Nine Gates Diabolic Distortion

What it does

A high gain preamp pedal rather than a full amp, built around dual gain stages and a three band EQ whose bands interact the way a real tone stack does. Controls are boost, drive, bass, mids, treble and level, with edge filtering on the DSP for taming fizz. It runs standalone or as an AUv3 effect, and expects a cabinet sim or IR loader after it.

In the demo

Jade puts it in front of Logic’s Amp Designer on three panned metal guitar tracks, then bypasses the amp so you can hear the raw pedal on its own. She runs it on an older black metal track with no amp at all, then plays a live seven string through a noise gate into Nine Gates and swaps IRs between two loaders on the same preset.

Worth knowing

On its own into a bare interface it sounds thin and buzzy, so a noise gate in front and an IR loader behind are part of the setup rather than optional. A Mac and Windows version is sold separately on Nembrini’s own site.