Input Gain and Output Gain
The Input Gain (±36 dB) controls how hard the distortion is driven, and Output Gain (±36 dB) is the make-up level.
Link
LINK is inverse gain linking - push Input Gain up and Output Gain walks down to compensate, so you can hunt for the sweet spot without level-matching by hand. Note: by popular request Output Gain is independent and does not cause input gain to compensate. The linking is one-way.
Norm
NORM (auto-normalize) sits next to LINK and sounds similar, but it’s a completely different thing: it normalizes the input signal, not the input/output gain. When enabled, it tracks the envelope of your input and squashes it into an essentially perfect sausage that hits the distortion at a consistent level internally - then the magic: the output applies the inverse normalization, and your original dynamics are restored.
Translation: quiet parts and loud parts get the same amount of distortion, but the output respects the dynamics of the input. It’s like squashing your signal into a sausage, shaping the sausage, then unsquashing it to follow your original envelope.
When to leave NORM off: when dynamics-reactive drive is the point - a signal that distorts harder as it gets louder.
Dry/Wet
The dry path is phase-coherent, so blending is artifact-free - no comb filtering. The trick that makes this work: oversampling is applied to the dry signal too, so both paths stay aligned. That makes 30%-wet parallel grit a first-class workflow, not a hack.
DC blocking
DC blocking quietly removes the offset that BIAS and asymmetric curves create - it’s a very low-frequency highpass filter. There are plenty of times it isn’t needed, and turning it off is technically more transparent; it’s on by default because certain curves can accidentally create a ton of DC bias if you don’t know what to watch for.