Swanky Amp (release 1.4.0)

[guitarzan]

This thing is ragged and glorious! Pretty much every blown out tweed tone possible is in Resonant Amp.

I'm tempted to say there is unusable range in the power-amp Drive and Sag parameters, but even though it gets ugly, I've heard Neil Young go there and make it work. I think some more refinement in the interaction between power-amp Drive and Sag might be a positive thing though. It almost seems like both parameters are trying to control the same thing after a certain point — is it possible that Drive and Sag could be consolidated into a single parameter?

I don't know if this sim can even do "nice" because I haven't tried — dozens of amp sims do "nice". The raggedness may limit the appeal, but it might also bring in people who have never had an interest in amp sims before. Resonant Amp is absolutely unique, and I think it might appeal most to those that like a less refined old school rock tone, especially Neil Young fans.

I know nobody asked, but if they did I would recommend aiming the commercial version at those in search of ragged glory… outboard reverb tank, tube Echoplex, Magnatone stereo vibe, the whole works. Add Whizzer-like midi control capabilities and I dub thee "Lazy Horse".

Also, any O.T. emulation or cab model refinement would make the gnarliest artifacts a bit more musically useful and tolerable in a mix.

[jbraner]

I think it's great that there's finally an amp not aimed at "Metal" detuned 8 string guitars

[garrinm]

I think it's great that there's finally an amp not aimed at "Metal" detuned 8 string guitars

That's the aesthetic these days is it haha? I did throw in a "high gain" preset that gets towards that sort of scooped super high gain sound I associated with metal. But it's a bit of a curiosity to me, I don't really use those kinds of sounds.

I'll be curious to know how your crunch sounds are sounding with the model tweaks that have come into the last few patches. Do you find the sag useful to your sound?

This thing is ragged and glorious! Pretty much every blown out tweed tone possible is in Resonant Amp.

I'll take that as very high praise xD. I'm glad I got the amp there. I know it's got its own personality, as opposed to being a straight clone of some other amp, but hopefully that's a good thing!

is it possible that Drive and Sag could be consolidated into a single parameter?

They affect each other pretty strongly, especially at high sag levels, but they do quite different things. And for some sounds I think it's important to have one turned up and the other down, so I don't think tying them together is necessarily a great idea. I'll keep it in mind though, maybe there's a way to have them follow each other a bit more.

I know nobody asked, but if they did I would recommend aiming the commercial version at those in search of ragged glory… outboard reverb tank, tube Echoplex, Magnatone stereo vibe, the whole works. Add Whizzer-like midi control capabilities and I dub thee "Lazy Horse".

Also, any O.T. emulation or cab model refinement would make the gnarliest artifacts a bit more musically useful and tolerable in a mix.

That's all the kinds of things I want to look into. That said I haven't yet tried emulating pedals, so while I have an idea for the range of effects I want to make available, emulating particular hardware might be possible in some cases, and in other cases I might just have to make my own based on best information available.

Thanks,
Garrin

[garrinm]

Version 0.6.0 is released, we're in beta territory now! This is actually a small patch, the only feature is improved preset management (it's now hopefully quite usable). The tooltips will have to wait for 0.6.1 as they are taking a bit more work than anticipated and I wanted to get the improvements to preset management in your hands ASAP.

I would suggest checking out some of the factory presets in 0.6.0 to get a feel for the range of sounds the amp can give you. They will work best if you first gain stage your guitar (get your soft strummed peak level to reach either the S or H ticks in the input level meter depending if you're using a single coil or humbucker pickup). The presets were made for a single coil pickup, so a humbucker will result in crunchier sounds.

I've made a (really) quick survey, and I'd really appreciate feedback from anyone willing to fill it out:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIp ... sp=sf_link

As usual the release is here:

https://github.com/resonantdsp/ResonantAmp
Installer: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aOKUJy ... sp=sharing
VST3: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BrrAsj ... sp=sharing

A big thanks to everyone who took a chance and put time into trying this out, and created this great discussion that is now 12 pages long. I learned a lot along the way, and I doubt this could've sounded anywhere near where it is now if I'd tried to do this in isolation.

P.S. the version number now shows in the bottom right corner, thanks for the suggestion. I also think Dave Clark was telling me to do this weeks ago, but at the time it slipped my mind as I always felt like I had bigger fish to fry.

