Real amps vs modelling and plugin amps

[HTT]

For me, it is a combination of amps, preamp/DI (Darkglass VMT Ultra and B7K Ultra) and plug-ins. I can’t think of a reason to limit myself when each tool has its place.

[bangzero]

have any of you real guitar folk tried the DiBiQuadro sims? i'm just a clean to crunchy old electric folkie, but to my ears they seem unusually "tangible". they seem to give the guitar a subtle sense of dimension or space (even in mono). it's quite lovely and fun to play with. other sims i've use now seem to come from a 1d point in space. & the DiBiQuadro sims respond instantly to all my mistakes in extreme detail. :^)

anyone else hearing this? anything else out there that does this? only things i've found so far are Cytomic's The Scream, and maybe some Analog Obsession fx. The Scream is an amazing combo with the JupiterXTC & Mercury2CP in my (very limited) experience.

[zerocrossing]

When setup properly, and when using a good quality capture and IR, NAM comes closest to a real amp feel. It's damned impressive.

Honourable mentions to Mercurial, Bluecat and Kuassa. I am not a high-gain player and these float my boat for cleans / edge of breakup tones, not to mention the flexibility.

See, what’s funny about this conversation is that I have tried Bluecat and found it to be terrible in every single way. It’s literally a dream come true… on paper, but the execution is sh!t, imo. Unusable. I felt the same way about MGuitarArchitect, and I’m a long time Melda fan.

[zerocrossing]

have any of you real guitar folk tried the DiBiQuadro sims? i'm just a clean to crunchy old electric folkie, but to my ears they seem unusually "tangible". they seem to give the guitar a subtle sense of dimension or space (even in mono). it's quite lovely and fun to play with. other sims i've use now seem to come from a 1d point in space. & the DiBiQuadro sims respond instantly to all my mistakes in extreme detail. :^)

anyone else hearing this? anything else out there that does this? only things i've found so far are Cytomic's The Scream, and maybe some Analog Obsession fx. The Scream is an amazing combo with the JupiterXTC & Mercury2CP in my (very limited) experience.

Not sure if it’s been addressed in an update, but the amount of aliasing made these unusable for me. The cost was kind of high, and I felt like overall the sound was just OK.

[stimresp]

When setup properly, and when using a good quality capture and IR, NAM comes closest to a real amp feel. It's damned impressive.

Honourable mentions to Mercurial, Bluecat and Kuassa. I am not a high-gain player and these float my boat for cleans / edge of breakup tones, not to mention the flexibility.

See, what’s funny about this conversation is that I have tried Bluecat and found it to be terrible in every single way. It’s literally a dream come true… on paper, but the execution is sh!t, imo. Unusable. I felt the same way about MGuitarArchitect, and I’m a long time Melda fan.

Horses for courses. Calling the execution 'shit' is laughable though. You are of course welcome to your opinion, as is everyone else.

I rarely use the in-built amp presets at this stage, preferring NAM profiles, but I do use Destructor to make my own dynamic overdrives, and it excels as long as you are willing to dig in to make it fit your own playing style. Late Replies is fantastic.

The fact that it loads 3rd party VSTs makes it a massively flexible virtual pedalboard. In that sense, the execution is top-notch.

[Uncle E]

have any of you real guitar folk tried the DiBiQuadro sims? i'm just a clean to crunchy old electric folkie, but to my ears they seem unusually "tangible". they seem to give the guitar a subtle sense of dimension or space (even in mono). it's quite lovely and fun to play with. other sims i've use now seem to come from a 1d point in space. & the DiBiQuadro sims respond instantly to all my mistakes in extreme detail. :^)

I found it to be stiff and undynamic. Very likely my expectations were too high. Also, the tremolo has a massive phase issue.

[zerocrossing]

When setup properly, and when using a good quality capture and IR, NAM comes closest to a real amp feel. It's damned impressive.

Honourable mentions to Mercurial, Bluecat and Kuassa. I am not a high-gain player and these float my boat for cleans / edge of breakup tones, not to mention the flexibility.

See, what’s funny about this conversation is that I have tried Bluecat and found it to be terrible in every single way. It’s literally a dream come true… on paper, but the execution is sh!t, imo. Unusable. I felt the same way about MGuitarArchitect, and I’m a long time Melda fan.

Horses for courses. Calling the execution 'shit' is laughable though. You are of course welcome to your opinion, as is everyone else.

I rarely use the in-built amp presets at this stage, preferring NAM profiles, but I do use Destructor to make my own dynamic overdrives, and it excels as long as you are willing to dig in to make it fit your own playing style. Late Replies is fantastic.

The fact that it loads 3rd party VSTs makes it a massively flexible virtual pedalboard. In that sense, the execution is top-notch.

I do love Late Replies, and I’ll concede that if you are using it like a virtual pedal board, it is a great tool. I just couldn’t get Destructor to sound good at all, and I really spent a lot of time. Also, I think I remember it being really CPU intensive, but I could be mistaken.

I love to tweak. I’m not the guy who wants the one knob amp model. I thought the AxeFX was great in that regard, and I was always able to find good sounds, but Destructor wasn’t for me.

[stimresp]

I love to tweak. I’m not the guy who wants the one knob amp model. I thought the AxeFX was great in that regard, and I was always able to find good sounds, but Destructor wasn’t for me.

Again, each to their own, but what I particularly love about Destructor is the dynamic range that can be tweaked to clean-up beautifully with the guitar volume knob. It gives bucketloads of control, more than any other sim I've tried.

