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Archetype Plini from Neural DSP

16K views 71 replies 13 participants last post by  Mattayus 
#1 · (Edited)


Kinda "old news" but, having tried the NATAS one and even thinking it sounds great but the price of one single Amp VST put me off buying it since it's more than I'm willing to pay for a one trick pony VST.

Anyway, yesterday browsing for Demos of the new Fractal Unit I went to Leon Todd channel (he does amazing sounds with the Fractal units and shows it) and noticed he had a demo/play through of the new Plini VST.

Him not being a Djenter or super High gain guy I was more interested the tones he would got of it instead of all that Ear Piercing stuff that nowadays plagues YT (sorry I'm old)



Got really impressed with the tones he got out of it and its basically 3 Amps (Clean/Crunch/High Gain) so I decided to give the demo a try. Whoaaaaa this sounds GOOD!!!! There is that Grit Crunch that is present on the other VSTs but the all amps sound really really good. Wished it had a Chorus pedal but oh well.

Give a try guys, im now really considering in buying it :)

https://neuraldsp.com/products/archetype-plini/
 
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#5 ·
I use the Nameless plug-in for tracking, it's so ultra-clear it allows you to dial right into the quality of what you are playing and work on eliminating stuff like handling noise. It's great for a very niche tone which may or may not be relevant to a project, but for tracking quality it can't be beaten.
 
#6 ·
The impression I get is that Neural DSP aren't developers, they are licensers backed by some stupid Djent VC crew attempting to cash in on the djent craze. :lol:

They have four products, and every one is licensed.

The whole point of Digital Signal processing is that since code is infinitely flexible, and there is no such thing as "name brand code", since it's all just 1s and 0s, you can offer all this awesome stuff without the snooty culture of "this is name brand/hot right now" in physical amp products.

Neural DSP doesn't have any standalone "Neural DSP" products. They have four products, that are all licensed versions of a trendy physical object. :lol:

I'll bet that the Mehtab venture capitalism firm is involved somewhere here.

Wouldn't be surprised if these weren't even modeled after the physical products, might have just made some generic vsts and slapped branding on them.

I'm not buying a VST if 70%+ of that VSTs cost is there because they licensed a trendy name and slapped it on there.

It doesn't inspire confidence when you look at their "artists" section. They are a relatively new brand, and they have all the "hip" artists on there. That doesn't mean they are really good, that just means they sent all those people free plugins and asked if they could use their picture on their site.

They are also "hiring" for a shit ton of positions. :lol: Many of the smaller vst brands are just one dude. Even highly regarded ones. That is a shit ton of positions for a company that only offers four VSTs, all of them generic things with brand names slapped on them.

These guys have been around for about a year (all of their social media pages were created in Feb 2018), they don't have any super complex plugins, mostly just generic sims with slick UIs, and they want all these positions?



Come on. These guys paid for someone to do their website. Unless it's a huge company like Waves or Toontrack or UAD, the same guy coding the VSTs does the website. :lol: I'm not giving $100+ to a startup pedaling products that get 70%+ of their value from licensing a name that clearly hasn't even broken even yet.

They're also partnering with ilok, which needless to say, costs money. Do you know how many start up VST makers partner with ilok?

The only thing that would make these guys less legit is if I went to buy one of their plugins and they offered Affirm backed financing. These guys aren't trying to sell cutting edge VSTs they designed, this is 100% an attempt to cash in on a highly impressionable audience prone to suggestion.
 
#16 ·
To be fair Fortin could shit in a box marked "Fortin Amps" and his fanboys would buy it. I don't think the plugin was going to make or break him in any instance.
 
#13 ·
It's the industry equivalent of strip mining dude. :lol:

Not even the big brands do that. Toontrack and Waves like, might send out relatively unobtrusive emails about, "Hey, we've got a new thing out, it might not even be in your niche, but it's out there if you are interested".

Companies like this, when they come out with a product, they are just like, "THIS IS THE BEST MOST ADVANCED THING EVER, YOU NEED THIS TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY, THIS IS THE APEX, THAT'S WHY IT'S $150."

Which is all well and good, but the buyer will eventually notice that a new product 3-6 months later comes along, and they say the exact same thing about it, and the thing you bought three months ago that was the most advanced ever and totally lifelike isn't good enough.

It's a business model based around building a massive amount of hype and peer pressure when a product comes out, and charging as much as they possibly can. Whether that's a good business practice or not is up to you, but I will say this, In 4 years do you think they'll be on version 3.5 of the Plini VST? Fuck no. That is profitable for the span of less than a year and how well it sells is based on the massive explosion of hype and peer pressure social media culture. Their next product is going to replace it. When a company releases multiple products in the span of a year that are suddenly unequivocally the "best thing on the market by a huge margin", that's a huge red flag. Because either;

A) They have a massive and highly skilled R&D team who make regular industry shattering breakthroughs every one to two months.
B) Their products are all hype.

This is a start up with four products, and every product has been industry shatteringly good if you believe the hype. Four products in the span of one year. Gimme a fucking break.

Sure, marketing is inherently dishonest, but that sort of marketing is more dishonest than most.

Look at every legit brands product life expectancy. Look at the R&D cycles for any other VST from a legit brand. How many years were there between Superior Drummer 2 and 3?

