AMPLITUBE 2 !!

[Lunch Money]

Educated DSP person will know quite well what to expect. Magic tricks like Squids' claims are simply impossible.

Educated people will also know that the term "impossible" shows only a lack of imagination and belief in the abilities of others. It's possible... just possible... that a team of experts working over a year might be able to come up with something that you, for all your knowledge of the field (I didn't know you were a programmer, actually, given how phobic you are of computer sound technology) couldn't have imagined or come up with on your own.

Scepticism aside (you're welcome to it!), you can't come in guns blazing from completely the opposite perspective (and in a rude way) and expect people to believe YOUR "expertise" either.

Gotta agree that I don't need a huge and photo-realistic GUI to make me believe in a product, though. But knowing the market and guitar players in general the way I do, you gotta do stuff like this to get them on-side. Give an amp-head guitar player a 'native host' GUI and the best DSP ever conceived of and they'll still pick the "amp-looking" plug-in instead, 90% of the time.

Greg

[Kingston]

given how phobic you are of computer sound technology

erm.. huh?

While I'll shrug that off as plain oddball, I'll also say that current CPU generation does not allow for what Squids has claimed. There isn't enough raw DSP power, a simple matter of maths, no matter how big a genius team of experts anyone has. I'm also not going to start lecturing about the aspects of guitar amp component modelling or the algorithms involved. KVR is a deaf place for that.

Threads like these remind me so well why I started disliking KVR sometime a go.

(..he said while tripping on a regular and a fanboy)

Still, it's good to remain hopeful that they will have at least improved on some previous shortcomings. That's is in fact highly likely.

[Lunch Money]

I could be wrong about the phobia... it might have been specific to guitar-modeling technologies, which wouldn't make my claim 'oddball', since it's only in those threads that I would have encountered this particular line of your reasoning. We don't seem to encounter each other in non-guitar threads.

I'm not a fanboy, not owning much IK stuff (just Sampletank LE because it came with the Combi Kits) and not owning Amplitube. I actually use Green Machine II.

You ALWAYS make assumptions about people, always think that your opinion is the most educated, and always end up making yourself look like an asshole whether you mean to or not. I like your music, I like your drum kits, and I believe you have a lot to offer this community.

I just wish you weren't such a tosser when you did it. There were far more constructive ways to approach your response than, "you're making me ill", using the words "bullshit" or "impossible", and also implying that you have extensive enough knowledge about the subject to have more authority than an entire team of DSP experts.

The thing is... Amplitube is good, and award-winning. Is it an amp? No. Amplitube 2 is clearly going to be an improvement. Will it be an amp? No, but it's getting closer.

Your claims make you look a bit of a nutbar, to be frank, and your tone does NOT convey the kind of person you probably are in real life. I'd rather get to know the musician of integrity than the know-it-all loudmouth.

And finally-- you didn't need to post a comment in this thread at all. You had the power to save yourself the 'stress' and 'aggravation'.

Please, please, please... learn not to make assumptions about people.

Greg

[cron]

20,000 amp combinations? Let's do the math: all the controls combined and every single knob incremented by one. All the permutations add up to about 20,000.

Squids, you have me feeling ill.

Excluding effects, Amplitude 2 ships with 39 modules. 39x39 = 1521, 38x38 = 1444 etc etc... Ramps up pretty quick.

[Kingston]

Your claims make you look a bit of a nutbar, to be frank, and your tone does NOT convey the kind of person you probably are in real life. I'd rather get to know the musician of integrity than the know-it-all loudmouth.

All humanity and integrity aside, KVR used to serve as my punching back. Unfortunately my leftsided snide remarks do not generate the right kind of discussion.

The wrong people always read them. Anyone with at least a bit of DSP experience, who sees thru the marketing would most likely agree with this one for example. That doesn't make me a team of experts, or mean that I can single handedly create something better. High quality oversampling, component modelling, physical modelling... Just to name but a few extremely CPU intesive tasks involved in proper emulations. Look them up, see what the competition is doing, and realise why amplitube 2 will not be earth shattering.

Made some assumptions again. Probably pissed off some people. Turfs being penetrated. Egoes punctured. Waking up the forum cops.

Luckily, life isn't as serious as some would have you believe.

[Lunch Money]

And I'm not as serious as you might think.

Cheers!

[finnbio]

The thing is... Amplitube is good, and award-winning. Is it an amp?

Hm let's think about this - because, like it is with the Oscars, it's not the best product that gets the cake - it's the one that puts in the most money in advertising and makes a lot in selling. These two are, of course, inter-related. Of course the product can't be complete crap, but it's rarely ever the best that gets these awards...

Izotope's trash is largely ignored in a lot of magazines, wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that they don't advertise???? I KNOW I'm not the only one who thinks it's a wonderful plugin...

