Creative Effects

VALVEFRAME

Name: VALVEFRAME
Brand: Signature Algorithms
SKU: valveframe
Price: 29.00 GBP
Availability: InStock

Four original amplifier models, a synthesised three-microphone cabinet section with five guitar and two bass cabinets, a phase-matched clean blend, and the studio chain around them.

29 55SALE

10-day trial

See the measurements

Free 10-day trial. The download is the whole collection, 22 plug-ins in one installer, so you can try every one; start VALVEFRAME's trial from inside the plug-in when you are ready. Downloading does not start it, and trying one plug-in does not start the others.

AU (macOS)
VST3
AAX
macOS Universal
Windows 64-bit
v1.0.0

What it does

A cabinet made of physics, not captures.

No sampled impulse responses ship with VALVEFRAME. Every cabinet response is synthesised from a description of the driver, the box, the microphone and where it is pointing: driver resonance, cone breakup modes, voice-coil inductance, baffle step, microphone response, proximity effect, then early reflections.

That is what makes microphone position genuinely continuous rather than a set of discrete captures, and it is why the whole cabinet section is a few hundred bytes of coefficients instead of tens of megabytes of audio.

Two of the seven cabinets are for bass, and BLEND mixes the clean DI back in, delayed and phase matched to the miked sound so the low end adds up instead of cancelling. REC MODE takes the reported latency to zero for playing through it while you record.

The chain is mono up to the cabinet, as a real amplifier is. Stereo begins at the microphone panning.

Key features

Valves solved properly, offline

Plate current from Koren's empirical triode model. The load line is solved by bisection at load time over a 4096-point grid, then looked up per sample: bisection because plate current is monotonic in the unknown, so it cannot diverge; offline because we can then afford to converge properly instead of stopping after two Newton steps.

The dynamic parts stay dynamic

Grid conduction charging the coupling capacitor and dragging the bias toward cutoff: the splutter-and-recover of a hard-driven amp. A partly bypassed cathode resistor reducing gain at low frequencies only. Miller capacitance. Supply sag.

A power amp that changes class under drive

A push-pull pair whose conduction overlap narrows as it is pushed, so a crossover notch appears as the stage moves from class AB toward class B. Transformer saturation makes the core a signal-dependent gain, so low notes compress while the top end stays open.

Continuous microphone position

Three microphone slots, five microphone characters, and position that moves smoothly rather than stepping between captures. Each slot holds two convolvers so responses swap by crossfade rather than by a discontinuity, and the convolution adds no latency: the first 64 taps are computed directly and the rest arrive exactly when they are needed.

REC MODE: zero latency for tracking

The red rocker swaps the oversampler's linear-phase filters for minimum-phase twins with the same magnitude response and drops the limiter's lookahead, so the plugin reports no latency and a host's low-latency mode keeps it in circuit. Level stays within 0.07 dB of the normal mode and every band carrying energy within 0.2 dB. A session saved in REC MODE reopens in it; presets leave it alone.

Bass cabinets and a phase-matched BLEND

A Bass 4x10 with tight lows and a growl around 1.8 kHz, and a deeper, darker Bass 1x15. BLEND puts the clean DI back under the miked cabinet, delayed by exactly what the processed path takes and passed through a copy of every low cut on that path, so a 50 % blend stays within 2 dB of an in-phase sum from 25 to 800 Hz on every cabinet, microphone and amplifier tried. Delayed alone, the same mix lost up to 12 dB where a bass's fundamentals are.

Five reverbs from one network

One feedback delay network mixed each pass by an orthonormal Hadamard matrix, so the mixing step neither creates nor destroys energy. Spring gets a dispersive all-pass ladder; shimmer gets an octave-up shifter inside the feedback path, so the tail climbs rather than merely having a bright layer added.

Verified against published values

A high-mu twin triode with a 100k plate load and a bypassed 1k5 cathode resistor is the most documented gain stage in guitar electronics, and its voltage gain is about 60. The model returns 62.9.

The interface

The VALVEFRAME amplifier page: back and forward preset buttons with SAVE, the ValveFrame script mark, red and blue rocker switches for REC MODE and bypass beside the AMP, CABINET and EFFECTS tabs, input, compressor and drive sections, a black amplifier panel with gain, bass, middle, treble, presence, bright, edge and master controls, a response row of sag, bias, feedback, transformer and tube age, and the signal chain along the footer. — VALVEFRAME · 1 of 3

The VALVEFRAME effects page: pre-EQ and post-EQ banks, tape and modulation sections, delay and reverb stages, and an output panel with limiter, width, output and ceiling controls and a BLEND knob for the clean DI, each a coloured panel. — VALVEFRAME · 2 of 3

The VALVEFRAME cabinet page with the Session Bass preset loaded: a Bass 4x10 cabinet in navy cloth with a large dynamic and a studio condenser placed against its cones, three mic slots with position, distance, level and pan controls, and the signal chain along the footer. — VALVEFRAME · 3 of 3

How it works

The signal path, as the plugin’s own documentation states it.

input -> gain staging / impedance -> compressor -> pre EQ
      -> [ 8x oversampled: drive -> preamp valves -> tone stack -> power amp ]
      -> cabinet + 3 mic blend -> post EQ
      -> tape -> modulation -> delay -> reverb -> BLEND -> widener -> limiter

BLEND mixes in the clean DI from after gain staging, delayed and phase matched.
The default order; every module after the input can be dragged to another place.

Audio

Audio demos for VALVEFRAME are not published yet.

We would rather show you nothing than show you a demo that was not recorded through this plugin.

