| Category | Value | Rating |
| Features | 20% |  |
| Usability | 25% |  |
| Sound | 25% |  |
| Documentation & Support | 10% | |
| Price | 20% |  |
| OVERALL RATING = 3.7 Stars, which earns it a WIHO Award! 3.6 stars or better: Outstanding, WIHO Award 3 stars or better: Worth considering 2 stars or better: Suited to specific needs 1 star or less: Not recommended |
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The Fortin Nameless Suite X from Neural DSP is a complete redevelopment of the original Fortin Nameless Suite that was introduced in 2018. It was a revolutionary guitar plug-in that captured the modern metal guitar tone in a natural state, and enabled musicians to obtain studio-quality guitar tones with massive flexibility from just a single plug-in that was mix ready.
Neural DSP worked directly with Mike Fortin himself to capture the true essence of his boutique guitar amplifiers. Now, six years later, this digital suite provides improved sound and even more options than before that will satisfy any guitarist or producer looking for high-quality rock, hard rock, and metal guitar tones without compromise.
Features
Fortin Nameless Suite X is a no-frills, metal-oriented guitar plug-in. With multiple Pre effects that are recreations of Fortin’s line of stomp boxes, we felt that we had exactly what was needed to craft our tones for the video demo below.
The GRIND adds an incredible amount of clarity and articulation to the guitar sound, making every note defined and present, even when highly distorted. ZUUL is a perfect recreation of Fortin’s acclaimed noise gate that clamps only the excess noise you get when playing high-gain amps and allows you to track and record without needing to spend much time editing your takes to remove unwanted noise from your performances. Finally, we have the HEXDRIVE overdrive pedal, which boosts more gain and headroom than most overdrives we’ve tried in the past, and its irregular style of clipping provides a great blend of both boost and overdrive together.
The amplifier itself is very impressive and allows for deep tone shaping. While it was specifically crafted to meet the demanding needs of extreme-metal musicians, sporting dual gain controls, this single-channel amplifier is celebrated for its brutal, tight, and aggressive sound while still maintaining clarity and feel. It sounded the way we wanted it to, and it delivered heavy tones with ease and minimal tweaking (although you have plenty to control once you dive into the EQ and Cab sections of the plug-in suite).
The lack of a clean channel is our only grievance, as even something basic would be nice to have just to prevent the need to own an additional plug-in for non-distorted tones. But as this is a faithful re-creation of a single-channel amp, it remains true to itself and presents you with… this single-channel amp!
Completely new to the Fortin Nameless Suite X are Neural DSP’s Transpose & Doubler features. Transpose is a pitch shifter which will digitally retune your guitar up or down by up to an octave on either side. It performs just as well as—if not better than—most hardware modeling units on the market today, and is very fast with minimal latency, as you’ll see and hear in our demo.
The Doubler effect sends your guitar signal into a simulated stereo field, emulating the sound of a double-tracked guitar recording. This is nice for stereo leads, and playing out loud in the room, but would be of limited usefulness while actually recording on a record.
The Cabsim + IR Loader works as intended, allowing you to blend mics on the virtual speaker cabinets and adjust them like you would in a real studio. The nine-band EQ is the same as found in most other Neural DSP plug-ins.
The brand-new Delay and Reverb processors complete this package, enabling you to create new soundscapes and craft your own ambient effects, which we found to be great for lead tones.
Usability and Sound
Documentation and Support
The manual for this plug-in is offered as a free download on Neural DSP’s website and is packed with information on every single feature. It walks you through the install process, how to use it as a standalone virtual amplifier or in your DAW, and it breaks down every knob and control in the plug-in. It was easy to follow and cleared up any questions we had, as it was laid out very well and easy to navigate. This is an exemplary demonstration of how plug-ins should be documented.
Price
With a street price of $99 USD, this is a good price for a great-sounding virtual amp plus effects.
Contact Information
Neural DSP
www.neuraldsp.com
