KVR Audio

cliftone · Post by **cliftone** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 5:21 pm

Well, we might as well do this. I have AT3, AT2, AT metal, AT Hendrix, AT Fender, well all of the AT amp sims. I have Revalver HP, Pod Farm, Guitar Combos, and have demos of the rest. My favorite is AT3, and AT Fender together. I have the Stomp IO to go with them and that is icing on the cake. I like the ability to change amps when playing live. The others are very good in their own right. I have no real complaints except that Revalver is so far behind on updates and keep getting further behind. Also I have most of the free amps sims, they are excellent. I am not here to bash anyones amp sims, but, again my favorite is AT. It does about everything that I want, they update regularly and give away prizes occasionaly. Money well spent I think.

rhythmtechnologies · Post by **rhythmtechnologies** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 5:44 pm

AT3 with recabinet impulses.

AT3 amp modelling is sublime but while i quite like AT3's new cab modelling i dont think its quite up to recab's standards yet.

Hink · Post by **Hink** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 5:48 pm

Jafo · Post by **Jafo** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 6:08 pm

BTE Juicy 77 or Cortex with AeternusEternus' Nebula cab sims, or JCM 900 -- unlike most ampsims, which are just simple waveshapers + fx, these respond, sound, feel, and all but smell like the Real Thing. Prices are good, too.

Silenceborn · Post by **Silenceborn** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 6:16 pm

john_adams1 wrote:I prefer Vandal over all other amp sims. It's leaps and bounds ahead of the others in terms of sound quality.

+1000

As an old user of almost all commercial and free amp sims out there, who have been using all AT2 and 3 and the rest as my go 2 ampsim for years, I just can not even imagine coming back to AT 2 or 3 or any other amp sims after the discovery of Vandal, Vandal sound quality is almost twice better than the rest to MY EARS. It has almost all the aspects of the real amps that I was always looking for inside the amp sims and finally found them in Vandal. I Can describe it as Tight, Punchy, Sharp, Dry and Meaty sound which as the result gives you focused and up-front distortion which is great for hard rock/metal sounds, instead of that glassy, lifeless and full-of-plastic-meat sound of some of the other amp sims around, and if you change the settings appropriately you can have that creamy and warm overdrive as well for blusy/jazzy sounds easily, and man, what a clean sound, so damn upfront with heavenly smoothness which gives me clarity I have never heard in any other amp sims so far. Vandal's sound quality is superb and best of the bests in my honest opinion.

Definitely Vandal is my go to amp sim for now, and honestly I have more fun and comfort playing and even recording with Vandal than micing my Fender Twin reverb and my Marshals.

Softube Tube-Tech comp --> Vandal(with some of DIMI's presets) ---> a touch of Fabfilter's Timeless 2 delay ---> Altiverb 6 conv Reverb ---> Drunk Guitar in Heaven.

Cheers

shogger · Post by **shogger** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 6:36 pm

Hink wrote:I excluded threads that pertain to just one sim in the title name, though all such threads turn into your request and I stopped at aug 09

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... ht=amp+sim

Really that much?

Shogger

cliftone · Post by **cliftone** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 6:53 pm

Does the Vandal come as a standalone?

Jafo · Post by **Jafo** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 7:29 pm

john_adams1 wrote:
Jafo wrote:BTE Juicy 77 or Cortex with AeternusEternus' Nebula cab sims, or JCM 900 -- unlike most ampsims, which are just simple waveshapers + fx, these respond, sound, feel, and all but smell like the Real Thing. Prices are good, too.
I don't understand what you mean by wavshapers

A waveshaper is noting special; it's just something that shapes wave forms, typically in one single way and across the whole spectrum. For example, you can apply a lot of gain and clipping, and turn the input into a square wave. You can then send it through a fairly steep low-pass filter set at the same frequency as the note to turn it into a triangle wave. Or you can send an input through a trigonometric function, or an arithmetic one -- try x/(x^2+1). RS-Met's most excellent FuncShaper is a lotta lotta fun for this!

All of this is good and well, except that a lot of physical gear -- real tubes in particular -- doesn't work that way. For example, tube distortion is very sensitive -- you can set an amp on stun, but pick softly and still get a fairly clean tone.

