Nine audio plug-ins for guitar, bass and mix

Trident runs three complete amp chains in parallel - LONDON, FORGE and EMBER - each with its own microphone, cabinet, pan position and level. Most amp plug-ins make you choose one model and switch; Trident blends all three simultaneously, so a British crunch can sit underneath a modern high-gain wall without re-recording the part or opening a second instance.

Where Trident goes wide, Monolith goes deep. A single dual-channel head - clean and lead - with the power-amp behaviour that decides how an amp actually feels: supply sag, bias, and touch response. The full chain runs gate, pedal, preamp, power amp, cabinet, room and spring.

Subdivide splits the bass into three bands and treats each the way it wants to be treated: compression on the low band so the bottom stays solid, independent drive and tone on the mids and highs where the grind lives, then cabinet and EQ across the result. The problem it solves is the oldest one in bass - distortion that eats the low end.

Classic compressors do not differ mainly in their controls - they differ in how they respond. EMO-COMP offers five distinct detection and saturation characters, from clean and transparent through optical, bus, variable-mu and transformer-coloured, so you can pick a behaviour instead of buying five plug-ins.

Drift keeps the immediacy of a delay pedal - tap the tempo, hold to freeze, stomp for a feedback swell - while adding what a pedal cannot: note divisions locked to your session tempo, tone shaping inside the feedback path, tape-style degradation and modulation.

A focused octave-up pitch shifter in the Whammy tradition. The pitched voice is mixed against the untouched original with an equal-power blend, so it thickens a line rather than replacing it. One job, done cleanly.

The Igloo models the bucket-brigade delay chorus that defined a generation of clean guitar tones. Two voices: a fixed-rate ensemble with a chorus/vibrato switch, and a variable-speed mode when you want to set the rate yourself.

Two drive voices in one pedal, with a morph control that sweeps continuously from one to the other. A live display shows the actual saturation curve and what a sine wave becomes passing through it, so the character control is something you can see, not just hear.

A standalone application, not a plug-in. Connect a guitar or bass to your audio interface and play through the full Subdivide or Trident signal chain without opening a DAW. Intended for the times you want to practise rather than produce.