To squids: Nigel not that great, huh? Well, according to CM (I know, not necessarily impartial, as they also have to take into account the interests of their advertisers), in a shootout between Warp, Revalver, Amplitube and Nigel, it was concluded that Nigel (quote) "blows everything else in this competition out of the water...". I suppose different ears hear different things. I actually haven't heard Nigel, but amplitube 1, while not bad at all, certainly had it's shortcomings and was (is) overpriced.

Greg (Lunch money). Yup, sadly you're right - what we see affects what we hear . But not what the person who listens to our recordings hears. And pretending circular controls is still kind of stupid in a mouse-controlled environment. And these pictures of tubes really irk me badly. I love GMII in that respect: "No tubes inside"

Alex

[Lunch Money]

The thing is... Amplitube is good, and award-winning. Is it an amp?

Hm let's think about this - because, like it is with the Oscars, it's not the best product that gets the cake - it's the one that puts in the most money in advertising and makes a lot in selling. These two are, of course, inter-related. Of course the product can't be complete crap, but it's rarely ever the best that gets these awards...

I agree that there is no using an ad-populem argument as 'proof'. Oh, how many times I argued with my friend Brad that 'Titanic' winning a bunch of awards and being the highest-grossing movie ever didn't make it a 'good' movie.

However, you also are correct that there IS a relationship. 'Lost in Translation', 'American Splendour', 'American Beauty', 'Adaptation', 'L.A. Confidential', and many other -good- movies have won Oscars, too. They're not shown as good BECAUSE they won an Oscar, but it's merely one more way of somebody recognizing talent. Somewhere along the way, someone recognized quality in Amplitube, whether or not it's actually the 'best'. As I mentioned, I'm a GMA2 guy, so I obviously didn't merely buy into advertising and marketing.

I agree that Trash gets overlooked... and it's easy for me to agree because every time somebody mentions it, I think, "Oh yeah, forgot about that one!".

Comparative quality aside, I'm quite willing to believe that if a handful of transistors and code can make a unit like PodXT sound fairly convincing that a modern computer is more than capable of doing a 'decent' job. I also know from past experience that this won't convince Kingston (and it's not my intention to) because he'll also say that the PodXT is crap.

Greg

[Sascha Franck]

OK, I won't talk about the sound of any of those emulations. Just so much: For me they'd be (and are) pleasant enough to use them in all sorts of contexts.

Where ALL of them (including full modulated amps, such as the Vetta or ZenTera, or whatever) fall EXTREMELY (and even ridiculously) short is live useage in different lineups.

If you ALLWAYS play the same songs, with the same band, under similar conditions = Fine. Either you're playing in a majorly successful band then or doing weddings and such.
For someone like me, playing a lot of live jobs with totally different sound demands, emulators suck big fast ass so far.

Here's a short description of the live rig I like using the most (I've got some easier solutions though, for cheesy commercial jobs):
- Boogie Mark IV.
Rack with:
- Alesis MIDIverb III (don't laugh, it's great for live useage, nobody will tell the difference because it's running through guitar amp speakers).
- A Midibuddy looper/switcher. In the loops we find:
- The Boogie preamp
- A Tubescreamer.
- A Rocktron noisegate.
- An old Ibanez EQ.
Pedal board with:
- Whammy.
- Cry Baby.
- Ernie Ball volume.
- some modulation effects (allways changed).
- Boss tempo delay (DDT 5 I think).

The looper/switcher is switching the Boogie channels as well.
Signal flow is: Guitar > Floorboard with Whammy > Cry Baby > Rack with looper (with all above mentioned devices) > Floorboard with Ernie Ball volume pedal > some modulation devices (I change them occasionally, Boss SE2, Pearl Phaser, things like that - I usually don't need much modulation stuff live) > Boss Digital Delay with Tap Tempo control > Rack with Alesis (strictly used for verbs only) > Poweramp in.

Everything is nicely controlled via some MIDI pedal (only sending patch changes).

OK, now, here's a bunch of VERY common things I am PERMANENTLY running into, along with a bunch of solutions:

"Hey, this room is sounding pretty much dampened" - No problem, I'll just turn up the presence button or the individual channel's treble controls (sometimes this might only affect the clean channel or whatever).

"Uh... this hall is sounding wet" - No problem, I just turn down the reverb mix on the Alesis (and probably the delay level on the delay unit as well).

"Today it's gonna sound more bluesy than rocky" - No problem, I'll just turn down the gain (and probably the trebles) on the orange and red channels of the Boogie.

"Today I may need louder lead sounds" - No problem, I'll just turn up the output level of the EQ (which is only functioning as a lead level boost).

"Ouch, pretty bad wires today, need more noise reduction" - No problem, I'll just lower the threshold on the noise gate.

There's a bunch of other problems or a combination of these (such as using a guitar with way higher output, etc) - ALL can be solved easily with my rig.

All this is while using ONE SINGLE preset bank (of 10 patches only that is).

NO emulation is up to these tasks AT ALL.
Just one example: If I needed more treble on the clean sounds for a particular gig I'd have to got through ALL my clean patches and resave them. How lame.
The same is true for more/less reverb, more/less gain and so on.

