Waves GTR vs Native Instruments Guitar Rig 2

[AndrewSimon]

Hey Vervil

I was browsing your site.
http://www.milking-rosewood.com

Nice playing.

[Vervil]

Thanks Andrew, appreciated

[Lunch Money]

Milking Rosewood? What about the poor neglected ebony and maple?

[Vervil]

LoL!

My friend gave me idea for the name. And I would not really use ebony... I think "Milking Ebony" could lead people to have wrong ideas about site content

[kilroy]

Ok Jeff and Sascha...would you please give me an idea how this file sounds on first listen. Just an objective critique would be nice. I used your DI source Jeff.

Too muddy for my taste. Sounds like someone playing behind the doors of a rehearsal room. Character of the drive might be fine though, but it's hard to tell.

I think it sounds like GTR with a slightly more Trebly setting than the one I used. It sounds pretty good!Jeff

Right, thanks chaps.

Sascha, I was sort of prepared for your take based on what I know of your tone, which I find very well balanced.

I have some more examples I wouldn't mind some opinions on if that is not too much trouble. I will try to get them up for the weekend. Some tweaking to do here in the mean time.

[Sascha Franck]

Man, Vervil, that's indeed some kickass playing to be sure!
Bit too metal-ish for my personal taste, but that's just me. Playing is great!

[Guitarjeff]

The thing I don't like about the POD is the extreme woofiness on the lower strings. Especially when Palm muting. If I use it for a final track, I have to cut lows in the mix and the guitar ends up sounding rather small.

Are you using POD 2.0 or XT? I have old POD, but will buy XT soon. If you are on XT and need distorted guitars , metal add-on pack will make a significant difference, especially 5150 mod. Also, when mixing, you can try producer Andy Sneap's trick of using multiband compressors just one band,(on all dist guitars together grouped on one bus) to tame lows around 150-200 Hz, so it can work better with bass and tame palm muting on places a bit.

Cheers!

I have 2.0 also. I like the Modern High Gain amp the best.Also the Brit Classic.

That sounds like a good tip. Would you use that instead of compressing the guitar group normally, or in addition to it? I normally put a UAD 1176 on my guitar group.

I am ashamed to admit I rarely use Multiband compression because I haven't really figured out how it works.


Jeff

[Guitarjeff]

Yeah! Vervil, great stuff. Not too metal for my tastes!

I Listened to Arrhythmia Kiss. Is that all POD? Great sound and playing!

Cheers!

Jeff

[fritzman]

Just to ilustrate, here is Amplitube clip (because it was obviously poor job done, and everyone disliked this one)but with some EQ to match spectral picture of Soldano Marshall clip.
www.milking-rosewood.com/mp3/Amplitube_Matched.mp3


I have no doubts that miced amp sounds better than amp sim, difference is easy to hear in a most of cases, just wanted to point out how much depends on skills when it comes to sound, and people often dismiss some sims because they were unable to get good results fast. Those "Shootouts" of different plugins are never quite fair, and I think sometimes people even simply tend to make patch sounds worst because they dislike plug and expect it to sound in certain way.

Hi Dushan,

I checked out your music at your site and I have big respect for your stuff. I mostly liked the playing and tone of "where you are guitarsolo".
After making that clear: Your Amplitube clip is much closer to the Soldano/Marshall clip that Jeff posted but it still has this ... sound. It's this bit of plastic that plugin makers would like to get rid of. Those shootouts are not fair and I think they are seldom really meant to be fair! This whole thing is way too much a taste thing that you could always please everybody. While I like your stuff from a musical POV I wouldn't want to play with your tone for example. Just my personal preference. This is true for most peoples tones btw. So it's not always a matter of not available skills or abilities but mostly a matter of taste.


Best wishes, FRitz

[Vervil]

Man, Vervil, that's indeed some kickass playing to be sure!
Bit too metal-ish for my personal taste, but that's just me. Playing is great!

Thanks Sascha. I have heard some of your clips here and there before, and even if you often represent yourself quite shy, as an ok-ish player, you do play very very nice, really focused, so it is a nice compliment if you like my playing... you know your way with guitar

[cheul]

Ok, as Jeff's examples I liked most tone-wise were actually GTR and GR-2, I decided to try and get a sound between those 2 :
http://killbenonline.free.fr/Cheulamp.wav
http://killbenonline.free.fr/Cheulamp2.wav
The second one being more trebly.
Please, have a listen and tell me what you think.

[Vervil]

The thing I don't like about the POD is the extreme woofiness on the lower strings. Especially when Palm muting. If I use it for a final track, I have to cut lows in the mix and the guitar ends up sounding rather small.

Are you using POD 2.0 or XT? I have old POD, but will buy XT soon. If you are on XT and need distorted guitars , metal add-on pack will make a significant difference, especially 5150 mod. Also, when mixing, you can try producer Andy Sneap's trick of using multiband compressors just one band,(on all dist guitars together grouped on one bus) to tame lows around 150-200 Hz, so it can work better with bass and tame palm muting on places a bit.

Cheers!

I have 2.0 also. I like the Modern High Gain amp the best.Also the Brit Classic.

That sounds like a good tip. Would you use that instead of compressing the guitar group normally, or in addition to it? I normally put a UAD 1176 on my guitar group.

I am ashamed to admit I rarely use Multiband compression because I haven't really figured out how it works.


