The studio
Cloned by measurement,
not vibes.
Derogatory Pig builds boutique bass plugins — lovingly, and from scratch — out of a single Mac Studio. Four effects so far: an envelope filter, an octave machine, a silicon fuzz and a reverse-octave reverb. Two of them are modelled on famous public circuits. Two are cloned from one-off hardware that exists in exactly one enclosure, anywhere. The difference between this and most plugin marketing is simple: I can show you the numbers.
The method
A microphone, not a memory.
"Modelled on" usually means someone listened to a pedal and tried to reproduce the feeling. That's a fine way to make something musical — it's a terrible way to make something accurate. So for the hardware clones I built a loop and stuck to it.
Record the unit at documented knob settings, with the settings written into the filenames. Analyse each recording in Python — Welch spectra, envelope traces, crest factor, RT60 decay fits, self-oscillation pitch. Fit the DSP to what the plots actually say, not to an adjective. When my ears and the measurements disagreed, I recorded more until one of them gave way. (My ears were right every time it mattered — but only because the numbers told me where to listen.)
The line
Two kinds of pedal.
Circuit archetypes
Jellikins and Sledgehammer descend from circuits whose schematics are public knowledge — the optical envelope-filter tradition and the Japanese brown-box octave tradition. Built from an architectural understanding of how those designs behave, then voiced for bass.
Hardware clones
Ice Age and Ethereal's reverb began as physical boxes I own — custom one-off builds. They were reconstructed by the measurement campaign above. "Cloned from custom hardware" is the literal truth: the source units are mine.
A worked example
The Ethereal saga.
The flagship reverb took roughly seven major DSP revisions, around forty hardware recordings, and a purpose-built offline test harness before it was right. The builder's entire brief was one sentence: the tone runs "from a full-bodied resonating echo through to a cold harsh hard-wall echo," with a feedback knob that climbs to self-oscillation. Everything else came out of the measurements — and most of it overturned an assumption I'd started with.
The most useful tool turned out to be the one that removed my opinion entirely: an offline harness that compiles the actual plugin code and drives it with synthetic test signals, printing note levels, channel balance and tail envelopes as numbers. It caught a right-channel imbalance, a low-frequency blow-up, a limiter that erased the reverb tail on hot bass, and a resonant emphasis that made every setting self-oscillate — all before anything shipped. The reverb's gentle "breathing" on sustained chords, which I'd nearly modelled as a long echo, was finally identified as slow comb-length modulation because the undulation period kept drifting and wouldn't correlate. The measurements didn't just make it accurate. They stopped me building the wrong thing four separate times.
The honest bits
What I won't pretend.
These are Mac-only and Apple-Silicon-only, on purpose — it halves the surface I have to test, so what ships is what I can actually stand behind. They run as Audio Unit, VST3 and standalone. The classic-circuit plugins are "inspired by" and "in the tradition of" their forebears — and those famous names are other companies' trademarks, which I'm not going to imply otherwise. And where a clone produced a gloriously wrong version along the way — Ethereal's saturating "Dirty" loop — I kept it as an option rather than quietly deleting the evidence.
Jellikins · Sledgehammer · Ice Age · Ethereal
Same obsession, four pedals.
If the method sounds like your kind of thing, the whole walnut-and-cream family is cheaper together.