Your signal chain was never supposed to be a straight line.

Eight drive voicings on one morphing circuit, included in the free version. TYPE does not switch between them, it sweeps: from soft breakup through hard clipping into fuzz, with every position in between usable. PRE TONE shapes the signal going into the distortion, POST TONE the signal coming out, MID sets the mid character, and MIX blends the dry signal back in.

A mid-’90s British studio distortion, traced from real hardware. It is one of the pedals the same LA session players kept quiet about, which is where the name comes from. Masses of gain that stays tight, with the bass firming up as you add more, and clipping set high enough that your pick attack still comes through. LOWEND tightens the lows before the dirt; all the way up it reads AUTH, the untouched original voicing.

The green-overdrive archetype, from the original late-’70s schematic. Its diodes clip inside the amplifier’s feedback loop, so your clean note always rides on top of the dirt. That is the compression, the singing sustain, the cleanup from the guitar’s volume knob. And the signature mid focus: only the mids get driven, while the lows pass nearly clean.

A true-stereo cabinet IR loader with the response drawn as a waveform. IRs load loudness-normalised, so swapping cabs compares tone instead of volume; IR LENGTH shortens the response, with a pull-out fade handle that softens the tail instead of chopping it. Low and high cuts and an output trim finish the job.

Two cabinets blended into one sound. The scope draws both IRs as glowing waves (A purple, B green, the overlap brighter) and you slide ALIGN until the shapes fuse and the blend stops sounding hollow. AUTO ALIGN and AUTO TRIM do the first pass, reversibly. Level-compensated, so two cabs together sit as loud as one.

The early-’70s octave fuzz, rebuilt from the schematic: a transformer and a pair of germanium diodes fold your note back onto itself, so a ringing octave floats above everything you play. Sputtery decay, bell-like clangs on double-stops, cleans up from the guitar’s volume knob. BIAS starves the circuit for meaner, more broken sounds, and the OCTAVE switch drops the fold-back for straight fuzz.

An early-’80s Japanese distortion, modelled from the original: scooped and raw where the mid-humped overdrives stay polite. Low Drive is a bright, punchy boost; turning it up focuses more and more gain into the upper mids until the whole circuit saturates and the attack starts to bloom. The tone knob blends bass against treble around that signature mid dip. It takes its name from the boulevard with the little club on it, where LA’s session players have been playing their late sets for decades, a few of them with one of these on the board.

The gold-box transparent overdrive, modelled from a trace of an original. The trick is the gain knob: it blends a driven voice against your untouched clean signal, so it never buries the guitar. It stays your sound, slightly compressed, gently pushed. Huge clean headroom makes it a natural always-on boost; unity sits low on the output dial, just like the hardware.

A germanium fuzz rebuilt as a complete circuit simulation. STAB starves its supply voltage, and across a whole swath of settings the pedal self-oscillates: the red arcs on the knobs mark measured squeal territory. DRIVE tunes the squeal’s pitch.

The ’90s studio-standard compressor, control for control: input level IS the compression. Push in harder, squeeze more. Its eight ratios run from gentle thickening to the pumping, crushed room-sound at the top, with valve- and tape-style colour on tap, a Mix knob for parallel squeeze, and the all-buttons-in British mode.

A true-stereo FET limiter after the mid-’60s studio unit with four ratio buttons and no threshold knob. INPUT is the threshold, so you set the squeeze by how hard you drive it. Attack and release run the original’s inverted tapers, faster as you turn them up, and pressing every ratio at once is the all-buttons-in mode. The class-A output stage colours the signal even at 1:1.

An optical compressor after an early-’70s studio unit. The signal lights two lamps sitting over photocells: the brighter they glow, the more the gain comes down, and as a note decays they darken and the gain returns. There is no threshold, ratio or attack control. The response comes from the lamps themselves. Balance blends the compressed signal against the clean one.

A wah modelled from the mid-’60s original, circuit and inductor included. POSITION is the treadle: sweep it by hand, drive it from an expression pedal, or wire an LFO onto it for auto-wah. The damping is set to the vocal-sounding vintage value rather than the sharper modern one, and LEVEL is the one control the original never had.

A vibe modelled on the original photocell circuit: a preamp into four phase stages, with the sweep taken from a modelled lamp-and-photocell pair instead of an LFO driving the stages directly. Since a photocell brightens quickly and darkens slowly, the sweep lopes rather than ticks. Chorus, vibe and tremolo modes; Symmetry skews the sweep and Bias moves the notches.

