Review: Audio Assault Hellbeast v2 (with video sample)

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to review the version 2.0 of another Audio Assault virtual amplifier: the Hellbeast v2!

The Hellbeast is probably the heaviest and most extreme virtual amp ever made by Audio Assault, and it's modeled on the Randall Satan amp, an amp now discontinued (but that due to some licensing change has later been produced by Fortin under the name Fortin Natas). 

This amp has the particularity of having a master gain knob and 2 other gain knobs which lets you dial separately the gain in the lows and the highs, which is a great thing if you want a tight low end, because you can keep the gain lower in the lows (so the lows are clean and fast) and raise the gain more in the high end to make the sound more aggressive and modern.

On the other hand, if you prefer a more vintage type of distortion you can raise the gain in the lows, and you will have a tone more similar to an Orange amp, which will be good for stoner, doom, or '70s hard rock.

As in all the v2 amps from the producer, also Hellbeast has all the extra features that were lacking in the first version: a completely redesigned, resizable UI, 3 channels, stompbox, rack and cab sections completely redesigned with all new IRs made by Seacow Cabs, a preset manager and (exclusive to this one) a double tracking simulator, which basically takes your playing in real time and make it sound like it's 2 layers of guitars, which is good to create some wall of sound especially during songwriting, if you don't want to spend time double-tracking everything.

All in all this is yet another good simulator that got further improved, I can't say it's my favourite from Audio Assault, it's a bit too extreme for my taste, but it actually gives you some extra flexibility compared to the others, allows you to obtain tones to a level of fine-tuning that many other sims cannot produce, and the new features are absolutely worth the upgrade.

Thumbs up!

Specs:



- 3 channels

- 3 stompboxes: Gate, Boost and Drive

- Rack Fx: 9 band equalizer, Delay, Reverb

- Dual cab IR loader with dozens of Seacow Cabs IRs

- Preset manager

- Double tracking simulator

- Resizable user interface

 

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