Aspen Instruments has released Black Diamond Distortion, a free distortion plugin with a wild concept. It can basically simulate any other distortion, whether it’s software or hardware.
This is the developer’s first release, and it comes with a companion plugin called Black Diamond Probe that can reverse-engineer the distortion character of almost any hardware or software unit and then send it as a preset to Black Diamond Distortion.
The concept is incredibly simple for something this awesome.
You place the Probe plugin after any distortion device (a tube preamp, tape machine, guitar pedal, or another plugin), route the sidechain to read the device’s input, and pass audio through it.
Probe extracts the nonlinear transfer function that defines the device’s distortion behavior and saves it as a .tfunc file. You then load that file into Black Diamond Distortion and use it as a preset.
In theory, this means you can capture the distortion character of your favorite gear and use it in a single plugin.
Now, if you’re like me, your imagination probably went wild there (compressors, tape delays, my toaster, oh my god!), but here’s a caveat.
The device being captured should be memoryless, meaning its output depends only on the current input, not past inputs. Most distortion, saturation, and waveshaping effects fit this requirement.
But, devices with time-dependent behavior (compressors, preamps with EQ enabled, or systems with hysteresis like most tape saturation) may form loops in the plot and cannot be captured as a single stable transfer function.
Any exported curve from those should be treated as an approximation. And that includes your toaster.
Black Diamond Distortion also has four editing modes for building distortions from scratch.
Harmonic Mode gives you sliders that control which harmonics the distortion excites, and nearly any slider combination produces a usable result.
Spline Mode lets you shape the transfer curve by dragging anchor points.
Brush Mode allows you to draw the distortion curve freehand, with options for a smoothing roller brush and texture brushes that introduce controlled randomness.
Equation Mode is the deepest (who said nerdiest?) option. You enter the mathematical equation that computes the distortion directly, which basically opens the door to an infinite range of algorithms.
The plugin ships with a library of presets that includes classic hardware-inspired designs, and a softclipper is built in.
But if you ask me, the real fun with this is capturing the hardware distortions. The developer is building a community-driven library of captured .tfunc presets from unique and classic gear, so the preset collection should grow over time.
Both Black Diamond Distortion and Black Diamond Probe are free, require no account, and are currently in early beta. The developer welcomes bug reports and feedback.
Both plugins are available in VST3 and AU formats for macOS (10.15+) and Windows (10+). The macOS installers are signed and notarized.
Download: Black Diamond Distortion (FREE)
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Last Updated on March 10, 2026 by Tomislav Zlatic.