A pitch vibrato modelled on the early-’80s original: wet only, with no dry signal mixed in. The LFO sweeps the delay clock, and since a changing delay length changes pitch, the note sways. In UNLATCH the module’s own bypass works as a momentary footswitch: the vibrato swells in over a set rise time and falls away when released.

A wide, watery stereo chorus modelled on the early-’80s original. Its stereo comes from the circuit itself: the left output carries the dry signal plus the effect, the right the dry signal minus it. Wide in stereo, and largely cancelling if the two are summed to mono, exactly as the hardware does. Rate reaches unusually high for a chorus, and Tone shapes only the effect voice.

A flanger modelled on the late-’70s original. The LFO sweeps the delay clock, so the delay length itself moves; Range sets how far toward the long, dark end that sweep reaches, while the short end stays fixed. Color is the feedback, and it limits itself as the signal gets louder, as the circuit does. MATRIX holds the sweep wherever it stands, leaving a fixed filter you can play through.

A ring modulator after the wood-cheeked studio classic: your signal is multiplied with a carrier tone, and one note comes out as a shimmering chord of metallic clangs. HI carriers make bells, robots and alien voices; LO turns the same trick into deep tremolo and throb. Drive gives it more harmonics to work with, and the LFO can swing the carrier into sirens and trills.

One of irio’s own algorithms rather than a model of a pedal. Four voices orbit a listener in the stereo field, and each voice’s position sets its pan, delay time, level and brightness together. Because the delay time keeps moving, the pitch moves with it: the voices doppler as they travel, which is what makes a rotating speaker sound like one. Inertia gives the orbit real spin-up and slow-down, Drift keeps any two cycles from matching, and the display is the orbit field itself: drag the voices around it.

Twelve stereo modulation effects in one module (chorus, rack chorus, flanger, phaser, tremolo, harmonic tremolo, filter, ring mod, auto-wah, rotary, vibe and vibrato) switched without a click. The same set of knobs serves all of them, taking on the meaning each effect needs, so one module covers most of what a modulation pedal would be there for.

irio’s own delay: eight machines (digital, tape, bucket-brigade, ping-pong, dual, multi-tap, pattern and reverse) switched without a click, and part of the free rig. The tape wows and flutters, the bucket-brigade stays dark and percussive; TIME bends pitch like a reel when you turn it, FREEZE locks the loop, DUCK rides the repeats down while you play.

irio’s own take on a mechanical echo. Instead of a delay line there is a spinning medium: one record head writes to it, and eight playback heads read it back. Place them anywhere around the wheel or snap them to a rhythm grid. Changing the motor speed repitches everything already on the wheel while new echoes stay in tune. Four media age the repeats differently, and Freeze lifts the record head for an endless hold.

An experimental four-voice delay for deep sound design. Each voice has its own time, pitch shift, reverse, tone and pan, and the loom decides where every echo’s next generation goes: parallel, wandering voice to voice, scattered, or criss-crossed in stereo. EVOLVE ages the repeats as they travel; each voice can feed a lush built-in ambience.

Eight-voice modulated multi-delay, built for the lush chord-clouds a certain great legato player drew out of a Japanese 8-stage delay pedal. Every line is a complete delay processor of its own: time, level, pan, feedback, LFO, in-loop tone filters and a diffusion smear.

irio’s own reverb: one deep engine, four voicings (Plate, Room, Hall and Chamber) that morph into one another without a click. Decay runs from a tight ambience to thirty seconds of wash, Bloom softens how the tail rises, Warmth and Air voice it, and Width spreads the image while the low end stays solid.

The ambient machine: a deeply modulated reverb built for huge shimmering washes and endless pads. SHIMMER adds a pitch-climbing choir with selectable intervals; the TEXTURE pages feed the wash with grain clouds, reverse slabs and mutating stutters; FREEZE holds a chord forever while you play over it; DUCK tucks it all under your hands.

A four-voice intelligent pitch shifter in the spirit of the classic studio pitch racks. CHROMATIC shifts in semitones; DIATONIC knows your key and scale and lands real harmonies, GLIDE sliding between intervals. Every voice gets its own detune, delay, pan and EQ band, and feedback re-shifts each repeat into the classic crystal cascade.