Jeff

I also like modern high gain, for leads. About Compression: From what I know, it is not of much use to compress distorted guitars, as they are already compressed because of very nature of distortion. Also, in mastering, as heavily distorted guitars are panned hard left and right most of the times, when applying compression and limiting to the mix, they will be compressed and become appaerently "bigger" anyway. If you are interested in topic of using multiband compressor for this, I got this from Andy Sneaps personal forum at ultimatemetal.com (one of the subforums), you can find a zillion useful informations there, including this trick with multiband (andy uses waves c4) If you like, send me a PM with your mail, and I will send you a screenshot of plugin with right settings I got there.
You said you have Line 6 amp. You do know that with POD XT and all addons purchased you get same software with all models as in their Vetta II head? Didn't tried Guitar Rig 2, but judging from sound clips I have heard, High Gain is still not right, but there is a lot of interesting sound mangling tools you cannot find in other sims.

Yeah! Vervil, great stuff. Not too metal for my tastes!

I Listened to Arrhythmia Kiss. Is that all POD? Great sound and playing!

Thank you Jeff! I think lead was a POD. This is just a temporary version, I am kind of lazy when I have to finish instrumentals. Other guitars were everything i could get my hands on, just for the sake of experimenting. I remeber that there was a SIR impulse reverb on both sides with impulses of guitar boxes I got from noisevault.com Not that I really like sound of guitars in that song, kind of thin and artificial to me. Most of other "Demo" stuff is POD.

And I have checked your site briefly will come back later to check mp3's. It seems that you are on your way to become a celebrity? Nice!

Hi Dushan,

I checked out your music at your site and I have big respect for your stuff. I mostly liked the playing and tone of "where you are guitarsolo".
After making that clear: Your Amplitube clip is much closer to the Soldano/Marshall clip that Jeff posted but it still has this ... sound. It's this bit of plastic that plugin makers would like to get rid of. Those shootouts are not fair and I think they are seldom really meant to be fair! This whole thing is way too much a taste thing that you could always please everybody. While I like your stuff from a musical POV I wouldn't want to play with your tone for example. Just my personal preference. This is true for most peoples tones btw. So it's not always a matter of not available skills or abilities but mostly a matter of taste. Smile


Best wishes, FRitz

Glad you like it Fritz. "Where you are" guitar solo is Digitech 2101 (not sure about number) that was best thing you could get for recording direct at that time (song was recorded in 1996). Kind of 80's sounding to me, but in a nice way. I absolutely agree about amplitube, as I have already said, it has to me some kind of fizzy, unpleasent character in high mids, that you can't get rid of, no matter what you do. I had access to it in studio when I was working on a project at that time, but at the end I was dissapointed, just made some presets you can find here at KVR, and quick demo for Lady J presets. Btw, you gave me a really nice compliment unintentionally, when you have said that you would not use my tone because in those clips there is a lot of different stuff and presets used, but I guess when we play, the way we play modifies tone, so one person sounds similar on different setups.
Btw checked some clips on your site. It is nice, I do like mixing of electronica elements and distorted guitars, interesting mixture of styles, only if vocals could be a bit better. Don't know what is the reason, but voice sounds somehow "homemade" if you know what I mean? Nice pictures of "band"

[fritzman]

Hi Dushan,

I checked out your music at your site and I have big respect for your stuff. I mostly liked the playing and tone of "where you are guitarsolo".

Glad you like it Fritz. "Where you are" guitar solo is Digitech 2101 (not sure about number) that was best thing you could get for recording direct at that time (song was recorded in 1996). Kind of 80's sounding to me, but in a nice way.

Oh, that's interesting.

Btw, you gave me a really nice compliment unintentionally, when you have said that you would not use my tone because in those clips there is a lot of different stuff and presets used, but I guess when we play, the way we play modifies tone, so one person sounds similar on different setups.

Yes, you're right! I once read this story about a guy who was at the GIT and had a private session with Robben Ford. They swapped guitars and Robben Ford sounded basically the same and this student said he still sounded poor.

Btw checked some clips on your site. It is nice, I do like mixing of electronica elements and distorted guitars, interesting mixture of styles, only if vocals could be a bit better. Don't know what is the reason, but voice sounds somehow "homemade" if you know what I mean? Nice pictures of "band"

Cool that you liked it. I'm not sure what you might meant with "homemade vocals"? Actually I wanted them to sound like this. I'm 95% happy with the sound of this album.
Yes, the pictures of the "band" are nice.


All the best, FRitz

[ew]

Btw, you gave me a really nice compliment unintentionally, when you have said that you would not use my tone because in those clips there is a lot of different stuff and presets used, but I guess when we play, the way we play modifies tone, so one person sounds similar on different setups.

Yes, you're right! I once read this story about a guy who was at the GIT and had a private session with Robben Ford. They swapped guitars and Robben Ford sounded basically the same and this student said he still sounded poor.

Very true, and a fact that so many people forget- tone is first and foremost in the hands; everything else is just icing on the cake

ew

[Hink]

Btw, you gave me a really nice compliment unintentionally, when you have said that you would not use my tone because in those clips there is a lot of different stuff and presets used, but I guess when we play, the way we play modifies tone, so one person sounds similar on different setups.

Yes, you're right! I once read this story about a guy who was at the GIT and had a private session with Robben Ford. They swapped guitars and Robben Ford sounded basically the same and this student said he still sounded poor.

Very true, and a fact that so many people forget- tone is first and foremost in the hands; everything else is just icing on the cake

ew

yup...I agree 100%, but let us not forget that another important link is also between your hands and the amp...there is a lot you can do to improve a guitars tone and efficiency as well...even if you just walked out of gc with a new paul...if you think about it amp means to amplify, (now of course the amp does change the sound and we exploit that nicely). That's why I like a rackmount pre-amp, I see that as a "tonafyer" and my 400 watt power amp just amplifies. However that's also why I like active electronics in my guitars. For me I feel I have more control over the tone and dynamics right onboard my guitar. Not too mention that active gives me a consistant, low impedance signal output and delivers it with far more effeciency then passive electronics...

For recording though I'm still pleased with my POD 2.0 and a Sansamp GT2.