The Drive will push your signal into the pedal, the Tone adjusts how bright or dark you’d like your drive, and the Gain sends the desired level out to the Amp. The overdrive section features a green stomp that looks a little like a Tube Screamer and features similar controls. Unfortunately, you can’t turn the Amp portion off at all either. I would like the option of sometimes just using the EQ, Limiter, and Magic on already tracked guitar parts, thus using it like a normal channel strip. Something I don’t quite understand is when turning off the cabinet, everything else after it has to be turned off as well.

This will open up the signal flow chart to allow you to quickly toggle features. Each section is extremely straightforward and can be turned off if wanted by clicking the “Signal Path” button at the bottom. It even features a nice tuner in the top right corner. Menace is broken down into a Pedal section with overdrive pedal, an Amp section with a great looking interface, a Cabinet section complete with different mic choices, Joey’s Magic section which applies some of Mr. The metering section helps get the dry signal right where you need it to get optimal sound quality and the output shows how much is going out. The plugin features a very nice gate, input controls, and output controls. This saves inserts, processing, and having to fumble around between different plugins by giving you what you need at the source. The interface is laid out exactly true to real world, including full parametric EQ and limiter. I’d prefer to just be able to fire Toneforge up and play without having to open a DAW session. One thing I would like to see is a stand-alone version for practice. Toneforge Menace comes in just about every format of plugin (with the exception of Reason Rack Extension) that you can imagine. On the other side of that, Joey Sturgis Tones is playing by the honor system so make sure you reward a company that works along these lines and buy the software. One of the great things right off the bat is that the plugin is DRM free so once you buy it, there’s no tomfoolery with registration keys or USB dongles. The Toneforge Menace is the first of many future releases of amplifier simulators and is packaged as an all-in-one solution for guitar processing within your DAW. We got a chance to take a look at the Toneforge Menace amp simulator he designed. On top of wearing all of those hats, he has developed several plugins under the name Joey Sturgis Tones. He own Foundation Recording Studio, he can play multiple instruments, he produces, tracks, mixes, and masters.

Jst toneforge menace vstx