Smash Happy Audio — User Manual
A true circuit-modeled fuzz pedal — real diode clipping stages and tone stack, not a waveshaper doing an impression of one — with a built-in octave shifter for classic octave-fuzz character.
Overgrown is a fuzz pedal modeled at the circuit level — its clipping stages and tone stack are simulated as an actual electrical network (a Wave Digital Filter model), not approximated with a waveshaping curve. That's the difference between a plugin that sounds vaguely fuzz-like and one that behaves like a real pedal responding to how hard you drive it.
It's built in the spirit of classic swollen-pickle-style fuzz circuits, with a real-time octave shifter layered on top for the up/down octave-fuzz sounds those pedals are famous for.
Overgrown wears its own stompbox face rather than the family's usual rack chassis — a photoreal pedal with a footswitch, chrome knobs, and a botanical illustration. The footswitch's LED communicates engaged/bypassed state; the switch itself looks identical either way, exactly like a real pedal.
Sustain drives both clipping stages — higher settings push the circuit model harder into clipping for more compression and sustain, the way turning up gain on a real fuzz circuit does. Clip Type selects the diode chemistry the circuit model actually simulates:
Switching Clip Type crossfades smoothly between diode models over a few milliseconds — there's no pop or discontinuity when you change it live.
Tone switches the modeled tone stack between Fat and Bright voicings. Mid controls how much midrange the tone stack cuts — because this is a real circuit model, Tone and Mid interact the way they would on the physical pedal, not as two independent EQ bands.
Octave Mode switches between Down, Off, and Up — a real-time pitch-tracked shifter, not a static harmonizer, so it tracks your playing dynamically. Octave Blend sets how much of the shifted signal mixes in alongside the fuzz. The shifter runs continuously in the background even when Mode is Off, so switching it on mid-note is instant rather than needing a moment to "warm up."
The output trim (−24 to +6 dB) — an intentional creative/mixing level control, separate from and in addition to the automatic gain compensation Overgrown already applies internally to keep level sane as you push Sustain.
| Formats | Audio Unit, VST3 |
| Platform | macOS, Apple Silicon |
| Modeling | Wave Digital Filter circuit model, double precision throughout |
| Clip types | Silicon, Germanium, LED — crossfaded live |
| Oversampling | 8x on the nonlinear stages |
| Octave | Real-time pitch-tracked shifter, Down / Off / Up |
| Harvest (output) | −24 to +6 dB |
| Channel configuration | Stereo in / stereo out |
Pitch-tracked octave shifting works best on clean, monophonic input — chords, heavy fuzz stacked before the shifter in your chain, or fast passages can confuse any pitch tracker. Try lowering Octave Blend or engaging the octave earlier in a simpler signal chain.
Overgrown compensates automatically as you drive Sustain harder, but it's an RMS-based leveling system with some inherent smoothing lag, not an instant limiter — use Harvest for the final creative trim once you've settled on a Sustain setting.
Clip Type crossfades over a few milliseconds by design to avoid a pop — on a very fast, repeated switch this can read as a brief softening rather than an instant change. That's expected behaviour, not a bug.