Review of the Neural DSP Darkglass Ultimate]

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What is it?

Neural DSP and Darkglass are intrinsically linked as brainchildren of Doug Castro, who co-founded Darkglass in 2009 before doing the same with Neural DSP in 2020. While he officially left Darkglass after a majority buyout from Korg in 2022, which has since brought the world the excellent Darkglass Anagram multi-fx/modeler.

Neural DSP’s Darkglass Ultimate plugin is the continuation of its previous Darkglass Ultra emulation, which saw Darkglass’s modern-classic B7K Ultra and Vintage Ultra bass overdrive/preamp pedal designs ported into software by the man who designed them.

But, far from just ‘the same but better’, Darkglass Ultimate expands on Ultra with some impressive looking new features that turn this into a complete suite for bass tone.

(Image credit: Future)

First up is a collection of pre-FX virtual bass effects pedals, which allow you to hit the B7K/Ultra Vintage with additional color from Compressor, Auto-Wah, Octaver and Fuzz pedal emulations.

Delay effects.

There’s great news for Ultra owners, too, because if you’re reading that thinking ‘Sounds great, but I don’t want to pay again!” you don’t have to. Darkglass Ultimate is a free upgrade for current owners of Darkglass Ultra. At the time of writing, Neural is also celebrating its birthday with a whopping 50% discount across all of its plugins.

Neural DSP

Usability and features

Neural DSP Darkglass plugin screenshots — (Image credit: Future)

Usability and features rating: ★★★★½

It’s fair to say Neural DSP has had a phenomenal rise to the top of the modeling game, and to some users this reputation is based on its hardware such as the Quad Cortex and Nano Cortex.

But to many, Neural is a plugin brand first thanks to its vast array of software offerings. Indeed, Darkglass Ultra was actually Neural’s first release back in 2018, making it a software brand before anything else. As such, Neural is well-versed in making software that’s perfectly primed for this section of the review: intuitive to use, while also bursting with features.

Darkglass Ultimate can run as a plugin inside your DAW (VST2, VST3, AU and AAX formats), but it can also function in standalone without a host. The layout of Darkglass Ultra follows a similar template to Neural’s other plugins. Along the top of the pane sit five icons which switch the main screen between Ultimate’s key sections (Pre-FX, Preamp, Cabinet EQ and Post-FX).

It’s all heavily graphically-led which makes navigation incredibly simple. The preamp screen feels like ‘home’, treating the B7K and Vintage Ultra as the ‘amp’ in the chain, and a quartet of selectable buttons at the bottom allow you to switch between the B7K/Ultra Vintage as well as choosing whether you’re running through the 2×10 or 8×10 cabs.

Put simply, the graphical representation and signal flow feels like having hardware in front of you.

Using everything is as simple as making quick selections and tweaking, and there’s a lot to tweak. The preamps include three-way selectors for Attack and Grunt, allowing you to tailor the punch of your notes when the distortion is engaged by filtering how much high end (Attack) and low end (Grunt) signal hits the saturation stage.

As well as this, there are toggles for selecting the centre-frequency of the midrange EQ controls, and if you’re so inclined, you can set the preamp to mirror your EQ selection between clean and driven sounds for a uniform tonality when shifting between clean and driven tones.

Neural has also included a host of utility features which includes a Transposer (capable of shifting the incoming signal up or down by 12 semitones), a Gate for minimizing noise, Tuner, Metronome and full MIDI control.

Put simply, the graphical representation and signal flow feels like having hardware in front of you. Neural’s handy Tooltips give you a quick description of any of the icons or controls you don’t understand, and the only thing I’d change about the way it functions would be adding the ability to change the order of the Pre-FX pedals.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★★

What’s quickly apparent is that the quality of the presets means that you’ll be able to find core sounds without having to create your own.

Collectively, Neural and Darkglass conjure words such as ‘modern’, ‘contemporary’ and ‘aggressive’ to mind. In other words, tones that will ensure note clarity, punch and the ability to be heard in a dense, heavy mix.

Upon loading the preset menu, there’s no doubt that these things are present in spades. We get presets designed by modern prog/metal titans including Karnivool bassist, Jon Stockman, Adam “Nolly” Getgood, Forrester Savell (Karnivool, Tesseract, Aristocrats) and more, as well as a selection created in house.

