Product Reviews by KVR Members

What? Another EQ plugin? Really? No. When I first demoed this, I didn't see anything special with it. But then... I noticed the Scale (from parallel to double effect of the EQ), the filter shape selector (clean or resonant), and the introduced harmonics with tweaking the five EQ bands. It's a great sounding, uniquely designed tool for shaping an instrument or an entire mix.

I can't recall any other plugin that does what this one does: Multiband transient design. Period. Maybe there is, but is it good as this one? Does it also have mutiband clipping? What's the price point?

It sounds great, it's useful and unusual.

Can't afford Fab Filter's Saturn? No problem, get XCTR. It may not be as versatile, nor have the same saturation models, but as for multiband saturation it gets you fast where you want to go with your mix.

Put it on your mixbus or instrument busses to enhance the sum. Use it as an exciter in the master bus. Use it to shape a complex vocal.

Only gripe is it crashes your DAW whenever you press the presets button. But who needs presets with a plugin such as this?

First off, there are a couple of Audio Assault plugins missing from here.

One of them is Dirt Machine, which is essentially a suite of overdrive/distortion/fuzz pedals (amazing value, from a classic boost to an OCD, with the likes of Big Muff, Texan Pride, Soul Food, and even an not-so-shabby acoustic sim).

The other is Emperor, which along Dominator and this here Bulldozer make for Audio Assault's collection of guitar rigs.

Guitar rigs because you actually get it all inside a plugin (except a noise gate/denoiser and rack effects). From 10 bread and butter stompboxes that you can place in front of the amp or in the fx loop, a 2-channel high gain amp, and a cab section with the staple cab choices (American, British, Japanese and German), four different microphones and a user interface to position them and distance them, or the choice to load your own inputs, these three amp rigs bring very different and useful tones to the table.

While the Emperor focuses more on punchy high-mids, Dominator is more of a mid-gain amp, and this Bulldozer goes for the low-mid presence (suposedly a recreation of a certain Diezel amp). And here is where it truly shines, maybe because of the type of frequency response this amp head is amazingly versatile in tone.

I don't do metal whatsoever, I strive for getting delicate textures and tone into the productions I'm involved in, moving towards a more post-rockish, shoegazey, slowcore kind of sound. I can get specific and unique tones out of this plugin, without having to immediately reach for an eq to slice high-mid frequencies and to low-pass above 10k, and this is saying quite a bit.

I'd say in my context, Emperor would be more for scorching leads, Dominator for discerning shredding and Bulldozer for more discrete cleaner presence, although it can do almost anything the other two do.

But hey, get them all, you won't go wrong.

I have only one gripe with these amps: tweaking the reverb stomp has crashed my DAW a few times. Would be great to include a VST loader in the stomp section for loading other plugins (such as Dirt Machine). Other than that, they're great.

I don't do metal, or any genre that might need high gain amps. I have the first Grind Machine, and must admit I seldomly if ever use it. I have several amp sims (Revalver, Amplitube, Guitar Rig, all the free amps available right now, a Line 6 Pod XT, and a Yamaha DG Stomp, you get the picture).

This amp sim is nothing short of amazing. Yes it can get heavy and shreddy (it's a high gain amp suite after all), but it can also do more 'subtle' lead tones, crunchy rhythms, cleanish slightly driven tones, and with the expansions, Hidden Gems in particular, you can even play jazz and blues with it.

A slew of high gain amps, along with several cab options and the 'tight' button make Grind Machine II an essential, versatile production tool ideal to get if you're into guitar music.

Probably one of the most useful saturation plugins around for enhancing and rebalancing individual sources.

I did a few A/B's with this plugin, focused particularly on a comparison with industry standard Soundtoys Decapitator, and was surprised to be able to reach very similar tone. Decapitator gives a bit more low end presence, but considering this plugin is around a third of the price (not to mention the excellent price drops during sales), the results you can achieve are amazing here, and you can compensate by using a unit that generates low end-specific saturation along with it.

Use it as an exciter, after a slow attack compressor, a preamp, a channel strip for mixing into, or even as a distortion unit.

Well done, Audio Assault.

Very interesting tool for when mixing with flat studio headphones, it gives off a different (good) perspective.