[jbraner]

I'll be curious to know how your crunch sounds are sounding with the model tweaks that have come into the last few patches. Do you find the sag useful to your sound?

I was just coming back to report and now 0.6.0 is out!
My crunch sounds are coming along OK - I'm keeping the sag around 2 or 3 and 4 for "a lot".
I've got a pretty good "amp is overloading" sound with sag up a little higher - but to be honest, that's not the main thing for me. I just love that I can dial out the crappy sounding artifacts that are always there. (I get them a lot on Marshall emulations - and I just don't get along with a lot of them).
EDIT - I'm not talking about your artifacts - I mean tube amp sims in general

I think there are nice clean sounds in here too

I'll play with 0.6.0 later - but I think we need more work on preset management.
My request would be to separate out the factory ones from the user ones (don't let them mix together) - and either they need to sort alphabetically (so we can use preset names to sort them) or we need a way to manage the order of the presets.
I had a quick look at 0.6.0 and new presets seem to go to the bottom of the list - but a couple of existing ones seemed to mix in to the list randomly (not alphabetical and mixed with the factory ones).
It would even be nice to allow user folders - to use for organising (and also to keep the factory ones out of the way)

Here's an example (and this goes for all my amp sims) - I'll always use my own cabs, so the factory presets are no good to me. I like to get them out of the way - then if I like some, I resave them with their cabs disabled. Then I save a few of my own - for starting points and I like to organise them like clean 01, clean 02, crunch 01, crunch 02, hi gain 01 etc.
I like to go down the list from cleaner to dirtier sounds

I know this is just my way of doing things - but I thought I'd give some input as to how different people might approach preset management.

BTW - I *love* plugins that have nice, easy to backup, portable - xml file presets!
Will be back after trying 0.6.0

[garrinm]

I'll play with 0.6.0 later - but I think we need more work on preset management.
My request would be to separate out the factory ones from the user ones (don't let them mix together) - and either they need to sort alphabetically (so we can use preset names to sort them) or we need a way to manage the order of the presets.

Hi John, thanks for that feedback. I definitely want to improve that situation over time. I can see how, especially with your use case, factor defaults get in the way. I will address that.

The presets are actually stored in XML right now. I should have mentioned this a bit sooner. You can find them in:

Code: Select all

C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Resonant DSP\Resonant Amp

You can tweak them there (there are even a couple of "hidden" parameters available in there relating to sag). And you can (very painfully) reorder them by setting the order attribute manually. They are sorted by that attribute, so you can push things before the factory defaults by giving them negative values.

I am thinking of redesigning this so that the order is determined from a master XML file, and also that would create a mechanism to exclude factory presets. This might take a couple of update cycles to get to though.

Thanks,
Garrin

[jbraner]

Hi Garinn,
You did already tell us about the presets location - that's how i knew they were XML files
I guess the factory ones are embedded in the VST or something?
Or are they in the file system somewhere?
I'll have a look at these - I'll play with 0.6.0 in a little while...

[jbraner]

I had a play with 0.6.0 - very nice indeed. It doesn't sound different from 0.5.3 (probably not supposed to)
BTW - I hadn't noticed that you snuck in a "Presence" control until today

I had a look at the XML files - it's too complicated to fool around in there. Do you set a value of 5 (on a knob) as 0.0 then 1-5 are negative and 5-10 are positive numbers?

I set negative numbers for presetOrder="" and got my presets to the top - but the thing is, to put things in order you have to put "more negative" numbers at the top so:
-99 top
-90 below that
-10 below that

Couldn't you just scan the file system to sort presets however the file system sees them? (alphabetical) wouldn't that be easier?
Then you could just put a button that takes us to the presets folder in the file system - and we can rename, delete, whatever - ourselves?
It's just a thought (that's how Neural DSP does it)

Also - presets don't touch input and output levels - correct?
For me - it's easier to just use Reaper presets for now (except for testing things for you)

I would say the only reason not to use this amp for "real use" - is just in case things change a little before version 1.0. Quality wise - it's certainly ready

[jbraner]

One more little thing - I would gladly pay money for this amp.
I would actually prefer it *without* FX, or anything but a basic cab. I'd rather use my own FX and cabs.
All my amp sims come with FX and cabs etc - but none of them are interchangeable. so if you get a really good tube screamer included with one - you can only use it with that amp. I'd rather get a good tube screamer plugin (like Cytomic's "The Scream") so I can use it with any of my amps.
Actually I'd rather use my real Tube Screamer before the amp sim

I'm probably in the minority though

[guitarzan]

Well Garrin, whatever direction you go with Resonant Amp commercially, the fact that what you have created so far will remain open source should have a lasting impact on guitar amp sims — and maybe beyond.

