Neural DSP are hosting one heck of a Black Friday (like years prior) where all of their plugins are 50% off. There is a lot of overlap between their Archetype plugins especially, so what should you buy if you can’t afford them all?
TL;DR buy the Gojira, Henson and Fortin Cali plugins (if you can afford all of them). Can only afford one? The Fortin Cali is a solid purchase.
Archetype: Gojira
If you play metal, this is the plugin for you. For such a long time, the Archetype: Nolly reigned supreme (particularly the Blood Eagle preset), but times have changed and now Gojira is the plugin you want.
You can get some absolutely filthy sounds from the Gojira plugin, but clean it up when you want something lighter. The octaver is one of my favourite pedals in this plugin.
I used to use the Fortin Nameless plugin, but I found that it required a lot of additional EQ to get it to sound right. The Gojira just sounds so much cleaner and can be used without needing EQ.
Archetype: Tim Henson
One of the newest Archetype plugins, and by far one of the best. You can get some really crisp clean tones with this plugin, or make them a little gritty with some crunch. The multi-voicer alone makes this a worthy purchase.
The Henson plugin is great for acoustic-style tones and clean break stuff. It’s not overly flexible in that you can’t create rib tingling chug riffs or djent with it either.
Where things get confusing for people is what is the difference between the Plini and Henson plugin? The Henson plugin can do a lot of what the Plini offers, where they differ is the Plini plugin allows you to create heavier and more lead type tones as well as cleans.
Sadly, the Plini has been eclipsed by Henson. It’s not what the Plini plugin is terrible, because it can still give you incredible soaring leads and Tesseract djent style delayed reverb cleans, but the Henson offers that and more. The Henson does a way better job at cleans.
Archetype: Fortin Cali
Second only to the Archetype: Henson, the Fortin Cali Archetype is a close second favourite. It can do somewhat clean tones (not as clean as Henson), it can do rock, punk, metal and a bunch of different genres.
If your budget only allows for buying one Archetype plugin, I would recommend the Fortin Cali, especially with its recent 2.0 update which really improves the plugin greatly.
I know some people are of the opinion that Archetype: Nolly is the do-it-all plugin that you should buy, but I’ve found the Fortin Cali is slightly more of an all-rounder, not overly tilted towards metal like the Nolly plugin is. And once again, Fortin Cali sounds great without needing EQ.