An analog-style synth played by your instrument: an ultra-fast tracker follows your playing and drives three oscillators, a resonant filter and its envelopes. SENS, SPEED and DYNAMICS tune it to your touch; GLIDE smooths the leaps. Wire a midi in module into it and it becomes a keyboard synth: mono to eight voices, velocity and all, standalone only.

A MIDI keyboard as a source on the canvas, over USB, virtual or Bluetooth. On its own it is a mono tone with glide and an envelope; wired into irio synth it plays the whole synth engine, up to eight voices with velocity. Two midi in modules on different channels let two keyboards play different corners of one rig. Standalone only, because as AUv3 the host owns MIDI.

An eight-band parametric stereo EQ. Each band can be a bell, a shelf, a notch, a band-pass or a cut, from a gentle slope to a steep one, anywhere from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, and each can be placed on the stereo signal, on the left or right channel alone, or on mid or side. Bands are set on the display, with a live spectrum running behind the curve.

A console channel strip modelled on the early-’70s British studio module, in true stereo: two strips, one per channel. Gain runs in steps from clean into transformer saturation, with TRIM compensating the level so it works as a colour control rather than a volume one. Three EQ bands on the original’s switched frequencies, plus high-pass and low-pass filters.

The simplest modifier: a purple outlet that moves other modules’ knobs. Wire it onto a module, tap the knobs you want, set RATE, DEPTH and a waveform. A filter that breathes, a delay time that drifts. With the global tempo card on the canvas, RATE locks to the beat at note ratios.

An envelope follower: wire a signal into it and it converts that signal’s level into a control signal, which its purple outlet can send to almost any knob in the patch: a filter that opens as you play harder, a delay that drops back while you play and returns in the gaps. ATTACK, HOLD and RELEASE set how quickly it follows, FLOOR ignores signal below a set level, and INVERT reverses the direction.

A modifier whose shape you draw yourself: the curve you draw on the display becomes the modulation. In CYCLE it repeats at a set rate. In TRIGGER it plays through once each time a signal you wire into it crosses a set threshold, which makes it a drawable envelope. Each route to a target knob has its own amount and direction.

A canvas inside a module: forty-plus DSP blocks (delay lines, filters, LFOs, envelopes, oscillators, mixers, clocks, saturators, step sequencers) for wiring up effect ideas of your own. Purple control blocks modulate any knob, or process control signals directly; eight macro knobs and eight buttons come out the front. A saved engine becomes a module like any other, in the picker next to the factory collection.

Every preset carries four scenes. A preset builds the rig; a scene sets it. Switching scene moves the whole patch at once (every knob, every switch, the levels, the loaded NAM profiles and IRs) while the modules, the wiring and the modulation routes stay put. The changes take click-free paths, so a scene can change mid-phrase. Scenes switch from the chips on the canvas, from a perform pad or a footswitch, over MIDI, or from an automation lane in your DAW.

The four-track looper’s canvas console. It also gets its own perform screen. Press to record, again to play, again to overdub; a stereo minute per track with reverse and half-speed. FREE runs wild, LOOP SYNC locks tracks to the first take’s cycle, TEMPO SYNC cuts loops to whole bars with a count-in, and sessions save with your presets.

Step past your last pad bank and the perform page lands on a ready-made looper screen. The bottom row is the four loop tracks, and each pad draws its loop’s waveform, playhead and state: tap to record, play and overdub, double-tap to stop, hold to clear. REVERSE, ½ SPEED and UNDO sit above, and MIDI pad bindings run it all from a floor controller.

A tape deck patched inline: your signal passes through untouched while the red dot captures what flows past, up to eight minutes standalone and four as AUv3. Mark a green trim region on the waveform (non-destructive) and SAVE writes a WAV to your library, ready for the player. SHARE sends a take the moment you’ve played it.

An audio-file source card: load a track and wire it in wherever a source belongs. Record yourself dry at the input, save the take and load it here, and you can work on tones later on headphones without the guitar in your hands. SPEED changes tempo without changing pitch, PITCH changes key without changing tempo, and the waveform has an A–B loop.

A metronome as a canvas card, with the beat shown on the card itself: four click sounds, an accent on beat one, and a row of pips counting the bar. It follows the global tempo card, or runs at its own rate set by knob or by tapping. The speed trainer raises the tempo bar by bar from a starting point to a target you set.

The built-in tuner, opened from the tuning-fork chip anywhere in the app. Outputs mute while it is open. A needle shows the deviation in cents, with strobe rows below it for finer work, and the reference pitch is adjustable from A 440. Included in the free version.