Amp

Cool Cat 120

Name: Cool Cat 120
Brand: Smear Audio
Price: 9.9 EUR
Availability: InStock

€9.90$10.90£8.90

VST3AUStandaloneCircuit-derived model

Some amps are famous for how they break up. This one is famous for how it stays clean. The Cool Cat 120 is a component-level recreation of the iconic solid-state combo that defined a whole era of glassy, pristine chime — the one clean platform that never sags, never blurs, and never gets in the way.

We modeled its ruthlessly clean preamp and power stage, its Fender-style passive tone stack, and — most importantly — its legendary stereo chorus: one voice kept dry, the other swept by a BBD delay line, so the stereo image shimmers and widens the way the real thing does.

Then we fixed the two things everyone always wished were better. The original's onboard reverb and its built-in distortion were famously the weak links — a thin reverb and a harsh, unloved dirt channel most players simply left off. So we replaced them. In place of the original reverb sits a lush, three-voice stereo plate (Bright / Medium / Dark) with real depth and bloom. In place of the weak distortion sits a proper Rat-style circuit up front — off at zero, or dialed in for thick, silicon-clipped grind through the clean voice.

The result is the clean platform you already love with the two parts nobody loved finally done right

Current version 1.2.1 (3 August 2026)

“The definitive clean platform —

glassy solid-state chime and

the legendary stereo chorus.”

Schematic parameters

An in-amp Rat-style distortion at the front of the chain. At zero it's fully bypassed for a pure clean; dial it up for gritty, silicon-clipped grind through the clean voice.

Universal architecture

The Smear Audio Ecosystem: Common Amp Features

These are the ideas, design philosophies, and shared technical choices common to every Smear Audio amp. They are not one-off product notes or model-specific feature lists, but the baseline assumptions behind how we build our amplifier plugins.

Pure Circuit Soul

Instead of running our software through a single, compromise-heavy digital grid, every individual tube stage is calculated independently in real time.

Ghost Bloom - The Living Feedback Engine

Getting a software plugin to feed back naturally without a roaring 4x12 cabinet physically vibrating your guitar strings used to be a pipe dream. Our proprietary Ghost Bloom engine changes the game by emulating physical acoustic feedback with breathtaking realism.

The Custom Cab & Space Matrix

An extraordinary amplifier needs a real environment to breathe. Our unified speaker platform offers a range of distinct, classically voiced cabinet models to suit each amp's character, paired with an intuitive three-dimensional mic room.

Universal Input Boosters: On-Demand Analog Heat

In the real world, the perfect tone almost always starts with a great pedal slamming the front end of an amp. We have hardwired two switchable, analog-modeled boost circuits directly into the top bar of every interface.