MixWave JHS Loud Is More Good Suite

[zerocrossing]

This one didn't seem to have a thread, so here it is. I'm still in demo mode, but I find the sound quality to be very good. Presets seem a bit bright for my taste, but that's easily fixed with mic placement or EQ. Maybe switching to the neck pickup.

Aliasing on high gain sounds is undetectable for me, if the oversampling is set at 8x. 4x is usually acceptable.

It's nice that it can be used as a full rig plugin, or as individual plugin effects. I'm not totally in love with the amp model, (it's not bad, just a bit lacking in character, which I suppose is expected for a "pedal platform" amp.) so it's nice to be able to just drag an instance and put it in front of whatever I want. The stars of the show are the pedals, though, and they are good. My favorite is the Hard Drive. The distortion is super smooth. and sounds great in front of anything.

My complaints are that the full suite is $143, which is more than Amplitube 5 Max is usually on sale for. (I think you can currently get a bundle of everything Amplitube makes, except for add-ons for $99!) That's more than a hardware JHS Hard Drive would run you, which this plugin is making me want. I'd never really use the full plugin, because it's too lacking things like a volume pedal, wah, room convolution, stereo pathcs, etc. As far as I can tell, there's no way to do MIDI learn anything, so you're automating in your DAW. That means I'm probably just running it in front of Amplitube or something. I guess I could buy the single plugin of the Hard Drive, but honestly, I might just spring for the pedal. If it's anything like the plugin, I already love it. (it is)

If you're looking for a pretty simple but high quality plugin that's similar in structure to something from Neural DSP, I'd highly recommend this, especially if you're a "pedal platform" kind of player. I frankly wish it was a bit more robust, and as usual, they do the thing where you have a screen full of blank cabinet grill and have to click on tabs to change full size graphic representations of each pedal effect. It's super annoying having to toggle between things when setting up a full chain, but this is true of most amp rig emulations. Why? So dumb. Guitar Rig seems to be the one that gets it right.

[heydemir]

[cle[/clear]

[Magic Russ]

Or you could get a ToneX (or Neural or Kemper) profile of the Loud Is More Good amp for free from their website.

[Magic Russ]

It's super annoying having to toggle between things when setting up a full chain, but this is true of most amp rig emulations. Why? So dumb. Guitar Rig seems to be the one that gets it right.

GR does have the best interface from that perspective.

I also hate the interfaces where they have the photorealistic renderings of components where you can't see what the settings are because they captured the glare on the chrome knobs.

[zerocrossing]

Or you could get a ToneX (or Neural or Kemper) profile of the Loud Is More Good amp for free from their website.

Sure, that's true, though upon your recommendations, I didn't find any of the Tonex LOUD IS MORE GOOD captures to sound very good. A bit too boxy. I like the plugin sound a lot more

Tonex is great, though I find that it's benefitting a bit of a new kid on the block syndrome, in that a good ol' model is every bit as good, but also captures the feel of how an amp is actually adjusted, including mic placement, as opposed to just having gain, output and a tone-stack.

I ignored Tonex for a while, until all the hype about NAM started percolating. Then I did a NAM-Tonex shoot out, and found that I preferred Tonex, mostly because it was a mature product with a lot of useful features and available good captures. That's worth something to me, but if you're on a budget, NAM is also great, though more aliasy. I know some say that NAM is more accurate, but I'd rather have less artifacts than great accuracy and harsh aliasing. It still aliases a bit even on hyper accurate captures, and is unusable on my machine due to high CPU use.

After I got all into Tonex, which was really impressive, I put it up against my AxeFX III mk2, and found that it could be equally good, and sometimes better, depending on the model. AxeFX suffers from IRs that make things sound a bit samey, so I tended to already be using Ownhammer IRs. With that in mind, I started comparing AxeFX models with Tonex captures and Ampeg models, and I found that most of the time, I preferred the sounds I could get out of Amplitube over both Tonex and the Fractal.

Anyway, I think the JHS plugin is really good. Not really for someone like me, but it sounds great and would be perfect for the kind of person who doesn't want to mess with much to get good results.