Neural DSP Archetype Gojira

[Marc Cormier]

Funny how there’s at least a half dozen new listings for Neural plug-ins on KVR right now, and at least a couple mention they’re selling so they can pick up Gojira.  Yeah, I think they nailed this one, especially.

[projectm]

LOL it sure seems so! Everyone is talking about this everywhere. My Facebook feed is one looooong ad for it!
 

I’ve been playing this so hard this weekend that I have blisters on my fingers. It’s been a while since that happened! 

[kevin H]

Me when I demoed Gojira:

 

Edited January 19, 2021 by kevin H

[Sander Verstraten]

First time I demoed a Neural DSP Plugin. Must say I'm floored with the quality and it is certainly not a 1 trick pony,

Downside is, that I probably have to wait until it goes on sale to get it. Stupid money

Sidenote: it also works great on Synths.

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

I finally downloaded it and...It's kinda meh, really, IMO.

First of all, you have the annoyance of having to create an account to download it and forced to either login into an iLok account or create one to try it. I know several people that would give up at the first step already and the second one adds more salt to the wound. If I were to gauge the plugin based solely on that, I wouldn't even consider buying it if it was on sale.

Now for the sounds. The amps sound more or less the same with the current generation of amp sims. Nothing extraordinary that sets it apart in that aspect. At least on my machine, it's impossible to use any of the effects. They are extremely expensive computation wise for reasons I'm not sure. None of these effects should tax your system at all. Since there's no way to change oversampling settings on the plugin or any quality settings, you're not gonna have much of a time playing with sounds. Or at least I didn't.

Since I've never heard anything by Gojira and now almost nothing about the band, the "fan factor" doesn't engage me and I'm only looking at the plugin from a sound perspective. I suspect the other archetypes will go more or less the same way, but at least you can change the oversampling settings on them.

[fitzroy]

55 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

First of all, you have the annoyance of having to create an account to download it and forced to either login into an iLok account or create one to try it. I know several people that would give up at the first step already and the second one adds more salt to the wound. If I were to gauge the plugin based solely on that, I wouldn't even consider buying it if it was on sale.

True, but most people who have a collection of plugins are used to that process. It is a bit of a hassle, but it's close to the norm, rather than an exception. 

57 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

Now for the sounds. The amps sound more or less the same with the current generation of amp sims. Nothing extraordinary that sets it apart in that aspect.

I think the benefit of having a generous demo policy is that everyone can decide for themselves. That's worth more than a thousand reviews. To my ears, the heavy sounds are awesome - on par, or better, with anything else I've tried. It makes even my semi-acoustic sound like a KH ESP. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but hey. 

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

3 minutes ago, fitzroy said:

True, but most people who have a collection of plugins are used to that process. It is a bit of a hassle, but it's close to the norm, rather than an exception. 

I beg to differ. Demos and trials should never be tied to any registration process at all. The purpose of a demo is allowing you to test a product to see if you're gonna buy or not, no strings attached. Who knows how easy is to delete and remove the accounts you had to create just to try that plugin afterwards? And what do they do with your data? In some instances, that can lead to enough bad publicity that a team or company can abandon the project altogether. That happened with Natron, a free/open source compositor similar to Nuke. It didn't cost nothing to use the software, but you had to register to download it. That caused many people to look somewhere for a solution that didn't require jumping through those hoops. The project is currently in search of a maintainer and has removed their registration requirements for download, perhaps a little too late.

8 minutes ago, fitzroy said:

I think the benefit of having a generous demo policy is that everyone can decide for themselves. That's worth more than a thousand reviews. To my ears, the heavy sounds are awesome - on par, or better, with anything else I've tried. It makes even my semi-acoustic sound like a KH ESP. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but hey. 

I wouldn't call 14 days "a generous demo policy" personally. Ableton gives you 90 days and many other companies offer you 30. I tend to have issues with heavy sounds thanks to using 12s tuned down one step. Everything sounds bassy and the high fizz in modern high gain sounds is fatiguing to my ears.

[fitzroy]

1 hour ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

I beg to differ. Demos and trials should never be tied to any registration process at all. The purpose of a demo is allowing you to test a product to see if you're gonna buy or not, no strings attached. Who knows how easy is to delete and remove the accounts you had to create just to try that plugin afterwards? And what do they do with your data? In some instances, that can lead to enough bad publicity that a team or company can abandon the project altogether. That happened with Natron, a free/open source compositor similar to Nuke. It didn't cost nothing to use the software, but you had to register to download it. That caused many people to look somewhere for a solution that didn't require jumping through those hoops. The project is currently in search of a maintainer and has removed their registration requirements for download, perhaps a little too late.

In theory, I agree with you. But in practice, most big names are using demos to tie you into their system to some extent. My point was that Neural doesn't stand out in any particularly bad way in this regard. Sure, you can demo/install only plugins that come with zero strings attached. But you'd be missing out on A LOT of great plugins. 

