So I've been on a guitar amp sim pilgrimage recently and stumbled on Aurora DSP's Rhino. I was intrigued by the fact that it doesn't try to simulate 'guitar amp X' but rather gives you all the elements that make up an amp chain (input, preamps, EQ, IRs and effects) and lets you play with them.
Basically it makes you approach your guitar tone as a sound designer rather than a guitar player, which yields some very different results. Plus literally everything is right there on one page. You can even cascade and blend several preamps and there's a (hidden, ack) octave-down feature if you drag the Rhino logo in the center (took me ages to find it, wtf...).
Then for all the playfulness, it has some really awesome pro features like tone matching and a quad-IR mixer that works extremely well.
Overall, I still play Mercuriall's AmpBox when I wan't to just play an amp (they're on par IMO with neuralDSP, which are awesome too but I hate the fragmentation of their line, like, no pitch or wah for Abasi etc.), but after going through a ton of sims, Rhino really strikes me as possibly the most creative take on using amp simulation in a more 'out of the box' way. You end up sounding like nothing else because you approach it like nothing else.
It's not the end-all of guitar amp sims and I wouldn't recommend going there to get that perfect vintage AC30 sound, but I'm amazed it doesn't get more attention. Even just as a distortion designer I don't think I've seen anything like this, certainly not for guitar.
Aurora DSP Rhino is one crazy beast
-
- KVRian
- Topic Starter
- 989 posts since 27 Jun, 2011
Gorilla is much more versatile but also more like an amp, if I had to pick one for bass it would be that. Gorilla is a lot more like Rhino, it goes from classic to out there.