“The hairy growl of the
'50s meets the sweeter, spacier
textures of the new decade.”
What do the knobs actually do?
The heart of the amp and your primary gain engine. Rather than just getting louder, it sweeps from a smoky, warm clean into a thick, saturated crunch—shaping compression, top-end clarity, and sustain for wide-open tube response at any level.
A simple single-knob presence and clarity shaper—a passive high-end bleed that rolls off the bite to smooth a track or lets the crisp top-end slice through the mix. Its behavior is completely independent of where your Loudness knob is set.
Sets the wet/dry mix of the built-in spring tank, dialing in a lush, cavernous wash and that unmistakable vintage drip right behind your notes.
Controls the rate of the built-in tremolo circuit. It sweeps smoothly from a lazy, slow-motion 2.75 Hz crawl up to a rapid, shimmering 5.0 Hz pulse.
Brings the modulation into your signal. At zero it's fully bypassed for a pure, direct tone; dialed all the way up it delivers a deep, hypnotic 15 dB throb that wraps around your playing.
Universal architecture
These are the ideas, design philosophies, and shared technical choices common to every Smear Audio amp. They are not one-off product notes or model-specific feature lists, but the baseline assumptions behind how we build our amplifier plugins.
Instead of running our software through a single, compromise-heavy digital grid, every individual tube stage is calculated independently in real time.
Getting a software plugin to feed back naturally without a roaring 4x12 cabinet physically vibrating your guitar strings used to be a pipe dream. Our proprietary Ghost Bloom engine changes the game by emulating physical acoustic feedback with breathtaking realism.
An extraordinary amplifier needs a real environment to breathe. Our unified speaker platform offers six distinct, classically voiced cabinet models, paired with an intuitive three-dimensional mic room.
In the real world, the perfect alternative or shoegaze tone almost always starts with a great pedal slamming the front end of an amp. We have hardwired two switchable, analog-modeled boost circuits directly into the top bar of every interface.
