Free Amp SE

I know there is enough discussion on the forums about the VST guitar amps, but I will emphasize this effort by Fretted Synth Audio.

I am not much of a guitar player, but I have a long experience in listening to guitar music. I tried most of the commercial and free guitar oriented VST-s.

Free Amp has a realistic interface: amp, speaker, stompboxes, with a neat littlle idea with a moveable mic in front of a speaker. Additional options are mostly obvious in function.

My guitar is G&L Tribute ASAT Special, inserted into EDIROL UA-25 USB soundcard. The result is a very clean, natural input sound. Free Amp SE jumps in to add a vast variety of sounds: from acoustic clean to Monster Magnet raw. Amp simulations are varied, and while I cannot say if they represent the real thing, they certainly have their own character, and that character can be tweaked and tampered for your preference, which is a great bonus, compared to GXstack for example.

Stompboxes sound great, especially Overdrive. They are a little harder to tweak (like Wah), simply because there is so much to tweak, not just a couple of buttons like in their hardware counterparts. But results are convincing, realistic. There is enough presets to show what can be done with it, most are quite usable.

This VST is CPU-hungry, and here is a quality switch that brings it down a notch. Maybe it is a SynthEdit thing, maybe the heavy modelling used. Still, it is not in a league of Arturia Moog or simmilar heavies... The guys at Fretted Synth are aware of CPU usage so they offer separate solutions for different amps and stomps.

No crashes yet.

This amp sim delivers the sounds I expected only from Guitar Rig. And for a price of a smile. Mine is so big it goes around my head. Twice.