Review: Klirrton Grindstein from Audiority

The Klirrton Grindstein preamp by Audiority and Kohlekeller Studio gives us the 90’s
Swedish “chainsaw” sound with a blend of modern clarity. Luca from Audiority knocks this one out of
the park. Excellent recreation of the hardware unit, preserving a very large majority of its personality.

Precisely modeled in collaboration with Klirrton Manufaktur and producer Kristian Kohle from
Kohlekeller Studio, the Grindstein is the official analog modeled simulation suite of their ultimate
death metal preamp, along with the cutting edge Schnauze noise gate and the new Fleisch
equalizer.

Audiority

Modern Guitar Plugins are Too Polite

Are your distorted guitars too nice sounding? Do your riffs sound like they hold the door open for old ladies? Do they wear a napkin while they eat? Do they always remember to put the toilet seat down? Well, maybe it’s time to check out a distortion plugin that will slam the door on that [REDACTED], rip [REDACTED] out and [REDACTED] the remains! [Ed. Maybe a bit graphic for our regular readers! I’m sure they get the gist…]

The Way of the Chainsaw – With a Twist

The preamp is designed with two distortion channels in parallel: a “standard” metal distortion and a gnarlier, nastier distortion that hearkens back to the classic Swedish Death Metal sound. While modern metal guitar tones can be characterized as “heavy but clean distortion”, the ’80s and ’90s underground gave us sounds that were unwieldy and out of control.

Those sounds were often the result of stacking distortion pedals with very extreme gain and EQ settings, often leading to squelching oscillations that were characteristic of the sound of that era (check out Dismember – Death Metal for reference).

The “Swedish Sound” can be boiled down to two active EQ filters pushed beyond their limit, crying out in pain. There is a real challenge in recreating that in the plugin world. The Grindstein delivers those nostalgic sounds in a way that I find surprisingly convincing. This goes quite a bit further than their previous HM-2 plugin, the Heavy Pedal, in recreating that squelchy, oscillating cry.

The Grind knob is the secret sauce of this plugin. It seems to include some kind of waveshaper (wave folding?) combined with some comb filtering. This adds modulation and personality to sustained chords and palm mutes I’ve only heard coming out of actual hardware up to this point. It breaks through the usual “flat” sound that you hear from most amp plugins and modelers. Genuinely impressed by the work that went into this. 

The Blend knob allows you to create a balance between grindy chainsaw madness and the standard sounding distortion. HOWEVER! A really special add-on to this plugin is the FX Loop switch, which allows you to swap out their standard distortion with any of your other amp sims! Very nice touch! I wish this was a bit more obvious than the small FX Loop dip-switch on the side of the preamp. For the realpreamp, this layout makes sense. For the plugin, it could have been made a bit more obvious as this is a very useful feature that makes this plugin a lot more flexible. 

Plugin details:

The plugin presents 4 sections that can be independently enabled/disabled. 

1 – A gate and clean boost (the SCHNAUZE pedal)

2 – The GRINDSTEIN itself:

Mix knob controls the balance between the standard and grindy tones.

Standard distortion is controlled by the Boost, Gain, Bass and Treble knobs. The FX Loop switch disables this channel in favour of a sidechain input where you can add your own distortion to run in parallel with the grind channel while the Mix knob does the work of blending the two signals together.

Midcut, Grind and High knobs control the grindier tone. Bright/Dark switch also changes the voicing. A phase switch will flip the phase of the grind channel which makes things even uglier and almost cancels out the harmonic content of your guitar playing entirely. Very “their demo was their best stuff” sounding.

3 – A five-band EQ section (the FLEISCH pedal)

• Dozer = 120hz boost
• Cleansing = 400hz cut
• Scoop = 700hz cut
• Chainsaw = 1.4khz boost
• Blade = 5hk sloped shelf boost

4 – Cabinet emulator that includes 7 great IR’s made by Christian Kohle himself.

Grind One Out

This plugin does the HM2 thing in a way that no other plugin can do AND it blends that with a standard distortion (or any other amp sim via the side-chain “fx loop” switch). The layout of the Grindsteinpreamp itself can be a bit confusing as to which knob controls which distortion but after a few minutes of experimentation the workflow is easily understood. A solid selection of presets gives you all the major flavours that thispreamp can produce

The Audiorty GUI layout is easy to understand with clearly labelled dots at the bottom which bring you to the different sections of the plugin. This is their standard layout and it’s an excellent one.

Because this distortion does what nothing else does, it gets a high mark for value. The introduction price is the right price, though. I feel that the full price may be asking too much so trying it out now and grabbing the intro price might be the right move. Otherwise, waiting for a sale is your best bet unless you cannot live without this type of distortion and you don’t own the real thing.

The ability of this plugin to produce the Swedish Chainsaw sound with all of its flaws and personality is genuinely unparalleled. The ability to easily and precisely blend that sound with any other distortion in your toolbox is something I have not seen before. Both of these features make this a must-own for metal producers and anyone who plays heavy guitars and wants that HM2 sound “in the box”.

Find out more about the Klirrton Grindstein from Audiority