Software has NEVER ACHIEVED Decent Guitar Distortion. Nope.

[waiting man]

I mean, really, who is it telling you that digital distortion isn't "decent"?
Did anybody ever listen to...

sorry for the cut SF...but I totally agree. there are incredibly huge, perverse, vivid, dooming distorsions in all Fripp and Belew material. every decade or less, those players create a new tremendous, original chain.
thinking that most of fripp distortions from thrak and the 90's material are Digitechs or Rolands makes me wonder a lot.
I sometimes rely a lot on a friend's old digitech rp3 and I'm contantly surprised by what you can do with the grunge distortion and something like a cab sim to muffle the high freqs a bit. not only that...the wahs are really extreme and the verbs are huge.

[Trevor Jackson]

Thanks for the dirthead link! It's a little expensive on my CPU, but I'm definitely not deleting it. Has more of a bite than warp but very pleasing.

I did find ONE decent patch in my travels, though. It's called "Warp". It has three patches - a JC chorus, a Plexi and a Mesa. The JC and Plexi are only so-so. The Mesa is the best distortion I have found in a VST. It's $50. Unless you guys can come with a better idea, it looks like that's what I'm gonna buy.

Warp huh...are you sure you tried FreeAmp SE 1.5 (2 should be out any day now)? Try all the presets and tweak the ones that you like - I am sure you can do as well as Warp. Another free one that might do the Warp thing is Dirthead ( http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... sc&start=0 ) on the Ultra channel.

[rpc9943]

you guys say trash, and i own it... but i cant seem to get that real... I don't know warm distorted sound... Like the one found in BUZ.

If you guys have any ideas to help me out lemme know. I bought the program in a bundle with ozone from some guy for pretty cheap and not much time to figure the distortion part out.

RonC

[Trevor Jackson]

I couldn't coax anything out of it either. But like Sascha said. To each his own

you guys say trash, and i own it... but i cant seem to get that real... I don't know warm distorted sound... Like the one found in BUZ.

If you guys have any ideas to help me out lemme know. I bought the program in a bundle with ozone from some guy for pretty cheap and not much time to figure the distortion part out.

RonC

[Empty Uranus]

Well - I guess I was being a little anal. Who knows - I'm sure I can come up with a new sound or two with these new thingies. My only thing is that I want to be able to recreate it live, though. I'm still that much of a purist (I still like seeing a human being play his/her musical instrument!)

Thus far, my best musical achievement was being very drunk one day and playing Smoke on the Water.

With a 1985 Johnson 30 horsepower outboard.

[Sascha Franck]

I'm still that much of a purist

So, why don't you just entirely ignore software?
And yes, that's a serious question.
I mean, there's TONS of purist solutions out there for guitar players.

[stag]

f**k tubes, Guitar Suite rules.
Amplitube 2 is okay too, a lot better than any rack stuff i ever tried direct to the board, with tubes or not.

[hao nao]

"distortion purists"

hmm ...

[CapnLockheed]

Ever hear a Digitech Bad Monkey?

Completely respectable stomp.

And no. I have never heard a VST come close.

As I said in my original post...."good tone" is subjective.
Yes, I've tried the Monkey. Like all other Digitech distortions
including the Grunge, 60's fuzz etc...it falls short of the
mark for me. There are MANY hardware AND software solutions
that I prefer the sound of....but that's just my opinion.
If you prefer to spank the Monkey then power to you.
BTW....I was involved in the development of the original
ReValver and I'm a member of the pre-beta team working
on ReValverMkII and I can tell you it's gonna kick ass.
I also prefer the tone of Freeamp SE, Buzz and Simulanalog
to your Monkey and they're free...but that's just my opinion.

Cheers......CL
Monkey and they

[grymmjack]

you guys say trash, and i own it... but i cant seem to get that real... I don't know warm distorted sound... Like the one found in BUZ.

If you guys have any ideas to help me out lemme know. I bought the program in a bundle with ozone from some guy for pretty cheap and not much time to figure the distortion part out.

RonC

wanna sell it?

