Blue Cat's Axiom 2.0

The Next Generation: Your Axe Beyond The Limits

Meet Blue Cat's Axiom: your versatile and open multi effects and amp simulation software for guitar and bass. Derived from the acclaimed Destructor plug-in for amp simulations, Axiom offers an infinite number of exceptional tones to enhance your musical expression with your axe.

In essence, Axiom caters to a wide range of musical scenarios, from recording and performance to sound design and experimentation. It empowers musicians, producers, and sound enthusiasts to achieve their sonic aspirations by combining realistic amp simulations, a wide array of effects, and the freedom to integrate their preferred plug-ins in any format. Whether you are in the studio crafting a masterpiece or on stage delivering a captivating live performance, Axiom is your go-to solution for pushing the boundaries of guitar and bass sound.

Axiom indeed offers a world of sonic possibilities thanks to its distinctive structure and signal flow:

• Two versatile amp simulation channels, each with pre and post effects, blend seamlessly for a lifelike amp experience.
• Discover unique amp simulation, offering exceptional tone, an authentic playing feel, and unrivaled tweaking capabilities for full control over your sound.
• Customize your tone with hundreds of presets or dive into the amp editor for complete control.
• Fine-tune your sound with additional input and master sections, boasting 4 effect slots each, and a built-in high-precision tuner.
• Safeguard your output with a brickwall limiter to prevent overshoot.

But that's merely the starting point. Axiom extends further, offering boundless potential for effects and creativity:

• Over 100 built-in effects, including creative delays, reverbs, distortion & fuzz pedals, modulation fx, wah and more.
• Unleash your inner pedal wizard and create your own: dive into creative delays and reverbs with the built-in version of Late Replies, sculpt your signature distortions, filters, and compressors with Destructor, and transform your pickups on the fly or refine acoustic guitar tones effortlessly with Re-Guitar!
• Seamless integration with third-party Audio Unit, VST, and VST3 plug-ins, expanding your sonic arsenal indefinitely.
• Enhance your performance with virtual instruments in the tools section, like metronomes, drum machines, sequencers, synthesizers, or the built-in audio player.

Axiom stands as your all-in-one solution, featuring an extensive library of hundreds of full-rig presets for both electric and acoustic guitar and bass. When used as an application, you can effortlessly play over backing tracks and record your performance with a single click.

If you are looking for amp simulation software without the effects, see the Destructor plug-in. For a plug-in host & multi-effects processor without amp simulation, check out Blue Cat's PatchWork.

Features

• Powerful and limitless multi-effects and amp modeling software for guitar and bass.
• Authentic, fully customizable amp simulations, powered by Blue Cat's Destructor.
• Versatile routing with 2 parallel amp simulation channels and comprehensive input and master sections.
• Over 100 high quality built-in effects, spanning from wah, delays, and reverb to EQ, filters, distortion units, compressors, gates, chorus, flanger, phaser, and more.
• Includes Blue Cat's Re-Guitar, Destructor, and Late Replies as built-in effects.
• Tailor the user interface to your preference, from a straightforward EZ mode to in-depth editing.
• Seamless recording over backing tracks (Application).
• Lightning-fast built-in tuner for precision tuning.
• Built-in MIDI controllable looper.
• An open and extensible platform, supporting third party VST, VST3, and Audio Unit (AU) plug-ins.
• Load and manipulate impulse responses (IR) within the amp simulator or the EQ plug-in.
• Delivered with thousands of presets for all sections and built-in effects.
• Load third party virtual instruments to play along.
• Simplify effect control with configurable macro parameters.
• Global stereo spread control.
• Lock sections to prevent changes when loading presets.
• No latency.

Blue Cat Audio Standards:

• Native DSP code for optimal performance.
• Full MIDI control and automation support with silent, zipper-free parameters update, advanced response control and MIDI Learn.
• No CPU load on idle: when the plug-in is fed with silence, the processing smoothly shuts down, to optimize the CPU usage of your Digital Audio Workstation.
• Customizable user interface with transparency management and zoom.
• Smooth Bypass: activate/deactivate the plug-in with absolutely no noise.
• Undo/Redo.
• Full-featured integrated presets manager.
• Copy/paste the state of the plug-in between instances using the system clipboard.
• Any sample rate supported.

