

TwängBäng is… guessed it: a spring reverb. Bäng. Sprooing. Pssshhhh. Full vintage.

Spacecake… Trippy little thing. Just two multitap delay lines, but they can do reverb, arranged in a crazy internal fashion, with lots of smear, micro-detuning, feedback, howl, flutter, you name it.

We’re currently testing all that s**t. We’ll be thorough, so it’ll perhaps take some time.

Also coming up next is the new ‘patch list’ architecture, on top of the preset mechanism. Consider you sending midi programs from outside… there, the trouble begins: what preset to load?

With the patch list, it’s dead-simple: just map an arbitrary preset from the disk to any of the 128 programs, save the whole list, and you’re done. You can even create unlimited lists. Ideal for those gigging every night, but having slighly different set lists.

Other aspects of midi control have also been greatly enhanced, such as scene control or midi cc handling. On schedule next for heavy testing.

More info coming soon.

Win & Mac Demo (scroll down to the bottom left)
Win & Mac Update

Some stuff added to this version:

We got a presence knob on the guitar amp, finally. Of course, it only makes sense for the A/B power amp, due to the principle (presence is the output wired back  (phase-inverted & filtered) to the input of the power amp). Just like the real thing, it’s also dependent on the power amp’s overall amplification factor, thereby interacting with the ‘sag’ control. It’s good we designed the amp to be that dynamic, as ‘presence’ enhances that even more

We then considered adding a plate reverb from algorithms we already had, but we ended up designing one from scratch, while getting lost somewhere in time. We finally came up with the ‘Vintage Plate Reverb’ as a convincing emulation of that tone we all know from the past decades. It somewhat reminds one of those legendary hardware reverbs that weren’t ‘perfect’ at all, in terms of naturalness, but offered a great deal of ‘character’. Now, this one is thick, lush, dense and ‘glues’ greatly with the input signal.
And it’s very light on the CPU (which normally is a contradiction).

Now, download the update (or the demo), have fun & make some rock

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v1.104, 2010/07/07

- guitar amp: added presence control to config panel (class A/B mode)
- post-fx: added new effect ‘vintage plate reverb’
- post-fx: units are now on by default when selecting an effect type
- GUI: added global option to switch dynamic window resize off (some hosts have problems here)
- GUI: stomp menus stay visible now in the ‘minimised’ view (all modules collapsed)
- GUI: guitar amp’s config view now stays open when switching scenes or presets
- stomps: improved delay modulation on TimeTunnel
- fixed: some Mac hosts showed wrong window size when re-opening the GUI
- fixed: missing update of selected entries in the cab sim’s menus
- fixed: guitar power amp sometimes turned silent upon scene switching
- Mac VST/AU: drastic CPU load reduction (runs 40-50% faster now)

v1.103, 2010/05/27 (included in Samplitude 11.1 update)

- cabinet sim: added mic 1/2 delay knob (allows for new sound textures and stereo effects)
- cabinet sim: added mic 1/2 on/off button
- added ‘console’ params (in/out/gate/tuner on/tuner mute) to the midi/remote mechanism
- added MIDI activity LED to console
- added UI update when updating params from outside (remote automation or MIDI)
- improved behaviour upon preset switching or host (auto-)save
- improved distortion texture of LaCrema, Halvar, Hellfire, Fuzz stomp
- improved phaser/tremolo stomp
- fixed: various MIDI issues (broken load/save, lost remote assignments)
- fixed: crashes when tweaking stomps (knobs or buttons) in some hosts (Reaper)
- fixed: crashes upon switching scenes via midi
- fixed: broken ‘multiply/blend’ method for remote params
- fixed: LFO on post-fx chorus & flanger wasn’t properly working at fast ‘rate’ settings
- fixed: missing window redraw when changing GUI size in some hosts
- fixed: missing thread safety upon fast post-fx configuration changes

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v1.102, 2010/03/31

- fixed: tuner didn’t show cents as numbers below main display
- fixed: loud ‘pop’ with LaCrema stomp

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Here’s a quick view on what can be expected next:

Nothing spectacular on the UI, but the small LED saying ‘yes, there’s MIDI coming in‘ shall also serve as an indicator that we take MIDI seriously. We got to finalize certain parts of the architecture somehow, but such things are naturally not that visual.