Generally I set the pre- and post- eq flat to begin and focus on the shaper. When I get that humming I'll bring in some gentle eq boosts and cuts. It's fairy dust in front of a nice NAM capture and IR.

Obviously I'm a total NAM convert and I'm excited to see where it's going next. Apparently the dev is working on upsampling which should deal with the aliasing issues, but I haven't run into this problem myself as I'm using mostly clean amp captures. Even so, they react surprisingly well to being pushed, in my experience.

How lucky we are to have all this great stuff!

[stoopicus]

Obviously I'm a total NAM convert and I'm excited to see where it's going next. Apparently the dev is working on upsampling which should deal with the aliasing issues, but I haven't run into this problem myself as I'm using mostly clean amp captures. Even so, they react surprisingly well to being pushed, in my experience.

How lucky we are to have all this great stuff!

Aliasing is also one of the areas where recording at a higher sample rate will also help, for technical reasons regarding sampling theory and how aliasing occurs. Doubling the sample rate in your interface is equivalent to (actually better than) adding an additional 2x upsampling.

[stimresp]

Aliasing is also one of the areas where recording at a higher sample rate will also help, for technical reasons regarding sampling theory and how aliasing occurs. Doubling the sample rate in your interface is equivalent to (actually better than) adding an additional 2x upsampling.

I'm running at 48khz and have encountered no problems, but apparently others have with high gain captures.

[Naillerz78]

Played through Softube Vintage Amp Room. Love the simple GUI on that one and the Marshall has this sustaining roar to it on power chords the others can lack. Instant Slash /GnR tones with a LP style guitar very simple yet dynamic that sim. It’s starting to move up my tier list

[kevinsparks]

When setup properly, and when using a good quality capture and IR, NAM comes closest to a real amp feel. It's damned impressive.

Honourable mentions to Mercurial, Bluecat and Kuassa. I am not a high-gain player and these float my boat for cleans / edge of breakup tones, not to mention the flexibility.

What mercurial sims do u use for cleans and EOB tones..?

I like the SS-11X, which gets very to close to my hardware SS-11. It's pretty diverse from to clean to eob to high gain, and it can do a whole lot if you use a variety of cab ir's. The gui is also nice because everything is all on one "page", no clicking through a bunch of tabs. And it's their cheapest product!

[zerocrossing]

I love to tweak. I’m not the guy who wants the one knob amp model. I thought the AxeFX was great in that regard, and I was always able to find good sounds, but Destructor wasn’t for me.

Again, each to their own, but what I particularly love about Destructor is the dynamic range that can be tweaked to clean-up beautifully with the guitar volume knob. It gives bucketloads of control, more than any other sim I've tried.

Generally I set the pre- and post- eq flat to begin and focus on the shaper. When I get that humming I'll bring in some gentle eq boosts and cuts. It's fairy dust in front of a nice NAM capture and IR.

Obviously I'm a total NAM convert and I'm excited to see where it's going next. Apparently the dev is working on upsampling which should deal with the aliasing issues, but I haven't run into this problem myself as I'm using mostly clean amp captures. Even so, they react surprisingly well to being pushed, in my experience.

How lucky we are to have all this great stuff!

Yeah, NAM is definitely a nice addition to our choices. I had a Kemper for a decade and I had a love-hate relationship with it. I don't know what the actual deal with it is, but I found that some captures could just sound amazing, while others sounded like they had this weird low-mid mush to them. I'm talking medium and higher gain sounds, not necessarily the kind of ultra-high gain sounds of metal players. I generally tend to hate a lot of those tones anyway.

There were enough good captures to keep me happy, but what I missed were dual amp paths, which I had used a lot during my time using hardware amps, and the type of tweakability that captures don't... well capture. I don't know the electronics behind them, but there's a world of difference in some amps between cranking the mid gain up, and leaving the mid gain where it is and bringing down the bass and treble controls. This is pretty silly of me, because the Kemper had a ton of control to adjust a capture, but I probably felt nostalgia for the time when I worked in a music shop and I'd have fun getting my hands on whatever new or traded in amp would come in.

When NAM came out, I was happily using Amplitube and ignored Tonex altogether. I heard a demo that sounded great, so I checked it out. Mostly what bugged me was the hit-or-miss way of finding captures on the FaceBook page. This was before they built a site for it. It didn't feel like a professional product... because it wasn't, even though it was providing a good quality output. For me, to be ready for professional production, I need a wide range of features, which I guess you'd get if you ran it inside something like Bluecat's Axiom. Because I was already so deep in Amplitube, it just made sense for me to add Tonex so I could be in the same software environment for all my sounds.

[zerocrossing]

I just thought of something that is so second nature, but important, that I don’t even think about it anymore. I use a UAD Apollo interface, and I keep a limiter, actually 3 different models, an 1176, Destressor and Avalon VT-737, each for their different characters. I set it up to just touch the peaks when I’m slamming the strings in a chord, so it’s not really compressing most of the time, but it does give a tiny bit of “umph,” to the tone of the naked guitar signal. Unity gain, though, and I’m not clipping the Apollo at any point. The 1176 is my all rounder, and if you don’t want a new interface you could use the native plugin, or if you’re feeling fancy, Warm Audio makes a clone I’ve seen used for $400. I’ve considered it, but I like being able to change models for different sounds.

[stoopicus]

There’s also the Cali ‘76 but yeah the UAD plugin is fine.