It’s great news that the Tone King and Morgan Plugins will be receiving ‘X’ updates next! These are the plugins that I use the most as a primary clean player, and I’m sure other non-metal players will be excited as well. Neural seems to be making an effort to get to these ‘forgotten’ groups - with the recent release of Darkglass Ultimate and the birthday plugin giveaway featuring basses as prizes, it seems clear that they are extending an olive branch to the bass community, for example.
Thinking about the Darkglass update, it looks like they expanded the effects as well as including the typical ‘X’ features (transpose, etc). So, with that in mind, the Tone King and Morgan Amp and Cab selection is limited but phenomenal, while the effects are a little… standard.
Which effects could be added to make the ‘X’ updates of Tone King and Morgan the best yet? Considering they could model the Microcosm for the Misha Mansoor plugin, my vote would be for a version of the Chase Bliss Clean compressor, or for something more vintage, perhaps the Strymon Deco for tape saturation without the delay.
Considering these ‘X’ updates are in development, lets give Neural some ideas!
Id like to see some stereo trem options. Im using 2 harmonic tremelos in L/R paths with quarter and dotter eighth periods, sounds awesome, kinda twisty. Maybe theres already a way to do it with one block instead of 2 blocks and 2 rows but I haven’t dug into it.
It seems like there is a general desire to improve the reverbs on both Tone King and the Morgan Suite. Even though the spring reverb is built into the amps, there is no reason they couldn’t add a more controllable as a stand alone unit. A full feature spring tank with tremolo would be great, and maybe it’s an opportunity to add convolution reverbs.
Even having a Strymon Flint would be nice; at this point they’ve modelled most of the settings but placed them in isolated pedals. There are bits and pieces of the Flint spread across the Asato and Mayer plugins, some in front of the amp, some after. Neural could replace/expand the trem on the Morgan Suite with this.
Additionally, could a new and more useful feature on the amp-based plugins could be a reconfigurable signal chain order, like the Mixwave plugins? I understand why they might not do that in the Archetypes, but it would be a good feature to have on Tone King and Morgan.
Thinking about adding features to these plugins again, a nice feature to give more range to the amps could be to have selectable tubes (6v6, 6L6, EL84, El34, KT66) in the power section. It could turn the Morgan SW50r into a SW22r, for example, or give the PR12 more headroom with 6L6s. Mixwave has done this with their Milkman plugin and it’s really phenomenal; the Tone King would certainly gain value from this, and give more purpose to the plugin vs the Imperial preamp pedal or real amp. Neural were able to do this with the Omega Ampworks plugin, so it seems possible.