More to the point, the types of harmonics and their relative proportions to each other change in the real thing, but with a typical waveshaper, it'll always be the same harmonics in the same relative proportions to each other. Guitarists notice this stuff. With tubes, especially triodes, you get a small amount of low- and even-order distortion at low volumes (some 2nd, a little 3rd, a touch of 4th), but at higher volumes, you get sharper harmonics -- more higher-order and predominantly odd-order (mostly 3rd, 5tf, 7th, with a touch of 2nd, 4th, and so forth).

Tubes add more and harsher harmonics on the transients, and mellow out as the notes fade. Much of classic rock is based on that... listen to Frampton's "Do You Feel Like I Do" or some Hendrix or Cream or early Aerosmith for particularly delectable examples.

This thread might be helpful, also. (I've also started a few thread on modeling tubes in the last couple of months, but what I mostly learned, is that DSP is far beyond my ken...)

zerocrossing · Post by **zerocrossing** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 7:33 pm

Well, I guess it'll be no surprise to people here that I'm basically using only AT3 at this point. I just think it sounds gorgeous. Recently I thought I might get a little low watt tube amp... but that's on the back burner. I just don't feel that much of an urge to have hardware as I do with analog synths. I wish IK Multimedia would take what they know about modeling and bring it to the VA software world.

Jafo · Post by **Jafo** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 7:35 pm

Silenceborn wrote:Vandal

So that's what Sascha Eversmeier's been up to! DLing trial now...

Later addition: Crap... this is insanely awesome. Ah well; maybe once the kids are grown I can save up enough pennies to buy this. Now accepting donations to the "Mike needs a great amp fund"!

Hink · Post by **Hink** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 7:41 pm

zerocrossing wrote:Well, I guess it'll be no surprise to people here that I'm basically using only AT3 at this point. I just think it sounds gorgeous. Recently I thought I might get a little low watt tube amp... but that's on the back burner. I just don't feel that much of an urge to have hardware as I do with analog synths. I wish IK Multimedia would take what they know about modeling and bring it to the VA software world.

while I agree with you (but I like all my sims) I have one problem that I'm curious about how you get around it, latency. I can play a sim in stand alone or a very small project without an issue but if the project gets large I have to increase my buffers. That's why I might find a tone I like playing live through a sim I still only use it for re-amping and for recording tracks I use my PODs so I can take advantage of direct monitor.

While it's true I'm likely to find better sounds in sims than from my outdated PODs I still can find tones that are fine for a reference amp, and let's face it...AT3 can be a cpu hog (and I have a robust machine).

So how do you get around the latency?

Hink · Post by **Hink** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 7:43 pm

cliftone wrote:Does the Vandal come as a standalone?

yes

cliftone · Post by **cliftone** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 7:54 pm

Hink wrote:
zerocrossing wrote:Well, I guess it'll be no surprise to people here that I'm basically using only AT3 at this point. I just think it sounds gorgeous. Recently I thought I might get a little low watt tube amp... but that's on the back burner. I just don't feel that much of an urge to have hardware as I do with analog synths. I wish IK Multimedia would take what they know about modeling and bring it to the VA software world.
while I agree with you (but I like all my sims) I have one problem that I'm curious about how you get around it, latency. I can play a sim in stand alone or a very small project without an issue but if the project gets large I have to increase my buffers. That's why I might find a tone I like playing live through a sim I still only use it for re-amping and for recording tracks I use my PODs so I can take advantage of direct monitor.

While it's true I'm likely to find better sounds in sims than from my outdated PODs I still can find tones that are fine for a reference amp, and let's face it...AT3 can be a cpu hog (and I have a robust machine).

So how do you get around the latency?

Hink, I also like Pod Farm for recording, I like the gearbox also, they just have something about them, maybe 78 amps, and so many tones for specific songs. Thanks for the answer to Vandal having a standalone, I will have to try this one out.

Franzel · Post by **Franzel** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 8:05 pm

Vandal comes as a VST or AU plugin, there's no standalone version as far as I know.

Jafo · Post by **Jafo** » Tue Apr 27, 2010 9:11 pm

Franzel wrote:Vandal comes as a VST or AU plugin, there's no standalone version as far as I know.

Savihost if you're running Windows; I'm sure the Mac people have a workalike.

Favorite amp sim and why