Basilica Audio

Overture — user manual

The 808 boost — tighten your low end before the gain hits.

What it is

Overture is a TS-808-style tight boost/overdrive for metal guitar. It is not a full amp-in-a-box; it is the small pedal you'd run on the floor in front of a high-gain amp, doing exactly the job a "modded 808" does in a real rig:

  1. Strip low end out of the signal before it hits any clipping/distortion, so palm mutes and low-string chugs stay tight and articulate instead of turning into a low-frequency mush once the amp's own gain stage saturates them.
  2. Add a controlled amount of its own drive/clipping character on top, voiced to push the front of an already-distorted amp rather than to be a distortion pedal in its own right - as of v0.2.0, with genuinely frequency-selective, drive-dependent clipping behaviour rather than a fixed-shape nonlinearity (see What changed in v0.2.0 below).

Where it sits in a heavy production chain

Overture is a pre-amp tightening/boost stage, not a cab sim, not an EQ, not a compressor. A typical chain:

Guitar -> noise gate -> Overture (tight boost) -> amp sim / real amp front end -> cab sim -> reverb/mix bus

Run it ahead of whatever provides the "wall of gain" in your chain (a real tube amp's input, or another plugin doing high-gain amp simulation). Overture's own Drive/Voicing controls are deliberately modest by default (see Tips) - the point is to shape what hits the gain stage, not to be the gain stage itself. If you want Overture's clipper to be the main distortion source (e.g. for a boost-only rig with a clean amp), push Drive further and pick a more aggressive Voicing - see the Own Distortion and Fuzz-Adjacent Lead factory presets.

Signal flow

Input -> Gate (optional) -> Tight (HPF, 20-400 Hz) -> Drive (0-40 dB) -> [oversampled]
           Bite shelf (~700 Hz, inside the drive-to-clipper path)
           -> Voicing clipper (variable Asymmetry) -> Knee Soften blend
                                                                     |
      Output <-- Mix <-- Level <-- Bite Tilt (+/-3 kHz shelf) <-- DC blocker <-+
        ^
        |
   delay-compensated dry path (also used by Bypass; NOT gated)

With Voicing set to Feedback, the Bite shelf, the memoryless clipper and the Knee Soften blend are replaced by a single circuit-solved feedback-clipper stage, and the DC blocker is always active. The DC blocker is otherwise only in circuit when Clip Quality is set to Enhanced.

The clipper (and the Bite shelf ahead of it) runs inside an oversampled block (2x/4x/8x, selectable via Oversampling) so harmonics don't alias back into the audible band. The dry path used by Mix (and by Bypass) is automatically delay-compensated against that oversampling latency, and the plugin reports its total latency to the host so playback stays sample-accurately aligned with every other track. See docs/architecture.md for the full engineering breakdown.

Reported latency

Oversampling is the plugin's only source of reported latency, and the figure is handed to your host so its plugin delay compensation keeps every other track aligned. Measured at 48 kHz:

Oversampling Reported latency
2x 4 samples
4x (default) 6 samples
8x 6 samples

A higher factor never reports less latency, but it does not always report more: the oversampler rounds each cascaded 2x stage's fractional latency to the nearest whole sample independently, which is why the 4x -> 8x step can land on the same total. The exact figures depend on the sample rate.

Nothing else in the plugin adds reported latency. The gate has no lookahead, and Clip Quality = Enhanced introduces a half-sample delay at the oversampled rate rather than at your host's - so switching the gate on, selecting the Feedback voicing or turning Enhanced on never changes what the host has to compensate for, and never shifts your track by a sample.