My old GT-5 did at least have a proper "utility" mode for the following:
- Global treble/bass response.
- Global reverb level.
- Global noise reduction threshold.
Which is why I'm still using it.
Another thing it does is to keep my last tapped delay tempo in mind, even whan changing patches. The lame POD-based stuff doesn't offer this - so when I am changing patches, the tempo of my delays is lost. UBERLAME! Apart fromt that, the Boss units (the mentioned tempo delay as well) is calculating the tempo from 4 taps while the POD delays are calculating it from two taps - which opens up for inaccuracy, especially in a live context.

So - finally, all those emulations are just not there for live playing, not at all. It's just WAY too much flipping through patches and doing fine adjustments, whereas I can just raise the gain of my lead channel during soloing, should I ever need to. And it'll be just the same when switching to it (or a variant of it) the next time.

In case they'd ever wanted to be useful for live musicianss, all those emulations should offer a WAY better utility menu, giving you access to all the things mentioned above.

[Lunch Money]

Sure, trying to do everything in one small unit is different than having separate units with separate physical controls.

Hard to argue with that.

Greg

[Kingston]

modern computer is more than capable of doing a 'decent' job.

ah. finally. the truth comes out.

OK, my critic, as was probably noticed by some, was aimed at comments like: "I have to say it sounds like the real thing", "It's in a whole other ballpark.".

I won't even bother about the countless other comments along these lines.

I never said you can't get decent emulation out of a computer. It's just that that kind of marketing hype needs to be addressed with scrutinity and with a good background information. Hence the remarks about current CPU generation and the (still limited) possibilities it offers. It'll be years untill "it sounds like the real thing". As far as ballpark, it better at least get close to vox tonelab, based on those comments. Otherwise there will be fire and brimstone.

Lunch money, I've never completely destroyed PodXT in these forums either. It's definitely decent, it's just that there's a better one as well. I'm sorry if I come off as know-it-all, but as far as this topic, that's pretty damn close to truth.

I would absolutely love if "it sounds like the real thing". But I'm 100% sure that won't be the case.

[Sascha Franck]

Sure, trying to do everything in one small unit is different than having separate units with separate physical controls.

Hard to argue with that.

Well, it *could* (at least partially) be done using some clever utility menu.
I have really thought about it and even wrote some mail to H&K after trying their ZenTera when it came out (mind you they never answered and I don't have that mail anymore to post it).

You could for example have some option like "set up amp model in global group #XYZ".
That way, I might just "send" all my models designed for clean rhytm guitars to "Clean Rhythm Group #1".
The same goes for all lead models, all crunch models - etc etc.
In those "groups" one could assign some global things, such as relative gain/treble and whatever offsets.

It's getting even easier for global relative reverb, noise reduction, bass/treble and such offsets.

While this might be tough to get done on a limited "computer" (and/or display) of hardware amps (such as the Vetta and ZenTera) sometimes, on a computer based emulation it should be a more or less easy thing.
Apparently not enough people are complaining about it.

But IMO that's one of the reasons for listening to so many utter shite guitar sounds these days on live gigs (in case people are using programmable stuff). Players just don't bother to adjust their patches. And, for the very reasons mentioned above, it's understandable because that'd be a patch fiddling fest on each and every gig.

It's defenitely one of the reasons why I won't use any of those emulations for serious live gigs.
I've been using both my POD and VAmp for some "test gigs" and while the sounds were REALLY nice at home (were I programmed them) almost each of them sucked live. Especially when switching sounds it was just too apparent that there was no "consistent" nature to them. A utility menu such as mentioned might've fixed most (if not all) issues.

[Sascha Franck]

Btw, for what it's worth, I usually never care about all that "sounds like the real thing" stuff. Because:
- I want it to "get the job done" rather than sounding like whatever real thing.
- I want it to suit my needs rather than anybody else's.
- I think most guitarists (yes, sometimes including me) are way too conservative.

Who in the world is telling you an overdriven patch HAS TO sound like a LP running through some Plexi Marshall? Just because each and every <famous> rock guitarist and their engineers have been telling you so?
Oh yes... that's quite an innovative approach, isn't it?

[championrabbit]

This thread is pathetic.

1. Nobody has heard the product apart from Squids who is not even vaguely impartial.

2. AT one suffers from aliasing. No amp sim should suffer from obvious aliasing like AT does. Was it fixed? No it was not. Was it addressed? No it was not.

Thus we see that IK are completely happy to release a product which is faulty and never fix it.

Yet what have we here?

People getting all excited about a new product by the makers of the aliasing-suffering AT mk1!!

Because having released AT1 broken/faulty and then not even addressed the probelm, AT2 is BOUND to be amazing, right??



Any of you guys want to buy London Bridge?

$5000!

[championrabbit]

- I want it to "get the job done" rather than sounding like whatever real thing.

Exactly.