1 hour ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

I wouldn't call 14 days "a generous demo policy" personally. Ableton gives you 90 days and many other companies offer you 30. I tend to have issues with heavy sounds thanks to using 12s tuned down one step. Everything sounds bassy and the high fizz in modern high gain sounds is fatiguing to my ears.

Whether a 14 day unrestricted demo (no noise, silence, pop-ups) is enough to decide whether one likes or doesn't like a plugin is really a first-world problem.  I think we can agree on that. The rest is down to taste, so inherently subjective. 

[antler]

4 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

Since I've never heard anything by Gojira and now almost nothing about the band, the "fan factor" doesn't engage me and I'm only looking at the plugin from a sound perspective.

I thought you said Gojira was a great band:

On 1/16/2021 at 1:36 AM, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

While Gojira is a great band, this plugin is just yet another one trick pony in the pile of metal plugins out there that all sound more or less the same, despite the numerous improvement claims made by developers.

 

[fitzroy]

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

4 hours ago, antler said:

I thought you said Gojira was a great band:

 

I'm saying that based on the two Mario Duplantier drum solos I saw. I've never heard any actual song from them.

I decided to find a way of using them in my Summer With Ola Riff Challenge. It's a bit time consuming, since I have to pick a preset, freeze the track, then repeat if the sound is not right. I downloaded the trial after all...

Edited January 20, 2021 by Bruno de Souza Lino

[Marc Cormier]

I'll get this even if I have to bake cookies and wash cars.  In Detroit.  In January.

[Zo]

1 hour ago, Marc Cormier said:

I'll get this even if I have to bake cookies and wash cars.  In Detroit.  In January.

lol if you do that you deserve the quortex (or what ever they call their HW lol )

i' m skipping this one , nothing i don't already have .... exept the pedal .... 

Between AT 5 and other stuff from neural and stl / softube i alrady have to much , actually selling stufff lol 

Edited January 20, 2021 by Zo

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

No effects on the guitars except for some EQ and compression. And no, the lead sound is not Silvera Solo.

 

[Soundwise]

On 1/17/2021 at 7:29 PM, Zo said:

smooth video with more cklean tones 

 

 

Gorgeous reverb, nice delay and pitch-shifting FX. As far as the amp sound goes - it definitely stands apart from the crowd, but somehow lacks something. Can't put it into words. It's almost "there", but not quite.

[fitzroy]

4 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

No effects on the guitars except for some EQ and compression. And no, the lead sound is not Silvera Solo.

On matters of taste, beyond adding your impressions to the murky pool of general opinion, which we all do here, there's no point in trying to convince people of anything. Adding what you think are arguments doesn't change that. Because just as with the original impression, people may well feel differently than you about the argument (in this case, the song, the playing, the gear, the recording chain, the mix, it goes on and on). It's a never-ending spiral. 

[Pollux]

44 minutes ago, fitzroy said:

On matters of taste, beyond adding your impressions to the murky pool of general opinion, which we all do here, there's no point in trying to convince people of anything. Adding what you think are arguments doesn't change that. Because just as with the original impression, people may well feel differently than you about the argument (in this case, the song, the playing, the gear, the recording chain, the mix, it goes on and on). It's a never-ending spiral. 

I think he was mentioning he did the video using Neural DSP Gojira and that he did not add any effects after it except for some EQ and compression, and that he did not use the Silvera Solo preset for the lead sound.

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

2 hours ago, Pollux said:

I think he was mentioning he did the video using Neural DSP Gojira and that he did not add any effects after it except for some EQ and compression, and that he did not use the Silvera Solo preset for the lead sound.

Exactly.

[fitzroy]

34 minutes ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

Exactly.

You lost me. You said this was a one trick pony. You also were 'meh' about it. Then you knew about Gojira, but you didn't. Then you post a video with you playing through it using a different preset/setting. Ok, so that is "not Silvera Solo". To show, what? That it's not a one trick pony? That it's still a one trick pony despite a different preset? That you tried it and it's great? That you tried it and it's still meh?

It's still an argument of some sort that hinges on taste, but I admit, I have no idea what the argument is. You win. ?

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

20 minutes ago, fitzroy said:

You lost me. You said this was a one trick pony. You also were 'meh' about it. Then you knew about Gojira, but you didn't. Then you post a video with you playing through it using a different preset/setting. Ok, so that is "not Silvera Solo". To show, what? That it's not a one trick pony? That it's still a one trick pony despite a different preset? That you tried it and it's great? That you tried it and it's still meh?

It's still an argument of some sort that hinges on taste, but I admit, I have no idea what the argument is. You win. ?

It still is a one trick pony and I don't retract any of the statements on the issues I had with it. You can't get a sparkly clean sound, only that usual clean with the amp starting to break up, which is not clean. Also, the Clean and Rust amps use more resouces than the Hot one for some reason. And it's not because of the effects or running two impulse responses either. The video is a metal video. I thought about doing something else trying to get different sounds that are out of the usual metal stuff but...There's no point in doing so. This plugin was made to people that want the Archetype artists "signature" sound with some tweakability.