Measured

134 DSP and 45 plugin test cases, the release audit and the bundled benchmark · Apple Silicon · 48 kHz

Latency: 130 samples · 2.71 ms
Latency in REC MODE: 0 samples
REC MODE against normal: level within 0.07 dB; every band carrying energy within 0.2 dB
BLEND at 50 %, worst loss against an in-phase sum, 25–800 Hz: 1.9 dB (delayed only: up to 12 dB)
Low E (41 Hz) against 800 Hz, Large Dynamic: Bass 4x10 −5.5 dB · Bass 1x15 −1.8 dB · Stack 4x12 −22.3 dB
CPU, full chain: 3.3 % of one core
Aliasing below 16 kHz, tanh drive, oversampled: −153 dB (−16 dB without oversampling)
Convolution vs direct convolution: 2.9e-7 relative, no delay
Allocations in process(), across 400 blocks: 0, verified by replacing operator new
auval: passes with zero warnings and zero failures

Figures are produced by this plugin’s own test suite and benchmark, on the hardware and sample rate named above. They are not estimates.

Controls

Amplifier

Input: AUTO gain staging, TRIM and IMPEDANCE, always first in the chain.
Drive: Transparent, Mid Focus, Soft Clip or Tape Drive, with DRIVE, TONE and LEVEL.
Amplifier: Downtown Clean, Garage 30, Dream, Lo-Fi. All four are built up front and kept resident, so selecting one is a pointer change plus an 8 ms fade.
Gain to Master: GAIN, BASS, MIDDLE, TREBLE, PRESENCE, BRIGHT, EDGE and MASTER. Presence works the way the real one does: by rolling the feedback off at the top rather than by boosting treble.
Response: SAG, BIAS, FEEDBACK, TRANSFORMER and TUBE AGE.

Cabinet

Cabinet: Chime 2x12, American 2x12, Stack 4x12, Alnico 2x12 and Vintage 1x12 for guitar; Bass 4x10 and Bass 1x15 for bass. IR LENGTH 2048 or 4096.
Microphones: Close Dynamic, Vintage Ribbon, Large Dynamic, Studio Condenser, Valve Condenser: three slots with POSITION, DISTANCE, LEVEL and PAN, and each microphone can be picked up and moved against the cabinet. For bass, use the Large Dynamic or a condenser; the Close Dynamic is voiced for guitar and cuts its own lows from 95 Hz.

Studio chain

Compressor: Studio VCA, Optical or FET, with THRESH, RATIO, ATTACK, RELEASE, KNEE, MAKEUP and MIX.
Pre EQ and Post EQ: LOW CUT, HIGH CUT, TILT and four bands with their own frequency and gain: one ahead of the amplifier, one after the cabinet.
Tape: SAT, WOW, FLUTTER, DUST, AGE and MIX.
Modulation: Analog Chorus, Dimensional, Clean Chorus, Vibrato or Phaser, with RATE, DEPTH, MIX, REGEN and WIDTH.
Delay: Tape, Analog, Digital or Ping Pong, free or synced to the host, with FEEDBACK, MIX, TONE, WOBBLE and SPREAD.
Reverb: Room, Plate, Hall, Spring or Shimmer, with SIZE, DECAY, DAMPING, PRE, MIX, WIDTH, SHIMMER and LOW CUT.
Output: WIDTH, OUTPUT, CEILING and the LIMITER.
BLEND: The clean DI mixed back in. 100 %, the default, is the processed sound alone; 0 % is the DI at its own level. There is no automatic level matching: through the mids the processed signal runs about 10 dB hotter than the DI at the default settings.

Session

REC MODE: The red rocker. Zero reported latency for playing through the plugin while recording. Switching passes through about 15 ms of silence, and it is not offered for automation: hosts absorb a latency change cleanly only with the transport stopped.
Bypass: The blue rocker, lit while the plugin is on. Passes the input delayed by exactly the reported latency, crossfaded over 20 ms, and is the same switch as the host's own bypass.
Signal chain: Along the foot of the window. Drag a module to a new place and the audio is processed in exactly the order shown; IN stays first.
Presets: Back and forward buttons, the preset browser and SAVE. User presets are plain XML.

Technical details

Formats, macOS: AU · VST3 · AAX
Formats, Windows: VST3 · AAX
Operating system: macOS 10.15 or later · Windows 10 or later, 64-bit
Architecture, macOS: Universal: Apple Silicon and Intel
Architecture, Windows: 64-bit
Plugin code: Icv1
Version: 1.0.0
Latency: 130 samples · 2.71 ms; 0 in REC MODE
CPU: 3.3 % of one core, full chain
Factory presets: 404

On 24 shelves under Genre, Decade and Instrument, among them 26 for bass and 24 for keys. All reachable from the browser and as host programs.

Worth knowing

The four amplifiers are voiced toward the character of the American clean, British class-A chime, high-headroom clean and small-cheap-amp archetypes. None is modelled from measurements of a specific product and none claims any relationship to one.
The amplifier voicings are physically motivated and internally consistent, but have not been matched against measurements of reference hardware. The figures that are checked against published values are the valve operating point and gain.
REC MODE keeps the tone, not the waveform: its minimum-phase filters delay different frequencies by slightly different amounts, so it does not null against the normal mode. That is why it is a switch rather than the default.
There is no dedicated high-gain amplifier: the Metal presets are a drive pedal into a cranked Garage 30, shaped by the EQs. There is no amplitude tremolo or auto-pan, so the keys presets use the phaser, chorus and vibrato instead. The 244 presets added after the original 160 were levelled and checked by measurement, not auditioned by ear.