The Kiesel-wrangling guitar teacher and social media star has entered the guitar software arena with one plugin to rule 'em all
YouTube guitarist and educator Thomas McRocklin has launched his own guitar plugin company, PolyChrome DSP, and promises a veritable cornucopia of electric guitar tones for the player who’s willing to take their sound digital.
Indeed, such is the functionality of PolyChrome DSP's debut plugin, the signature McRocklin Suite, the man himself says he has replaced over $3,000 worth of plugins – and “a massively complicated software rack” – all with just this one plugin. Sounds intriguing, but what’s in the box?
Well, four core guitar amps for a start. There is Acoustic, which is as the name suggests and contains four tone profiles, “from P bright and airy, to rich and full”, and Clean, which is described as “the perfect clean amp”, and therefore we’d imagine should play nice with your other outboard gear. After all, this is 2023, and a hardware pedalboard can co-exist and indeed thrive within the 21st-century player’s digital infrastructure.
Edge is an amplifier voiced for big cleans and expensive-sounding boutique grit, and all in between, while Gain is described as a lot-gain amp voicing that is easily transformed into a fire-breather by sticking an overdrive pedal in front of it. Speaking of which...
(Image credit: PolyChrome DSP)
The PolyChrome DSP plugin also has a quartet of gain pedals. Attacker is described as fresh and modern, with a “Full Beast Mode” lest you feel your tone is lacking danging. Shredder is based on an unnamed but modded classic overdrive. The GUI text for this lights up green – could that be a tell that the Shredder is a digital Tube Screamer clone?
Riffer, meanwhile, is a good, old-fashioned modded distortion pedal, best suited to… Yes, you guessed it, rhythm guitar and the practice of arranging power chords and single-note lines in a fashion as to stick in the audience’s head. Finally, Viber rounds out your gain pedal options with a mids-heavy, stackable drive.
There are also four and eight-band graphic equalizers, and what is intriguingly described as the Heatpressor, a multi-algorithm approach to compression that helps to push a guitar track through the mix.
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Other features include a synthesized octave down effect, 15 “mix-ready” speaker chains – to which you can dial in resonance, air, lo and hi cut, with each voiced for an amplifier – a noise gate, a zero-latency stereo/spread tool, an ‘80s-style chorus pedal plus three reverbs and three delays.
PolyChrome DSP ships with over 350 presets and is an Apple Silicon native with a latency of 0.045ms. It is available as VST, AU, CLAP or standalone (Windows, MacOS), and is available now for an introductory price of €99 (approximately $109, full price €149).
Jonathan Horsley has been writing about guitars since 2005, playing them since 1990, and regularly contributes to publications including Guitar World, MusicRadar and Total Guitar. He uses Jazz III nylon picks, 10s during the week, 9s at the weekend, and shamefully still struggles with rhythm figure one of Van Halen’s Panama.
