HoRNet has announced the release of Valvola, a free vacuum tube emulation plugin for Windows and macOS.
Valvola is HoRNet’s Christmas gift this year and emulates the electric behavior of a vacuum tube and its surrounding circuit. HoRNet says the sound of their new plugin is as close as you can get to the real tube behavior since the code it’s the direct modeling of the circuit characteristics obtained directly by simulating the tube and the biasing circuit around it.
Valvola comes with many different vacuum tube emulations, including triodes and pentodes, from the classic 12AX7 used in preamplifiers to the EL84 power tube, well using more than one instance of Valvola you could create your little tube amplifier emulation.
The typical tube distortion that Valvola provides is not static but changes with your music since tubes has some kind of “memory effect” that actually change their bias point if they processed high levels (this is the case with heavy bass drums, bass synths, or guitars) in practice they distort more with low-frequency peaks. Also, vacuum tubes are not linear in frequency response and each one has its own characteristic sound that we carefully modeled using the original tube parameters.
All these interactions are controlled using just one “saturation” knob that also keeps the level constant so you can just add distortion without adding gain and keeping the aliasing at a minimum thanks to the intelligent oversampling up to 4x.
Valvola is available as VST/AU/AAX plugin for DAWs on Windows and macOS. In order to download it, you will have to “pay” with a tweet or Facebook share.
More information: HoRNet
