Mercuriall Audio Software has introduced Greed Smasher, a freeware emulation of the Mesa/Boogie Grid Slammer overdrive pedal in VST, AU, and AAX plug-in formats for PC and Mac.
Greed Smasher is Mercuriall’s latest freeware guitar processing plugin, following the previously released Tube Screamer emulation and a range of free guitar amp sims. It is a highly detailed, circuit-based model of the Grid Slammer overdrive pedal by Mesa/Boogie. Being a virtual overdrive pedal, the plugin is aimed mainly at guitar players and music producers who use distorted guitars in their music, although effects like this one can work equally well for processing virtual instruments and even hardware synthesizers.
The user interface is a replica of the Grid Slammer guitar pedal, featuring a bypass switch and level, tone, and gain knobs. The top panel adds a mono/stereo input switch and a low/high processing quality switch which toggles between 2X and 4X oversampling. The desired input gain value can be typed in by clicking the black bar at the top of the GUI.
Although the plugin seems great on paper, it simply didn’t work during our test. It crashed both MuLab 7 and Studio One 2, tested on a Windows 7 machine with decent specs. It could be some sort of driver incompatibility issue. Hopefully, this is something that can be fixed with a future update.
On a related note, Mercuriall Audio Software is offering a discount on their Spark ($80 instead of $120) and U530 ($39.99 instead of $59.99) guitar preamp plugins. The discounted prices are available through June 20th, 2017.
Greed Smasher is available for free download via Mercuriall Audio Software (13.7 MB download size, EXE installer, 32-bit & 64-bit VST/AU/AAX plug-in format for Windows & Mac OS).
Last Updated on June 15, 2017 by Tomislav Zlatic.