What’s quickly apparent is that the quality of the presets – which cover the B7K and Ultra Vintage fairly evenly – means that you’ll be able to find most core sounds without having to create your own. From weighty, wooly heft, to spiky, punchy, blended distortion through to gritty vintage overdriven tones, there’s a lot on offer and helpfully pre-made for you.

The B7K is likely to be the preference for many players, offering surgical, grinding distortion, while allowing you to keep your low end intact by blending in the clean signal. The attack control is a great offering too, particularly if you want to achieve a heavier ‘pluck’ without imparting too much dynamic processing from the Compressor.

All of this is almost to be expected, though, particularly if you’ve used the original hardware or Darkglass Ultra for these applications before. The big surprise, however, comes when loading some of the Neural preset sounds. Here, you’ll find a bit more tonal breadth, designed to showcase just how versatile the Darkglass Ultimate suite can be.

There’s ping-pong delays, synth sounds and my particular favorite, Dub Joggler. This preset delivers an extra-smooth, fat bass sound that’s addictive as it is satisfying. Somehow, it manages to remove the bulk of your high end while still remaining entirely articulate, producing a huge sine wave-like tone.

Placing a touch of Auto-Wah in front and playing palm-muted lines with my thumb sends me down a dynamic rabbit hole of crystal-clean, filtered pops, squiggles and slides, enhanced even further by adding the Transposer to take the pitch into pseudo-five-string territory. Who thought we’d look to the kings of gritty bass for silky neo-soul tones?

Turning to the effects, and it’s a similarly intuitive story. Dialing-in sounds from the Compressor’s three controls (Compression, Level and Blend) is simple, perhaps too simple for some, but it clamps down nice and quick, while experimenting with the Blend control helps tame things to retain some dynamics if you go too squishy.

The Auto-Wah has controls for Sensitivity, Range, Attack and Decay speeds, and as with the Compressor, it produces usable, musical results quickly. Likewise, the Octaver follows the tradition of Octave 1 (-1) Octave 2 (-2) and Dry controls.

Boss OC-2 synth bass effect where you play an octave up and dial-out everything apart from the -1 octave signal. Run that into the Fuzz pedal and you’ve got a big, synth-y square wave sound which I’d love to have placed the auto-wah after.

Neural DSP Darkglass plugin screenshots

(Image credit: Future)

After the preamp comes the Cab, EQ and Post-FX sections. The cabinets can be mic’d in stereo with a host of options for microphone types, including classic dynamic and condenser microphones as well as bass drum mics and a specialized SubKick mic for channelling the ultra-lows. You can drag the mics around, or get finer control using the settings for each, which even includes panning them and phase inversion. It adds an entire extra dimension to the variety on offer and in a world increasingly reliant on speaker IRs, it’s great to have this much control.

The EQ is straightforward and allows for forensic sculpting of your tone. Finally, there’s the Chorus and Delay Post-FX, and both aim to deliver analog-style approximations of modulation and echo. The delay in particular is very impressive, with controls for tempo syncing, Modulation and Ping-Pong between left and right channels. Neural describes it as “simple” in the manual, but it sounds great – instantly leading me to some drop-D Justin Chancellor-style riffs – and offers a lot considering it’s ‘only’ part of this plugin.

Neural DSP Darkglass plugin screenshots

(Image credit: Future)

Verdict

The EQ is straightforward and allows for forensic sculpting of your tone.

At a glance, it’d be easy to think you have Darkglass Ultimate figured out before plugging in as a heavy-focussed source of gained-up bass sounds. It does that, of course, but the reality is there’s so much more on offer here. So much, in fact that Neural has already announced that Darkglass Ultimate won’t be joining its Plugin Compatibility line of hardware-compatible plugins.

That’s due to a licensing agreement with Darkglass, which effectively stops the plugin from threatening Darklass’s Anagram hardware modeler/multi-FX. So, it’s worth knowing if you’re already pondering purchasing the plugin to stock your Quad Cortex or Quad Cortex mini: this is likely to remain as a software-only product.

But, it doesn’t seem fair to penalize Darkglass Ultimate for what it can’t be, especially when it performs so well. This is a fully-formed product in its own right, and it’s upright on its own two feet as a DAW-based bass solution or standalone plugin.

Guitar World Verdict: Think Darkglass is only for heavy genres? Think again. Yes, this plugin has you covered for vintage and modern overdrive tones, but it’ll also walk the walk for many other styles, to overlook that would be a missed opportunity. It delivers brilliant sounds and excellent usability at a price that makes it great value for money.