Guitar Combo: AC Box Combo

This is the first VST product that I have felt strongly enough about to review (well, I'm pretty excited about Tracktion, too, but that seems to have enough hype going for it now).

I have been playing guitar live and in the studio for over 15 years, and only began using amp emulation in the past year. Originally i enjoyed using Amplitube, but I had some problems with CPU usage and stability when using more than one instance, so I started experimenting with other plugins, including the excellent and free Guitar Suite.

I was a little skeptical to try a new, big commercial plugin after being quite happy with Guitar Suite, but I was completely bowled over at how musical and playable the sounds are on this thing.

I sat down to test the plugin, expecting to spend 15 minutes or so. Hours later, I had torn calluses on my fretboard hand, and several cigarettes had smoldered down to the quick in my ashtray while I just spent the afternoon wailing with this beauty.

I quickly went back and re-amped some songs I recorded in Tracktion originally using Guitar Suite, and the difference was remarkable. It gave the guitar tracks much more presence and character in the mixes, much more pro sounding and more life and character.

An outstanding plugin. One item for my wish list is to be able to create sub-banks of presets, I like the directory structure that Amplitube has and it would make it easier to store patches for a particular song.