The Big Guitar Amp Sim Roundup + Review

[Jeffguitars]

I agree that room sound is a big part of a perceived guitar sound. Of course, there are ways to add room sounds to sims. So then the question isn't whether there's a problem with amp sims, the question is whether there's a problem with convolution reverbs, and whether they can reproduce the nuances of "real" rooms accurately. 10 years ago, I would have said "not really." However, some of the recent convolution reverbs, like Waves Abbey Road Chambers, sound very much like "the real thing." The tradeoff is a big CPU hit. But just as we continue to hear progress with amp sims, there's progress occurring in the field of modeling acoustic spaces. Whether the result is equal to physical rooms by the standards of the person doing the recording is something only the person doing the recording can answer. However, I don't think it matters too much to the people who listen to music.

At least you have confronted that this is the ACOUSTIC SPACE problem. Where you are wrong it that NO WAY convolution (I HAVE WAVES AR Chambers and plates) and or any other 2D eq representation can IN OUR LIFE TIMES actually BE THE REAL 3D spaces. They are NOT the same thing, they just aren't. Record me some amp sim guitar and run it through the AR chambers and show me the delicate, intimate detail the amp sim can do that recreates the real acoustic space of a real studio room. It may help MASK the fact that the real acoustic space wasn't actually recorded, but it cannot reproduce it. Convolution is still a 2d eq curve, just a good one most like them better than algo spaces. They are FLAT OUT stll 2d eq digital representations of real 3d spaces and they do not come even close to the real thing and won't for a LONG LONG LONG time.

[telecode]

You won't, because YOU CAN'T, it's flat out that simple.

Yes. you can't. No one ever said amp sims can replace tube amps of yester yore or high end $2000+ tube amps. The amp sim is a different tool than a tube amp. You use it differently. What an amp sim does do is it allows you to quickly and easily record electric guitar into a DAW and you can get very very good results. The sounds you can get are going to be much more versatile than what you are limited to with your regular amp. Your Fender Pro is always going to sound like a Fender pro, unless you buy a Marshall stack.

FWIW.. Steely Dan were a professional rock group and legendary group that recorded in the most expensive recording studios at the time. They also had at their disposal high priced engineer, Roger Nichols , who had 30+ years experience with the equipment in those studios. They had much more fire power when making those records than Joe Shmo today who tinkers with a DAW in his 1 bedroom. Different times, different folks.

And again, right in the first sentence we see either an diliberate or misunderstood comment.
"Yes. you can't. No one ever said amp sims can replace tube amps of yester yore or high end $2000+ tube amps. The amp sim is a different tool than a tube amp. You use it differently."
Again, THIS HAS NOTHING to do with a guitar PREAMP. There are wondersful sounding amps that are NOT tube and plenty of wonderful sounding amp sim PREAMPS. IT IS THE GREAT ROOMS and MICS INTERACTING in those rooms that amp sims CANNOT DO!!! Put a great amp sim through a good power amp section, tube or not, put it in a great studio room and record it into a good mic in that great room and YOU WILL GET A GREAT RECORDING of that space that a DI sim cannot do and will not be able to do in our life times. It's that simple. I understand some wanting to defend amp sims, but I see the same SUBTLE attempts to cloud the issue, when will the dreaded "TONE" word start being tossed in? Let me make this clear again. WE ARE TALKING THE ROOM, a real studio room and the interaction of that room with a good mic and speaker. It's the room that these amp sims CANNOT simulate because in the end they are simply 2d digital copies that will NOT IN OUR life times be true 3d. They can't be and the sims just cannot give you that real 3d acoustical space, they just can't. I WANT THEM TOO, I want someone to show me this so I can finally have what I have been after all these years.

Thats all fine and dandy, but I am talking about the 99% people who are out there making music today who don't have access to a "great" studio room and don't need that access due to the genre of music they are making. (Check out YT vids on how Fatrat or Duskus make their music, just headphones, a laptop, interface and lots of stems).

If you did have access to a great room, you wouldn't be using sims to begin with. Also, a shitty low to mid priced guitar and real amp are going to sound just as shitty in a high end studio. i am not defending amp sims. i am simply stating that they are a different tool to use to make music and they actually give great results for what they are and where their price point. i made CDs in the 90s with rock groups in pro studios with engineers (they were not high end studios, just regular run of the mill studios catering to no name rock bands but they were real studios in the music business at the time) and my guitars sound much better today using sims than they did on those old tapes and CD's made in the 90s using real amps (some were my own regular touring amp and some where amps that studio had at their disposal).

you are using particular recordings by some legendary artists as your measuring stick. you should be using recordings make by regular run on the mill no namer bands and compare what todays guitar technology can do, which costs peanuts to what those bands were using, and compare those results.

