Hex Forge is the flagship — the whole Hex Chain signal chain in a SINGLE plugin, rebuilt around a modern node-chain interface: every block is a card you tap to edit, drag to reorder, and click to bypass, with per-model faceplates, live tone readouts and a built-in strobe tuner.
The blocks: input trim, noise gate, compressor, fuzz, drive, amp, cab, a 6-band graphic EQ, modulation, delay, reverb, wah, octave and the industrial ‘Nail’ stage — each independently bypassable and freely reorderable, so you build a complete board without patching a dozen plugins. And the depth inside each block is the point:
– AMP: THIRTEEN original voicings (clean to modern high-gain), including the Cali V — a 9-mode three-channel switcher with a 5-band graphic EQ — the chrome-clad Diamond Plate with 8 dual-rectifier modes plus Bold/Spongy variac and Silicon/Tube rectifier feel switches, and the Plexiglass with its jumpered Vol I + Vol II channels; every voicing rides a modeled power amp, with hum filtering and decay-aware noise conditioning on the hot channels.
– DRIVE: seven overdrive/boost/distortion voicings, from the green mid-hump legend to the mythical gold horse.
– FUZZ: four pedals — the multi-era Italian Hero, the germanium I Know It bender, the octave-ringing Octavius, and the self-oscillating Fuzz Zachary starve box.
– CAB: six loudness-matched built-in cabs (plus your own IRs), a DRAGGABLE mic-placement pad (cap→edge position, close→30 cm distance) and adjustable stereo room ambience — all preset-savable, plus a Room/Studio cab voice (Studio = second virtual mic, console curve and bus glue for the ‘recorded’ sound).
– Plus modulation (two choruses, vibe, seasick tape-warble, phaser, flanger, tremolo, rotary — with a 0–100 ms center-delay control), the four-machine delay (digital / tape / multi-head Echo Wreck / dual Seraph), a THREE-machine reverb (modulated plate with a Classic/Dense tank switch, drippy three-spring tank, and a blooming cinematic AMBIENT wash with its own Bloom control), a 6-band graphic EQ with a live response scope and preset curves (movable anywhere in the chain — post-everything mix sculpting or classic tone shaping), wah, and an octaver with a microtonal quarter-tone shimmer voice.
A 32-bank / 128-slot preset engine ships loaded with 60+ song-inspired factory rigs — grunge, doom-pop ghouls, psychedelic prog, ’60s guitar heroes, art rock, sludge metal, nu metal, djent, ambient post-rock and more — every one researched against the original gear, level-matched so no preset jumps out, and recalled hands-free via A/B/C/D footswitches and hold-both bank chords. The preset browser has live type-to-search filtering, so slot 47 of 128 is three keystrokes away. The factory pedalboard is pre-wired, so the pi-Stomp footswitches work the moment you load it — no MIDI setup. A dB-scaled master output with a transparent clip limiter keeps the whole rig stage-safe, and an optional stereo DOUBLER fakes a second tracked take (micro-delay + slow detune) for instant width.
On 64-bit/desktop targets the amp and drive slots load your own .nam captures (the cab slot is pure IR/convolution); on 32-bit (patchbox-os-arm32) NAM is hidden and the algorithmic models are used. The heaviest plugin in the suite — best on Pi 4/5 and desktop. Free and open source (GPL-3).
Credit: Ryan Powell
Hex Forge looks incredibly flexible. One thing I’m curious about is whether it supports per-block CPU usage or oversampling controls. When building larger signal chains with high-gain amps, IRs, and multiple effects, it would be useful to optimize performance without having to simplify the entire preset FNF.