Mercuriall Audio has introduced Metal Area MT-A, a freeware emulation of the Boss Metal Zone MT-2 distortion pedal in VST, AU, and AAX plugin formats for PC and Mac.
Metal Area MT-A emulates the popular Metal Zone MT-2 guitar pedal using Mercuriall Audio’s custom Neural Hybrid Engine technology. The developer promises to deliver pristine audio quality and the authentic MT-2 distortion character while ensuring a low CPU hit. Mercuriall Audio has released a number of decent guitar pedal emulations in the past (Greed Smasher being one of the more recent examples), so our expectations were fairly high with this one.
See also: Best FREE Distortion VST Plugins!The user interface features input level and distortion amount controls, as well as a 3-band equalizer with adjustable mid-band frequency. Additional controls located at the top of the user interface are used to choose between mono and stereo processing mode and to set the oversampling amount. With oversampling turned on, the aliasing artifacts won’t be audible but this comes at a cost of higher CPU consumption. Overall, the interface is well-designed with an intuitive control layout that takes no time getting used to.
During our test, Metal Area MT-A performed well and didn’t put too much strain on the CPU, as promised on the product page. The distortion effect seems authentic enough, although more experienced guitarists and heavy metal producers should be the judge of that. Check out the demo video below if you want to hear the plugin in action before downloading your free copy.
Metal Area MT-A can be downloaded completely free of charge from Mercuriall Audio’s website, no registration required. The software comes with an automatic installer which will extract the necessary plugin files on your computer’s hard drive. The plugin is compatible with 64-bit digital audio workstations on PC and Mac.
Metal Area MT-A is available for free download via Mercuriall Audio (4.3 MB download size, EXE installer, 64-bit VST/AU/AAX plugin format for Windows & MacOS).
5 Comments
X-Raym
onThis is a really great plugin, which keep noise level quite low compared to other distortion.
Best free alternative would be Ignite Amps ProF.E.T.
heavymetalmixer
onExactly, just like ProFET this pedal is also a preamp.
Brute Fours
onI’m sure this is good, but honestly, I wish it were the other Boss metal pedal, the HM-2.
Mice in Your Rice
onJust a heads up, Tomislav: there is no 32 bit version in the installer, only 3 versions of 64 bit.
Tomislav Zlatic
onThanks for letting me know, I’ll fix it right away.