Another thing we included was having the virtual microphones selectable on & off (now, is THAT rocket science or what???).

And we also added ‘delay’ knobs to the ‘tweak’ view of the cabinet simulation. These let you shift each mic in time to up to 25ms and offers for a vast palette of new sound textures. That can range from slight phasing artifacts to a complete twist of the cab sound. And you can easily create convincing stereo effects this way (engineers call this the ‘Haas effect’). The old ‘mic phase +/-’ switches were replaced by simple push buttons to flip either phase, as we needed to save space. What was of minor importance before (the phase), can now have a dramatic impact in conjunction with the added delays.

www.vandalamps.com

www.vandalamps.com

While this blog will be kept updated with any non-marketing stuff, such as ongoing development details, vandalamps.com will probably your first point of interest concerning product orders, demo downloads, updates, additional presets and such.

We also have a bunch of audio & video files ready for you to listen to and watch. Within the next weeks/months, we’ll set up more content, providing more presets, additional videos etc.

We’d like to encourage everybody to get in contact with us, especially if you’re using the Vandal plugin and made cool presets or audio/video demos that we could post. If we can find you & Vandal on myspace or youtube, let us know as well. We want vandalamps to be as alive and vital as the plugin itself.
See ya!

• Vandal will be a boxed product (but download version is also planned)
• Regular retail price (boxed) will be 169 EUR / 199 USD
• Contains Windows (VST) & Mac (VST & AU) plugin
• Also contains Samplitude 11 Silver (Windows)
• Release on March 24 (Day 1 of Frankfurt Musikmesse)

The official release date will also be the start of www.vandalamps.com. Gonna be cool as well

New modulation effects, dynamics, filter stuff, delays, etc.

These stomps are as thoroughly modelled and programmed as every other part in the plugin, so not just a bunch of cheap off-the-shelf algorithms. Each of them is capable of recreating the naturalness and unique sound texture associated with stomp box fx as usual.

More news coming soon.

Help us to make Vandal the best native amp sim! Just answer a couple of questions (which popped up during development), send them in and – with a bit of luck – win 1 out of 3 copies of the new Samplitude 11 Pro (the current Vandal version already included )!

These links take you to the survey (choose your language):

English

German

Don’t hesitate. Even if luck isn’t on your side, there’s at least the chance to apply for beta testing through the survey, so that we perhaps get back to you sooner than you think

A seperate/standalone product release is being evaluated at the moment. At this time, we can’t precisely say when or whether it’s VST, AU, or both, a boxed product or download-only. But we’ll let you know ASAP. As this blog is development-only, decisions are up to teams other than ours.

In the meantime, we continue developing the software further. We’ve recently refined the amp & cabinet parts, tweaked the stomps and fx, and we’ve also concentrated on gathering presets and templates (the latter serving as a starting point for new amp & cab endeavours on the users’ side).

Here’s how VANDAL sounds in its current state (courtesy of Dimi Nalbantov):

• Magnetic Storm
• BritCrunch
• CleanClean

• Unprocessed
• Small Cass-A Combo + 1×12 Vintage
• Small Brit Combo, Crunch Channel, 2×12 Vintage
• Small Brit Combo, Lead Channel, 2×12 Vintage
• Modern HighGain+4×12, stereo miking (real-time movement of the virtual mics)
• Modern HighGain+4×12, distance miking (turning the ‘distance’ knob on the CabSim in real-time)

• Clean Amp, no stomp
• La Crema Overdrive in front of Clean Amp
• Halvar Preamp/Overdrive + Amp
• Hellfire Distortion + Amp
• Fuzz + Amp
• Guitar Amp in ‘classic’ preamp mode + Chorus stomp
• Chorus more extreme
• PhaseShifter/Tremolo: Phaser 70%, Tremolo 0%
• PhaseShifter/Tremolo: Phaser 0%, Tremolo 70%
• PhaseShifter/Tremolo, both dialed-in

• Phaser
• Room Reverb
• Hall Reverb
• Hall Reverb, long + modulated