What's new for Axiom 2.0

Redesigned User Interface:

• Introducing "EZ mode", a customizable view that streamlines access to main controls, ideal for live gigs and quick tone adjustments.
• New 3D HD graphics offer a plethora of styles for amps, pedals, and custom macro controls.
• Create your unique amps and pedals with the new rack designer, offering a vast selection of knobs, backgrounds, faceplates, and handles. (over 200 000 styles available).
• Assign specific colors to each pedal/plug-in (also visible on the EZ View footswitches).
• Simplified macro control editing, featuring drag-and-drop reordering, file-based load/save assignments, and copy/paste functionality.
• Each Axiom preset now forms a complete rig with multiple pedals and easily controllable macro parameters for the EZ view.
• New built-in input mute control (no need for a plug-in anymore).

Direct to Disk Recording & Playback:

• One-click recording of the application's output to a file.
• Seamlessly play over backing tracks with the new built-in audio player, supporting wav, mp3, and flac formats.
• Drag and drop audio files directly into plug-in slots to open the audio player.

Improved DSP Engine for More Realistic Tones:

• Incorporates the Destructor 2.0 non-linear processing engine, featuring enhanced simulations, new filters, and precise control over drive parameter behavior.
• Complete redesign of all guitar and bass amps or pedal models based on the new Destructor V2 engine.
• Brand new high gain guitar tones, rebuilt from the ground up.
• Adjusted EQ frequencies and bandwidth for all guitar and bass amps to emulate real world amps behavior.
• Select amps and pedals EQ position in the signal chain (before or after distortion), and simulate a wider range of gear.
• Access a multitude of new effects, including over 100 shortcuts to built-in effects and presets.
• Plug-ins oversampling now available, reducing aliasing (up to 16x). Warning: some third party plug-ins may not support higher sampling rates properly.

Tailored for Acoustic Guitars and Piezo Pickups:

• Includes Re-Guitar 1.3 with piezo input support.
• New factory presets for acoustic guitars and piezo-equipped electric guitars.
• New amp and preamp models for acoustic guitars.

Enhanced MIDI control:

• New EZ View pedalboard footswitches that automatically map to loaded plug-ins in order, regardless of the slots used.
• New BASS, MID, TREBLE controls for Destructor EQ following whichever EQ is selected (Pre or Post)
• Axiom can now use its own parameters in macro controls, mixed together with loaded plug-ins parameters.
• Synchronize multiple MIDI controllers: when "all channels" (0) is used for MIDI input control and "send MIDI events when parameters values change" is active, the plug-in now sends MIDI events to all other channels to update other controllers.
• Locking MIDI control in Axiom (preventing MIDI control settings to be changed when loading presets) now also preserves MIDI control locks for the amps when set.

Other New Features and Improvements:

• Improved graphical user interface performance, particularly on Mac.
• Enhanced resampling when the plug-in starts streaming audio as a network server with Connector.
• Several undo/redo issues resolved.
• Macro LEARN mode is now disabled automatically when the Params Map Editor is closed.
• AAX plug-in now reports the recording status to hosted plug-ins (in recent versions of Pro Tools that support it).
• Updated parameters layout for GUI-less plug-ins, accommodating those with multiple parameters.
• GUI-less plug-ins generic editor now follows Axiom's zoom level.
• Reduced plug-in loading time.
• Fixed a crash when opening the editor of a VST2 GUI-less plug-in that uses non-unicode encoding in its parameters (piz-midi plug-ins).
• Fixed plug-in slot menu issues when loading plug-ins with over 22380 parameters on Windows.
• Ableton Live 11: Fixed VST3 MIDI input not detected.
• Fixed stuck notes with some VST3 instruments.
• Fixed some VST3 instruments producing no sound (e.g. Toontrack instruments).
• Fixed VST plug-in version crash upon load when user default preset uses an impulse response in the amp simulator.
• Fully compatible with Axiom V1.

System Requirements

Windows

• Windows Vista, Windows 7, 8 or 10 (32 or 64-bit)
• An SSE2-enabled processor (Pentium 4 or newer).
• Any VST / AAX compatible host software (32 or 64-bit).
• ASIO, MME or WASAPI compatible audio interface for the Standalone application (ASIO recommended).

Mac

• macOS 10.9 or newer (Intel or M1 Apple Silicon processor) (64-bit only)
• For the plug-in, any VST / Audio Unit / AAX compatible application (64-bit only).
• For the standalone application, a Core Audio compatible audio interface.

Plugin Formats:

Mac

• AAX
• AU
• VST
• VST3

Windows

• AAX
• VST
• VST3
• x64 AAX
• x64 VST
• x64 VST3.