[Anderton]

Where you are wrong it that NO WAY convolution (I HAVE WAVES AR Chambers and plates) and or any other 2D eq representation can IN OUR LIFE TIMES actually BE THE REAL 3D spaces.

I agree, if you plan on dying within the next few years

For starters, you can't get 3D out of stereo. However, the advances that are being made in 5.1 and 7.1 surround, coupled with advances in space/environment simulation in virtual reality projects, will serve us well. Currently a lot of this development is based around games, because frankly, compared to music that's where the money is. But at some point it will become commercially viable, and trickle down to us musicians.

Will a virtual experience be exactly the same as a physical experience? Of course not. Sitting in a concert hall will always be different compared to sitting in your living room with its own imperfect acoustics, listening to speakers which are themselves imperfect. But we do have amp sims where trained engineers with "golden ears" can't tell the difference compared to a miked amp on playback. That's all that matters for recording. If it gets to the point where a classical musician with superb hearing can't tell the difference between an ensemble recorded in the Vienna Symphony Hall and an ensemble recorded in a dead room with "Vienna Symphony Hall" processing applied, to me that qualifies as mission accomplished. And we will get there.

As to something like AR Chambers, Waves is constrained to producing a product that's capable of being used on the average consumer computer. Even so, more than a couple instances of AR Chambers will bring many computers to their knees; it doesn't make economic sense for Waves to create plug-ins that can run only on a $35,000 Mac Pro. The reality is that a space is quantifiable, but the other reality is that the level of complexity is mind-boggling, technically daunting, and incredibly expensive to reproduce. Creating an algorithm with sufficient detail to capture all those nuances is a real challenge.

But, it wasn't that long along people claimed it would be impossible to do pitch correction with polyphonic program material, yet Celemony did it. "Always in motion is the future," as a little green dude once said.

[telecode]

Currently a lot of this development is based around games, because frankly, compared to music that's where the money is. But at some point it will become commercially viable, and trickle down to us musicians.

The Spotifization of music consumption has pretty much shot the last bit of hope for quality in music listening. I can appreciate the simplicity and ease of access to music that streaming gives, but you forget how crappy of a sound quality spotify has trained your ears to appreciate to until you listen to a CD that was ripped in lossless. Not that long ago, I had my regular headphones on during commute home and forgot i had my ipad in my backpack while commuting. all of a sudden a track came on that i was familiar with and i was blown away thinking, "wow, i never realized these headphones where that good!!" (they are actually crappy gym headphones!) and went for my phone to check the blue tooth connection as i thought maybe i stumbled onto a setting i wasn't aware of, and then i realized what happened....

the headphones were still connected to my ipad that i use in the gym when i watch YT and forgot i had itunes with a whole bunch of ripped CD's from my home collection on the ipad that i had prepared for a trip long ago. itunes was playing. those sames tunes i also listen to on spotify regularly so hadn't heard them off my collection in a very long time.

I don't think music listening will go back to high quality no matter what happens. If I recall correctly, we did have a feeble attempt by record companies to push blue ray high fidelity 5.1 audio versions of classic back catalog releases. i own a couple!!. it bombed like a bitch. regular joe blow music lover would rather give Spotify $10 a month or just listen off youtube than spent $30 on a BR audio disk to get great quality.

anyways, back to guitarz... sim are great and you can achieve create results with them if you spend time working with them. the guitar market is getting saturated with competition and i see companies are upping their game bit by bit. prices are going down and the quality is going up.

[Ploki]

i can't play like lou reed. I'd easily produce a sound like that ITB.

if lou reed played it for me it'd sound just like that.

sorry

amplitude tho, imo, is utter garbage. I tried their mesaboogie... Compared to my (now sold) Boogie Mark V, and it wasn't even close.
I use Fuse Audio Labs VPRE-2C in conjuction with his Fender Bassman (Fuse Audio Labs F-59)

I can get a better mesaboogie sound from VPRE-2C and F-59 than i can from the amplitube mesaboogie.

Point 1. NO ONE ASKED YOU to play like Lou Reed. I asked you to simply play some clean riffing panned hard left and post it so we can compare the quality of the recorded sound. You didn't for an obvious reason, and it's because y

ou know as well as I do I imagine, that it simply will not sound as intimate.
Point 2. I am noticing a desire by the responders to simply avoid doing such a simple thing, use your amp sim and play me some clean guitar riffing, just chords. The quality of that sound on the LR or the Steely Dan song is obviously and clearly because it's done in a wonderful room with good amps and mics.
It has ZERO TO DO with who is playing or what licks they are playing on a personal level.

