Reckless Technology
Section
VST plugins
21 plugins · v0.21Twenty-one guitar and studio effects: an amp, a cabinet and a rack of pedals, compressors, delays, reverbs and a vocoder, plus a Pedalboard that carries the other twenty inside a single plugin. Each comes as a VST3 and a standalone app, and as an Audio Unit on the Mac.
I've spent many years designing amplifiers and effects with valves, MOSFETs, JFETs, bipolar transistors, op amps and diodes, and many years writing software for audio systems, digital signal processing included. I'm also a musician, and I love the sound of loud valve amps and vintage analog gear. That combination is what this suite is built on.
None of these plugins is a model of a particular piece of hardware: not of any amp, effect or pedal. Each is an original design, worked out from first principles with a knowledge of analog audio electronics and of software engineering, and built on our own C++ framework. I think you'll find them fun to play through: responsive and dynamic, with low latency and a good feel under the fingers.
VST/ASIO is a registered trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.
The Pedalboard
Amps and cabinets
Reckless Amp. An entirely original guitar preamp: a treble boost, two gain stages with switchable curves, a Master that drives an output clipper, and a noise gate. Its one classic element is the tone stack, the standard passive circuit of the Marshall Plexi and of many Fender and Vox amps, which gives the EQ the response a guitarist expects. Every one of its components can be changed on the schematic, and the amp behaves as if you had swapped that part in the analog circuit. Read more →
Reckless NAM. A player for Neural Amp Modeler captures: load any .nam file, classic or A2, and play through it, with a level in, bass and treble shelves, a room, a level out and the Reckless Amp’s noise gate. Read more →
Reckless Cab. A guitar speaker cabinet from an impulse response, with no latency: load a cabinet recording, design one in the Cabinet Maker, or capture your own through your interface. Read more →
Reckless Tone. The classic guitar head's passive Bass, Mid and Treble tone stack, with all seven of its parts yours to change. Read more →
Drive and pitch
Reckless Drive. An overdrive pedal: a highpass, a clipper and a roll-off from 700 Hz, with a tone control that moves the roll-off. The lamp shows how hard you are driving it. Read more →
Reckless Distortion. A distortion pedal: two clipping stages in series, a highpass ahead of them and a roll-off after them. Two tubes glow as hard as each stage works. Read more →
Reckless Octave. An analog-style octave divider: your note an octave down and two octaves down, under your dry sound. Read more →
Filters and modulation
Reckless Wah. A wah built from a tuned LCR circuit, moved by your playing, by an LFO in time with the song, or by an expression pedal over MIDI. Read more →
Reckless Sequence. A filter played by a step sequencer: up to thirty-two bars you draw, each the filter's frequency on one step, run in time with the song. Read more →
Reckless Mod. Six modulation effects on one panel: chorus, phaser, flanger, tremolo and vibrato on one LFO, and Multi Chorus, eleven chorus voices spread across the stereo field. Read more →
Reckless Vibe. A photocell vibe: one lamp sweeping four photocell phase stages, with the uneven throb of a rotating speaker. Read more →
Reckless Vocoder. A 31-band channel vocoder: the instrument you feed it comes out shaped by your voice, with your words on the instrument's pitch and tone. It adds no latency. Read more →
Dynamics and EQ
Reckless Gate. A noise gate: it turns the output down whenever the signal falls below the Threshold, so the gaps between notes are silent. Open, it is a wire. Read more →
Reckless Comp. A character compressor with a choice of three gain-control devices, each drawn from its physics, a JFET, a diode bridge or a photocell, or Pure, with a needle showing the gain reduction. Read more →
Reckless Limiter. A fast peak limiter: its peaks come out held at −2 dBFS, the peaks between the samples included, and nothing leaves over full scale. Read more →
Reckless EQ. A five-band parametric equaliser, each band a peak, a shelf or a filter, with a graph of the response over a live spectrum of the output. Read more →
Time and space
Reckless Delay. A virtual-analog stereo delay whose repeats darken and wobble as they go, the way tape and a bucket-brigade do. Read more →
Reckless Doubler. One performance on one speaker and a copy a few tens of milliseconds late on the other, its timing drifting slowly, so one part sounds like two takes. Read more →
Reckless Oldsverb. Three reverbs behind one set of knobs: a hall, a room with its walls' first reflections, and a shimmer whose tail climbs an octave at a time. Read more →
Reckless Space. Plays any impulse response file, a cabinet, a room, a plate or up to thirty seconds of reverb, with no latency, or a space the Space Craft builds. Read more →