Parameter reference

Parameter Range Default Unit What it does
Tight 20 – 400 100 Hz High-pass filter placed before the clipper. Raising it strips more low end out of the signal that reaches the Drive/clipper stage, keeping palm mutes and low-string chugs tight instead of farting out once the amp's own gain stage saturates them. This is the core "808 mod" trick the plugin is built around. Lower it (toward 20 Hz) for a fuller, less tightened low end; raise it (toward 300-400 Hz) for maximum palm-mute articulation on drop-tuned guitars. v0.2.0's default (100 Hz, was 130 Hz) sits centrally inside the documented 80-120 Hz workflow sweet spot - see What changed in v0.2.0.
Drive 0 – 40 3 dB Gain applied to the signal right before the clipper (selected by Voicing). At 0 dB the clipper barely engages; higher values push harder into the chosen nonlinearity. v0.2.0's default (3 dB, was 8 dB) sits in the best-documented "near-zero drive, Level does the pushing" region of the technique - see What changed in v0.2.0.
Bite 0 – 100 65 % Frequency-dependent gain inside the drive-to-clipper stage (new in v0.2.0) - a fixed ~700 Hz low-shelf that progressively reduces the drive reaching the clipper below the shelf, scaled by this control, so bass is clipped less than treble. This is the actual mechanism the reference circuit uses for "tightness" (not a separate filter ahead of Drive - that's still Tight's job). At 0%, the clipper's gain is flat with frequency, identical to how v0.1's clipper behaved.
Knee Soften 0 – 100 40 % Drive-dependent knee softening (new in v0.2.0) - blends each voicing's transfer function toward a softer-kneed variant, more pronounced the harder Drive is pushing the clipper. Applies to all three voicings, including Hard Clip (which otherwise has zero knee at any Drive level). At 0%, every voicing keeps its exact fixed-knee shape at every Drive level, matching v0.1.
Asymmetry 0 – 100 40 % Exposes the Asymmetric voicing's internal bias (new in v0.2.0 - was a fixed constant in v0.1), mapping to a bias of 0.0 (fully symmetric) to 0.5 (maximally asymmetric). Soft Symmetric and Hard Clip ignore it entirely. The Feedback voicing also responds to it (as of v0.3.0), but by a different mechanism: instead of biasing a curve it morphs the diode law itself toward the asymmetric variant, so at 0% that stage is genuinely symmetric (its even harmonics disappear) and at 100% the second harmonic becomes a prominent part of what you hear. The default (40%) reproduces v0.1's fixed bias exactly for the Asymmetric voicing.
Voicing Asymmetric / Soft Symmetric / Hard Clip / Feedback Asymmetric – Selects the clipper nonlinearity the oversampled Drive/Bite stage feeds into. Asymmetric is the original "808 boost" voicing: a single-ended, biased tanh curve (op-amp/diode-style, bias set by Asymmetry), producing both odd and even harmonics for a slightly asymmetric, "tube-like" push. Soft Symmetric is a plain, unbiased tanh curve - smoother, more even-handed saturation with only odd harmonics, closer to a push-pull amp stage. Hard Clip is a straight clamp with no soft knee (unless softened via Knee Soften) - the brightest and most aggressive of the three, closer to a fuzz/comparator-style clip; use it when you want Overture itself to be doing real distortion work rather than just tightening/boosting. Feedback (new in v0.3.0) is a different animal from the other three: instead of a fixed transfer curve it solves the actual op-amp/diode/RC feedback loop sample by sample, so its gain, its knee and its high-frequency rounding all move together with how hard you are hitting it and with where Drive sits. Bite and Knee Soften have no effect in this voicing (the circuit's own ~720 Hz pre-emphasis is the bite mechanism, and its knee is physical), and Drive controls the circuit's feedback resistance rather than a gain stage in front of it. Asymmetry does still apply, as a change to the diode law itself - see its row above. It is a programme-level clipper, not a clean boost: it starts clipping around -40 dBFS at Drive 0 and a normal -12 dBFS track will drive it hard - that is the reference circuit's actual behaviour, and it is what makes the voicing touch-sensitive. Expect to pull Level down when you select it. Switching Voicing is a discrete change (like a stompbox toggle), not a smoothly-automatable control, so expect an audible step at the instant you switch, not a crossfade.
Bite Tilt -100 – +100 0 % Post-clip bidirectional tilt around a fixed ~3 kHz corner (new in v0.2.0, replaces v0.1's cut-only Tone). Negative values darken (subsuming v0.1's entire Tone cut range); positive values brighten - a capability v0.1 entirely lacked. Flat (0%, the default) is a true no-op. See What changed in v0.2.0 for how an old v0.1 session's Tone setting maps onto this control.
Level -24 – +24 0 dB Output trim, applied after Bite Tilt and before the dry/wet Mix. Use it to match Overture's output level to the rest of your chain, especially if you've pushed Drive hard.
Mix 0 – 100 100 % Dry/wet blend of the whole "wet" chain (everything from Tight through Level) against the untouched input. At 100% (the default) Overture behaves like a real boost pedal - fully in the signal path. Lower values blend in some of the original, unprocessed signal; at exactly 0% the output is a sample-accurate (delay-compensated) passthrough of the input.
Bypass Off / On Off – Host-visible bypass. Unlike a plain "mute the plugin" bypass, Overture keeps its internal oversampler running while bypassed so the reported plugin latency (and your host's delay compensation) never changes - engaging/disengaging Bypass crossfades smoothly (over roughly a tenth of a second) rather than clicking or popping, and never introduces a timing glitch on other tracks.
Gate Off / On Off – Built-in noise gate (new in v0.3.0), placed at the very front of the wet chain - before Tight, before Drive - so hum and hiss never reach the clipper at all. Off by default; switching it on mid-note neither clicks nor mutes. The dry path (anything you blend in with Mix below 100%) is deliberately not gated: the gate is part of the pedal chain, the way an outboard gate in front of an amp would be. Detection is stereo-linked - one detector fed by both channels, one gain applied to both - so the stereo image never wanders as the gate works. It opens fast enough not to blunt a pick attack (the gain travels from 10% to 90% in well under a millisecond), and when shut it attenuates deeply rather than hard-muting: the floor is 90 dB down, not digital silence. Adds no latency.
Gate Threshold -80 – -20 -50 dB The level the gate opens at. The detector is a 5 ms mean-square follower, so a full-scale sine reads about -3 dB and a typical high-output DI's noise floor sits around -60…-45 dB. The gate closes 4 dB below this (fixed hysteresis), which is what stops it chattering on a decaying note. Start well below your playing level and raise it until the noise between chugs disappears.
Gate Release Auto / Fast / Slow Auto – How fast the gate closes once you stop playing. Auto watches the programme itself: an abrupt palm mute closes the gate almost instantly, while a ringing chord is released at its own decay rate so the tail is never truncated - one setting for both, and the reason this is the default. Fast (800 dB/s) and Slow (60 dB/s) are fixed alternatives for when you want a specific, predictable behaviour.
Knee Response Drive / Signal Drive – Where Knee Soften's intensity comes from (new in v0.3.0). Drive scales it by the Drive knob, exactly as v0.2.0 did. Signal scales it by how hard the clipper is actually being hit, so a quiet passage at Drive 40 keeps a hard knee and a slammed input gets the soft one - closer to how the circuit behaves, and generally the more musical choice for dynamic playing.
Clip Quality Classic / Enhanced Classic – A configuration choice, not a performance control (new in v0.3.0). Classic is the exact v0.2.0 clipper path, bit for bit. Enhanced adds antiderivative anti-aliasing to the three memoryless voicings plus a 5 Hz DC blocker on the clipper output: measurably cleaner (about 19 dB less alias energy at 2x oversampling, and roughly what plain 4x buys you, for far less CPU), with the harmonic content otherwise unchanged. Leave it on Classic if you need a session to null bit-exactly against an older one; otherwise Enhanced is the better-sounding setting, especially at low oversampling factors. It has no effect on the Feedback voicing, which is a circuit solver rather than a transfer curve.
Oversampling 2x / 4x / 8x 4x – Oversampling factor around the clipper (and Bite shelf). Higher factors give a cleaner (less aliased) clipper at the cost of more CPU. Changing this parameter takes effect the next time your host re-initialises the plugin (e.g. on transport stop/start, a sample-rate change, or reopening the project) - not instantly while audio is running. This is a deliberate real-time-safety choice: reconfiguring the oversampler requires a memory allocation, which must never happen on the audio thread. If you want to hear a change immediately, stop and restart playback (or reopen the plugin) after changing it.