On the other hand, how many months are there going to be between Neural DSPs hot new item that blows everything else away and the next groundbreaking VST by Neural DSP? Maybe 2 if you are lucky.

Expansive Suite of VST tools that shatter the industry's preconceptions of what amp sims are capable of, or a relatively generic amp sim program with slick UI, licensing the name of whatever is most in at the moment, and aggressive marketing? That's up to the user to decide, but when you look at the time frame involved in developing their products it pretty clearly points to only one of those.
 
#14 ·
The objection to a lot of these modern brands isn't even stylistic, it's that they operate on the same model of "planned obsolescence" as industries like smart phone manufacturers.

With VSTs there is no physical waste, but the issue with planned obsolescence is that they sell you this really sweet idea that you are getting the most cutting edge thing possible, when in reality they have something even more "cutting edge" coming out in 8-12 weeks.

I would always rather spend money with someone who has a passion for advancing what they are doing instead of someone who is more interested in a license to print money. Stuff like Strymon and Mesa and shit like that is expensive, but I have faith that the company made it as well as they possibly could, not that they have something lined up that is going to make it obsolete in 3 months time.
 
#17 ·
I think you are taking this too personal.
Fucking this.

Again I say, who cares about their business practice, r&d or any of it. Will there be a new plini plug in in 2 years? I'd expect not, but that has no impact on the quality of the current offering.

There is zero chance I will buy it because I prefer the other ones but it's still a great sounding plugin, the dark glass one is fucking great as well.

The reality is you are right, they are marketing it at weak minded idiots who will buy anything they think is the flavour of the month but I'm unsure why that's worth bothering about? Let them get on with it.

Also your point about their products being obsolete is only valid if you subscribe to the 'must have the next best thing' mindset which you dont. So it's not an issue.
 
#15 ·
I think you are taking this too personal.

Of course being Companies they want profit as any company wants. They target their potential user base and throw out products that gather to them. The Nameless guess it was a "success" or else they would not have released more. Having coded one Amp the rest is most certain just some tweaks to get other sounding one and then capitalize on the R&D.

Ever wondered where is the guy behind Le Pou VSTs? or Vadim Taranov? or Nick Crow? Those guys kinda dissapeared from the scene (except Vadim), pretty sure they are working for some company if they are still on the VST Amps area.

As long as people are willing to buy these and they aren't total ripoffs (like that certain VST that came out last year with the name of a famous guitar player an doesn't really sound that good), let them make the flavor of the month. I think the Plini being 3 Amps with some FX is much more appealing to me than paying the same for the other two Amps they released. Will I buy it? Maybe, not sure. I pretty much prefer the new Ax thing to be honest so I might save the money on this one.
 
#26 ·
Engage is on a whole tier above Mehtab, IMO. Latter has done some shady stuff here and there and at least for a while was a very active flipper who owned a DSLR and wasn't afraid to use it, but I don't recall him ever straight-up lying about condition or prior ownership of guitars, or misrepresenting what something actually was. I wouldn't rule out buying something from Mehtab in the unlikely instance he was selling something I was actually interested in, but anything tied to Engage's name would be enough to make me steer clear.
 
#31 ·
I've got nothing against plugins; I've been trying to use BIAS Amp 2 and/or S-Gear, while I wait for my name to come up on the FM3. But I just can't get it to sound or feel right. It's pretty frustrating. I think it's just the weirdness with using an interface into a computer, compared to a dedicated device.
 
#32 ·
I've warmed up to plugins over the last few months. Too much temptation to knob twist, so I usually stick to one or two amp models, one or two IRs MAXIMUM and I go back to recorded tones I like to reference what I'm after and avoid fucking with it from ear fatigue. Been pretty fruitful so far.
 
#53 ·
Yeah djent kids gon' djent, but who gives a shit, some of their gear is fucking amazing. Just use it differently to them if that's not your cup of tea, and it's all good :shrug:. I'm gonna check their bass VST because I'm curious, love the sound of DarkGlass stuff I've heard, and think it might turn out to be a good tool to get me closer to the sound that's in my head. If not, who cares. I'm not trying it because I've been marketed "at", it might not even work for my sound, but it could turn out to be cool, and I couldn't care less about its association (in fact the first time i heard about DarkGlass was because of the bassist from Karnivool - a decidedly un-djenty band).
 
#54 ·
I cant imagine you will be dissapointed, its really good. Just used it on an album mix last weekend and its hard to make it sound bad which isnt the case for most VSTs

My only complaint with Neural is that they use iLok which I always find a pain in the ass.
 
#59 ·
Well it's just semantics really.

Sure they aren't your typical Computer because you cant "install things" or use it for others things because they are made to be like that. If the developers "opened" their closed OS to allow use of a SDK that alone would make it more "Computer" like. One could code plugins or remove restrictions (if the SDK was that open.) Of course it will never happens since their success relies on the secrecy under the OS and it's also a way to control every aspect of it. Kinda like what Apple did for years... building their machines for their own OS and not allowing others to build any hardware for it, that way incompatibilities were minimized to zero basically. They only had to support a few number of hardware unlike Windows machines that always accepted everything.
 
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