Overture

The 808 boost — tighten your low end before the gain hits.

Work in progress. Overture is pre-1.0 and under active development. Binaries for macOS and Windows are available from the Releases page (currently unsigned — see the release notes); building from source works too. Expect breaking changes until v1.0.0 ships (see Roadmap).

What it is

Overture is a TS-808-style tight overdrive/boost built on JUCE 8, aimed at the pre-amp tightening stage metal guitarists run in front of a high-gain amp: it strips low end before the clipper (the "808 boost" trick) so palm mutes stay tight instead of farting out into the gain stage, then drives an oversampled, selectable-voicing clipper for the actual overdrive character. See docs/manual.md for the full user manual (signal flow, every parameter explained, and usage tips).

Features (v0.2.0 scope)

• Tight - high-pass pre-emphasis, 20 Hz - 400 Hz (default 100 Hz), removes low end before the clipper
• Drive - 0 - 40 dB of gain into the clipper (default 3 dB)
• Bite - frequency-dependent gain inside the drive-to-clipper path (0-100%, default 65%) - bass is clipped less than treble, reproducing the reference circuit's own tightening mechanism rather than approximating it with a separate filter
• Knee Soften - drive-dependent knee softening (0-100%, default 40%), applies to all three voicings including Hard Clip
• Asymmetry - exposes the Asymmetric voicing's internal bias as a 0-100% control (default 40%, reproducing v0.1's fixed bias)
• Voicing - Asymmetric (biased tanh, the original "808 boost" character), Soft Symmetric (unbiased tanh), or Hard Clip (straight clamp), run inside oversampling to keep aliasing out of the clipped signal
• Bite Tilt - post-clip bidirectional shelf around a ~3 kHz corner (-100% to +100%, default 0%/flat), replacing v0.1's cut-only Tone - darkens or brightens
• Level - output trim, -24 dB to +24 dB
• Mix - dry/wet, with the dry path delay-compensated against the oversampling latency so Mix at 0% is a sample-accurate passthrough
• Bypass - host-visible soft bypass; keeps the oversampler running and latency reporting stable, crossfades instead of clicking
• Oversampling - 2x / 4x / 8x, selectable; takes effect on the next host re-initialisation (real-time-safe by design - see docs/manual.md)
• Presets - nine factory presets plus full user preset management (save/load/import/export/default), with a German-localised preset bar frame
• Full state save/recall via AudioProcessorValueTreeState, with tolerant migration of v0.1 sessions

Signal flow

Input --> Tight (HPF, 20-400 Hz) --> Drive (0-40 dB) --> [oversampled]
            Bite shelf (~700 Hz, inside the drive-to-clipper path)
            --> Voicing clipper --> Knee Soften blend
                                                                  |
      Output <-- Mix <-- Level <-- Bite Tilt (+/-3 kHz shelf) <--+
        ^
        |
   delay-compensated dry path (also used by Bypass)

See docs/architecture.md for the full engineering breakdown, including the oversampling/latency-compensation strategy and parameter smoothing, and docs/design-brief.md/docs/research-notes.md for the sourced rationale behind the v0.2.0 rework.

Roadmap

Milestone	Description	Status
M0	Bootstrap - project skeleton, CI, docs	Done
M1	DSP completion & test coverage - Voicing/Bypass/Oversampling, 4th-order Tone stack, tuned defaults, broadened Catch2 suite	Done
M2	Deep-dive DSP rework (Bite/Knee Soften/Asymmetry/Bite Tilt), presets & state recall, i18n frame	Done
M3	Custom GUI & accessibility	Planned
M4	Release engineering - signing, notarization, installers, v1.0.0	Planned

Installation

No pre-built binaries are published yet (see the work-in-progress notice above). Once releases begin, installation will follow the standard plugin locations:

macOS

Format	Path
AU (Component)	~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/
VST3	~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3/

If Logic Pro doesn't pick up the plugin after installing, force a rescan by resetting the AU cache:

killall -9 AudioComponentRegistrar
auval -a

Windows

Format	Path
VST3	C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\

Building from source

Requires JUCE 8.0.14, C++20, and CMake ≥ 3.24. See docs/building.md for full prerequisites and step-by-step build/test commands for macOS and Windows.

cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build
ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure

License

Overture is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPLv3).

This project uses JUCE 8, whose open-source tier is licensed under AGPLv3 (as of JUCE 8; JUCE 7 and earlier used GPLv3), which is why this project is AGPLv3 rather than GPLv3. See docs/adr/0002-agplv3-licensing.md for the full reasoning.

VST is a registered trademark of Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH.

Overture is an independent open-source project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any plugin manufacturer.