Presets

Overture ships with eleven factory presets (a certified Default plus ten use-case-driven starting points - see docs/presets.md for the full list and intent behind each). The preset bar docked at the top of the editor lets you browse factory/user presets, save your own (~/Library/Audio/Presets/Yves Vogl/Overture/ on macOS), import/export single presets or zip banks, and mark any preset (including your own) as the default that loads on a fresh instance.

What changed in v0.3.0

v0.3.0 adds a built-in gate, a circuit-solved clipper voicing, an opt-in anti-aliasing mode and a signal-dependent knee. Every new control defaults to a neutral value, so a v0.2.0 project loads and sounds bit-identical.

Where the new controls are (interim state)

v0.3.0 ships the five new parameters without dedicated on-screen controls. They are fully automatable and appear in your host's generic parameter view (in Logic: the plugin's "Controls" view; in Reaper: the FX parameter list; in Live: the plugin's parameter list) - they simply have no knob in Overture's own window yet. Photoreal controls for all five arrive with the M3 GUI. The one editor-visible change in this release is the Voicing menu's new Feedback entry, which appears automatically.

Two compatibility notes

What changed in v0.2.0

v0.2.0 is a research-driven rework of the Drive -> Clipper -> Tone portion of the chain, sourced from published circuit analyses of the reference-class "tube-screamer-in-front-of-a-high-gain-amp" technique, a purpose-built commercial pedal's own documentation, and publicly reported artist workflows - not measured against physical reference hardware or original-manufacturer schematics/datasheets by this project. See docs/research-notes.md for the full sourced findings and docs/design-brief.md for the reasoning behind every change below.

Tips