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The ordering of the components in the Vandal GUI reflects the route of your signal.

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• Review

The Vandal guitar/bass amp simulator first saw the light of day as one of the included plug-ins contained within Magix's Samplitude DAW for PC. Now it's available as a separate product, and what's more, it's available for Mac, too - a first for Magix.

Like most amp simulators, Vandal provides a variety of virtual amps, cabs, miking configurations and effects. Unlike many of them, though, it uses physical modelling rather than impulse responses to calculate the behaviours of the speaker, cabinet, recording space and microphones.

Installation is via a single disc, and a download version is also available from the Vandal website (the boxed version includes Samplitude Silver for PC). There's no standalone version: Vandal is a VST/AU plug-in, with a single-screen interface.

The positioning of components in the UI follows the route of your signal. The strip at the top is where I/O levels can be set, presets loaded and MIDI control managed. Each patch in Vandal comprises four complete setups (aka scenes) and these are intended for creating variations for use throughout a song - eg, to bring in a delay effect during a solo, or switch to a clean sound and so on. Annoyingly, however, there's a digital click when you switch presets - it's not loud, but it's noticeable. Hopefully this problem will be cured in an update.

There are about 80 presets and, as well as a bunch of generic ones, there are folders for some that mimic real amps (US Hotrod Stereo, Brit800 Lead, etc) and thinly-disguised song-mimicking patches (eg, Smoking Under Water). Many of the presets feature multiple scenes, too.

In detail

The amp section is where Vandal starts to diverge from most of its competitors. It's not based on any real hardware and, in fact, there's 'just' one guitar and one bass amp. Magix's philosophy is that, owing to the flexibility of the two amps, you'll be able to dial in a tone for any occasion, and there is indeed plenty of variety to be had.

You can choose your preamp model (Modern High Gain, British, Classic), select a channel (Clean, Crunch, Lead) decide on Class A or A/B power amp and dial it all in with typical amp-style controls. The Voicing section's Freq and Curve controls introduce an EQ curve throughout the amp circuitry, giving dramatic tonal variations. The bass amp has different controls and includes an opto-compressor.

The speaker, cabinet, room and mic are the physically-modelled components of Vandal, and are thus potentially its most interesting assets. As well as 12 speaker types ranging from 10" to 15" cones in numerous sonic flavours, Vandal offers a small choice of cabs: five guitar, two bass. This leads to a lot of possible combinations, including artificial ones like placing 15" speakers in a 12" cab.