I recently went back ITB for guitar tones. I couldn’t deny that Tonex sounded as good as my AxeFX and didn’t have the fan noise. It was too too inflexible on its own to be useful to me, but I knew it worked in Amplitube, so that’s the route I went. I picked up a HX Stomp XL in case I need something easily portable, and it came with Helix Native, so I’m set.
But I’ve had Komplete since the dawn of time, so of course I had Guitar Rig 6. I dusted it off during my demos of Tonex/Amplitube and I was pleasantly surprised at how good the amp sims sounded, but I sort of was focused on something else. I use it a fair amount, but only as a multi-effects plugin for other stuff.
Yesterday I decided to spend some time doing some sound design for complex effects that would go on after other amp sim plugins, and I never ended up loading up another amp sim. Guitar Rig 6 sounds fantastic. I’ll add the caveat that the “emulations” seems to me to be wildly off from the amps they advertise they’re emulating, but if you disregard that and just use them, they have this sound… hard to explain. They sort of sound like they look. Like Into The Spiderverse vs. Tobey Maguire‘s Spider-Man movies. Yesterday I found myself really liking the general character and I often wandered away from my goal of making heavily effect laden sounds and just ended up with a bunch of more basic guitar amp sounds. It’s really useful to use the crossover to get big spacious sounds that keep a very tight low end. I found myself getting unique guitar tones that I loved as much as anything I’ve ever gotten from an amp simulation, including the Kemper and Fractal models.
The UI is clean and basically easy to use. They have IK and Line 6 beaten by a wide margin in this respect. Native Instruments manages to have all the complexity and more available to the user, but somehow manage to present it in a way where you never feel lost or wonder why you can’t tweak a stomp setting and still see your amp settings.
Variety isn’t as big as some of the competitors, but it does seem to cover most of what you’d want, from clean to ultra high gain. Effects cover most everything. Of course if you want something very detailed and specific, like a Binson Echorec sound, you’re going to want to load up your favorite separate plugin. (Mine’s the one from Pulsar) This is try of all of the amp sim plugins, as far as I can tell.
So that’s my story. If you were like me and made a judgement based on previous versions, which were definitely crappy sounding, or focused on how little their emulations sounded like the amps they kind of look like, I’d encourage you to dust it off and give it some more time. You probably already own it when you got on the Komplete upgrade bandwagon.
Got ya.. love your analogy.