[grymmjack]

these opinion threads about any given topic always end up the same.

participant A: "blahA rules! blahA kicks your dogs nuts into outerspace and then the nuts land on some distant planet eventually and are worshipped by dog nut loving aliens! then they extract the homeward-bound instinct dna gene from the dog to track it to it's origin and then the dog nut loving aliens blow up the earth with blahA! anyone who doesn't use A or love dog nuts, is a total tosser!"

participant B: "you're a tosser, blahB could blow up that alien mothership as it was coming to the earth... plus... blahB has invisible forcefields to protect everything!"

participant C: "you are all stupid little kids. watch out, i call the ground hot-lava now!"

participant D: "all blah-players are a bunch of morons. play a blib instead! blibs own your moms sweatsocks!"

repeat.

[guitarzan]

Thanks for the dirthead link! It's a little expensive on my CPU, but I'm definitely not deleting it. Has more of a bite than warp but very pleasing.

I did find ONE decent patch in my travels, though. It's called "Warp". It has three patches - a JC chorus, a Plexi and a Mesa. The JC and Plexi are only so-so. The Mesa is the best distortion I have found in a VST. It's $50. Unless you guys can come with a better idea, it looks like that's what I'm gonna buy.

Warp huh...are you sure you tried FreeAmp SE 1.5 (2 should be out any day now)? Try all the presets and tweak the ones that you like - I am sure you can do as well as Warp. Another free one that might do the Warp thing is Dirthead ( http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... sc&start=0 ) on the Ultra channel.

No problem, Trevor - I had almost forgotten about Dirthead myself! If you downloaded the .2 version from the beginning of that thread then there is a slightly improved version , .21, the link is about halfway down page 4. It has a switch to bypass the speaker emulation, so you could run it into Boogex and get speaker emulation from impulses. ( http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... c&start=45 )

[keithm]

Well, I use my pandora PX4 or VAMP for recording (and live) and always get great comments about my sound - and they are software! I also see lots of guitar players with a POD stuck behind their Marshall Stacks - again software. So it ain't software or digital distortion to blame, just maybe some of these vst amp sims aren't being made by people who know great guitar tone! The guitar suite sounds great - and that's 3-4 years old but since then - I've not heard a better plugin.

Too much time is being spent on the FX and not enough on the original guitar tone for me (which is why guitar suite still takes some beating): but one trick to try is after any guitar amp plugin - try a convolution impulse IR of a real speaker cab - that really makes a difference

[stag]

these opinion threads about any given topic always end up the same.

participant A: "blahA rules! blahA kicks your dogs nuts into outerspace and then the nuts land on some distant planet eventually and are worshipped by dog nut loving aliens! then they extract the homeward-bound instinct dna gene from the dog to track it to it's origin and then the dog nut loving aliens blow up the earth with blahA! anyone who doesn't use A or love dog nuts, is a total tosser!"

participant B: "you're a tosser, blahB could blow up that alien mothership as it was coming to the earth... plus... blahB has invisible forcefields to protect everything!"

participant C: "you are all stupid little kids. watch out, i call the ground hot-lava now!"

participant D: "all blah-players are a bunch of morons. play a blib instead! blibs own your moms sweatsocks!"

repeat.

Is it that time of the month

[Jafo]

A few semi-random observations:

Most "amp sims" just act like overloaded preamp tubes or transistors, but it's power tube distortion which give the "tube sound and feel" -- that lovely warm squishy kind of sonic mayhem. (Tube rectifiers help a lot, too.) You get a more organic tone from mixing a tranny preamp with power tubes, than by a tube preamp with a tranny power amp. Even the best sims seem a bit flat in this regard -- but they aren't bad.

Speaker distortion is a key part of any good cranked tone. Few sims even attempt it; none do it well, but a few (Line 6, at least) do a halfway decent job.

(cf. http://www.amptone.com for the above points.)

To me, most of DigiTech's products sound like DigiTech products: decent if static sims, but full of digital artifacts, much like the cymbals on a badly-encoded MP3.

Isn't the Bad Monkey basically just a Tube Screamer clone? If so, it might be worth looking at the Simulanalog and BTW TS clones for comparison. (I'd agree that while it is far from the best, it's quite decent, and a fantastic value for the money.)

VST plugs make it really easy and cheap to EQ before and after distortion, which can make a huge difference.

We're still only in the early generations of amp sims; they're quite usable now, the best is yet to come.