The process you've come up with to model sag makes this the most dynamic amp sim yet, by a longshot, and maybe that same technique could be applied to compressors and other dynamic processors that are used even more widely in recording than amp sims — a character compressor that actually compresses! I think that might be well received.

I've really enjoyed being involved in this, although it's over too soon — I thought this would be at a week-by-week, month-by-month pace. I never even got to set up the whole "test bench" I had in mind

Thanks, and good luck with it going forward!

[garrinm]

You did already tell us about the presets location - that's how i knew they were XML files

BTW - I hadn't noticed that you snuck in a "Presence" control until today

Well, it's been a flurry of activity leading up to 0.6.0, I guess I lost track of the features / explaining them here. But yes, there is presence. Though it's not a negative feedback implementation, it's more like the modern fender presence control, boosting around 4 kHz (do note that as with the rest of the tone stack it goes into the power amp, so any distortion there will act on the boosted frequencies and spread them out, it's not just a straight EQ on the final signal).

I personally find that kind of control goes a long way towards cleaning up heavy distortion, or adding definition to signals more on the edge of distortion. So I thought to get a better sound palette the amp would need it.

The parameter ranges are a bit of a mess, you have to map [-1, +1] to [0, 10] (related to some choices I made what seems now like a long time ago in this process haha). So, it's not very user friendly. I could change this in the future (seeing as I track the plugin version in the XML so I could correctly convert). But for now I guess it at least works, and if you want to change settings in XML you'd have to do x / 5 - 1 where x is the 0 to 10 value.

I see that sorting will be important, so I will revisit this. I was concerned about preserving the order in which presets were added in the plugin, I do think that is important for a consistent experience. But if you want to go into the directory and just move things around by renaming them, that makes good sense to me, I'll look into supporting that.

My next priorities are: tooltips, then a website. After that I will revisit presets unless there's some fire to be put out somewhere else. I might bug you for specifics about how you expect it to work when I get there .

[garrinm]

Well Garrin, whatever direction you go with Resonant Amp commercially, the fact that what you have created so far will remain open source should have a lasting impact on guitar amp sims — and maybe beyond.

The process you've come up with to model sag makes this the most dynamic amp sim yet, by a longshot, and maybe that same technique could be applied to compressors and other dynamic processors that are used even more widely in recording than amp sims — a character compressor that actually compresses! I think that might be well received.

I've really enjoyed being involved in this, although it's over too soon — I thought this would be at a week-by-week, month-by-month pace. I never even got to set up the whole "test bench" I had in mind

Thanks, and good luck with it going forward!

I really appreciate the kind words, but I'm not done with the open source version yet! I certainly intend to keep improving it. Some features will be out-of-scope as I'll consider them for the commercial version, but I think there's still directions to explore with the open source version. And as time goes on and it becomes more stable, I do expect things to wind down, but probably it won't be entirely abrupt.

[jbraner]

After that I will revisit presets unless there's some fire to be put out somewhere else. I might bug you for specifics about how you expect it to work when I get there .

I'm happy to do that - I'm also aware that there are plenty of other ways to look at it.
I'm pretty sure most people will lile to arrange their presets how they want them though...

Just let us know what you want us to look at (or look out for etc) as things move on.

[guitarzan]

I really appreciate the kind words, but I'm not done with the open source version yet! I certainly intend to keep improving it. Some features will be out-of-scope as I'll consider them for the commercial version, but I think there's still directions to explore with the open source version. And as time goes on and it becomes more stable, I do expect things to wind down, but probably it won't be entirely abrupt.

I realize that there is more to be done, but as it becomes more about presets and other practicalities I simply will not have much to suggest, or even an opinion for that matter, since this has been the first I've used a DAW and plugins in something like ten years. I'll still be here following progress.

[jbraner]

I simply will not have much to suggest, or even an opinion for that matter, since this has been the first I've used a DAW and plugins in something like ten years.

I would think you could offer a lot - looking at it from a new perspective.