I need to get to the studio - i'll give it a whirl. I disagree with your notion tho, playing is 80% of the sound imo.

[Anderton]

Currently a lot of this development is based around games, because frankly, compared to music that's where the money is. But at some point it will become commercially viable, and trickle down to us musicians.

I don't think music listening will go back to high quality no matter what happens. If I recall correctly, we did have a feeble attempt by record companies to push blue ray high fidelity 5.1 audio versions of classic back catalog releases. i own a couple!!. it bombed like a bitch. regular joe blow music lover would rather give Spotify $10 a month or just listen off youtube than spent $30 on a BR audio disk to get great quality.

I would agree if it's just about music, but as I mentioned, games are where the money is and gamers want high-quality sound. They want immersion. I don't know any musicians with a surround system, but everyone I know with a VR setup has it. If surround penetrates on a consumer level for VR or gaming (and that may not be too difficult an "if" 5-10 years from now), music can hopefully hitch a ride.

[Tj Shredder]

Currently a lot of this development is based around games, because frankly, compared to music that's where the money is. But at some point it will become commercially viable, and trickle down to us musicians.

I don't know any musicians with a surround system, but everyone I know with a VR setup has it. If surround penetrates on a consumer level for VR or gaming (and that may not be too difficult an "if" 5-10 years from now), music can hopefully hitch a ride.

I have a 10.2 system and I am not at all a gamer. I guess musicians connected to contemporary classical electronic music might have more channels, as the standard is something like 8 speakers.
This is an academic minority though, and in addition a minority with zero interest in amp sims...; - )

[imrae]

"I can't reproduce the sound on this record. The digital modelling must be bad." It's such a bizarre conclusion to draw. I wouldn't be able to reproduce those sounds even with the original equipment; we're talking about some of the best recordings ever made here.

I'll happily agree that software doesn't ship with equivalent IRs, but I'm quite confident that if you could recreate the setup and captured an IR from it, the result would be satisfactory.

I said NOTHING about digital modelling is all around bad. I said it can be GREAT for live use.

*snip*

I'm sorry, but the attempts to conflate the issues is an attempt to cloud the fact that some don't want to face. One more time, it is the ACOUSTIC SPACE

*etc*

Yes, I did actually understand the first time that you were referring to the cabinet-in-a-room part of the system. Sorry if that wasn't clear. No conflation was needed; your position is just as ridiculous when taken in context.

Stop repeating that rooms are not EQs. Acknowledge that delays and filters are deeply related and that the vast majority of room behaviour is in fact a filter. Explain what you think is missing from the model. Don't expect people to respond to your impossible test standard: reproducing unspecified details of an unknown recording setup.

Apologies for directness, but I do find these long, unstructured and repetitive posts with UNNECESSARY CAPITALS to be quite rude in their own way.

[Ploki]

Frankly, my studio room is very dead (deliberately). Even when I record an amp in it, it won't sound like that...

[telecode]

Frankly, my studio room is very dead (deliberately). Even when I record an amp in it, it won't sound like that...

usually real studio rooms ara dead so you can capture the amps and performances as cleanly as possible and they apply your compression and reverbs during mixing.

[Ploki]

Frankly, my studio room is very dead (deliberately). Even when I record an amp in it, it won't sound like that...

usually real studio rooms ara dead so you can capture the amps and performances as cleanly as possible and they apply your compression and reverbs during mixing.

They are?
I'm not sure that's the trend. Iconic sound of specific studios was partly due to their acoustics as well.

I mean, and i don't know what does compression have to do with the room, rooms don't compress

[telecode]

Frankly, my studio room is very dead (deliberately). Even when I record an amp in it, it won't sound like that...

usually real studio rooms ara dead so you can capture the amps and performances as cleanly as possible and they apply your compression and reverbs during mixing.

They are?
I'm not sure that's the trend. Iconic sound of specific studios was partly due to their acoustics as well.

I mean, and i don't know what does compression have to do with the room, rooms don't compress

yeah. the well known famous ones. but 99% regular joe blow studios were usually located in shitty parts of the city where they could make noise and had cheap rent to keep costs low. the rooms were dead studio booths.

[Anderton]

I'm kinda surprised no one wants to talk about AcouFiend, it's really quite cool.

[telecode]

I'm kinda surprised no one wants to talk about AcouFiend, it's really quite cool.

sure. go ahead. it looks interesting. can you use it with any sim or just bluecat products.

[Ploki]

I'm kinda surprised no one wants to talk about AcouFiend, it's really quite cool.

sure. go ahead. it looks interesting. can you use it with any sim or just bluecat products.

viewtopic.php?p=7738656#p7738656
he already did - in depth. we just derailed it with nonsense