The Sword by Audiority is a FREE EQ boost pedal plugin for macOS and Windows.
The Sword is the product of a collaboration between Audiority and The Amp Sim Universe and promises to deliver the ultimate clean boost.
Audiority has based The Sword on the EQ/boost section of its Solidus VS8100 analog modeled solid state amplifier plugin.
The Sword is an analog-modeled ten-band graphic EQ with a 20dB clean booster. Each frequency band allows users to boost or cut by +/- 12dB, which provides ample tone-shaping.
As with any such pedal/plugin, the results depend heavily on context, where, and how you use it.
But, it’s immediately evident that The Sword ticks a few essential boxes; it’s simple and impactful (and free). Impactful doesn’t have to mean aggressive or in your face, but rather a positive influence on the sound, however discrete or conspicuous it may be.
The resizable GUI is as straightforward as can be; it has a fader for each band, a Gain knob, and on/off switches for the EQ and Boost functions.
Those are the core controls of the plugin, but it also features an HQ (enable oversampling) switch and a Randomize function that’s always handy.
Clean Boost pedals are very popular among guitarists, especially with the tone-shaping capabilities of a simple EQ section. Of course, effects pedals aren’t limited to guitarists and bassists; any musician can make good use of them, but my introduction to pedals came through working with guitarists.
I don’t mind admitting that I knew very little about effects pedals when I first started working with guitarists; I was a fairly traditional pianist (in terms of tech, at least) with much to learn.
A clean boost pedal is something I might have misunderstood back then because it’s easy to align the word clean with a clean sound, which isn’t inherently true.
Moreover, a clean boost responds linearly to the signal and introduces no limiting. Depending on where you use it in your chain, a clean boost can slam your signal further into crunchy overdrive or provide a pure volume boost without coloring anything, and more.
I know the above is obvious to many, but nothing is too obvious when you’re new, so I don’t mind highlighting some mistakes or misconceptions from my early days for anyone beginning their journey.
If you check out The Sword, feel free to share what you get out of it in the comments!
And don’t forget BPB readers can get a FREE IK Multimedia Quad Image on April 30th.
The Sword is available in AU, CLAP, VST2, VST3, and AAX formats for macOS (10.13 upwards) and Windows ( 7 upwards).
Download: The Sword (FREE)
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3 Comments
Né
onI use an old Laney DP 150 Bass Head that i found in a bunker once as pre-amp / eq. The amp itself is dead, but the pre-amp and 11 band graphic eq (and an additional 15db boost/cut fader) work fine. And it has a switch to set them to pre or post DI.
TheSword sounds not bad at all, i’ll check it out later. Thanks for the article! :)
alex
onNice! Thx. Love Audiority plugs. They’re CPU hogs, though, especially with oversampling enabled. But the sound quality is great. The only paid one that I use is their Polycomp. It’s actually the only multiband compressor that I use (besides ReaXcomp, when I need more bands, more flexibility and colorless compression, of course).
Katie b
onI’m still new to analog modeled vsts, is this different from something like fruity parametric eq?