Every day is Christmas at Wire Grind Audio! The indie dev delivered the goods yet again for the holiday season, this time with a new freebie, the Honest Overdrive plugin.
Honest Overdrive is a Windows-exclusive release in VST3 format.
Wire Grind describes the release as a simple, workhorse plugin for general distortion needs.
This ain’t your granddaddy’s overdrive, though! As the dev explains, most overdrives work by boosting the signal until it’s clipped by a set distortion curve.
Honest Overdrive instead takes the “reverse approach” by increasing the sensitivity of the distortion curve until it clips a fixed signal.
We covered the release of Wire Grind’s previous free distortion plugin Rasp earlier in the month.
Any bedroom producers who checked out Rasp will find the control scheme of Honest Overdrive to be quite familiar, as they have the same basic layout, albeit with some different parameters in place.
Honest Overdrive features pots for Clipping Threshold, Softness Amount, and Output Gain, as well as controls for Bypass and Oversampling.
The layout is completed using in and out meters, maximum saturation and overdriven indicators, undo, redo, A/B settings, and paste.
The Clipping Threshold sets the level where the clipping starts, while the Softness Amount determines how soft the clipping is. If the latter is set to +12 dB for example, the distortion will max out at 12 dB above the clipping threshold.
Overdriven and Maximum Saturation, meanwhile, indicate whether the signal has exceeded the clipping threshold or when the overdrive signal has hit its hard limit, respectively.
Wire Grind has provided a nice and easy download process, as you can download the Windows installer with a single click from the product page.
The dev runs a YouTube channel, @WireGrindAudio-mg1un, although there are no demos of Honest Overdrive on there yet.
There don’t seem to be any user demos available of any of Wire Grind’s free plugin releases yet either, so they’re a bit of a mystery download.
December has been a busy month for Wire Grind so far, as Honest Overdrive dropped just two weeks after the launch of Rasp.
Both Honest Overdrive and Rasp are quirky releases with a unique approach to adding distorted goodness to your signal.
So I could see how if you’re after a no-frills dirt plugin with a point of difference, then both Honest Overdrive and Rasp could be worth a download.
Download: Honest Overdrive (FREE)
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Last Updated on December 24, 2024 by Tomislav Zlatic.
