S-Gear

This S-gear has been upgraded now, from 3 amps to 5. And an added tuner, and as well a Room Thing and Mod Thing. It still caters to the traditional kind of player that is brought up with 70s-80s hard rock, and not so much modern day high gain metal. It has a response and feel that - for the price - is really what the others are missing out on. It has this "break-up" in between cleanish and half-crunch, that is smooth and seamless especially when volume knob on the guitar is used. Having used it now since it's inception, I tend to fall back on using two amps only, the later Tweed (just 3-4 knobs) or the Duke. Together with cab sims. And assorted IR's. It hasn't as of yet nailed that AC-30 top boost but version 3.0 is in the works. The thing that sparked my interest was the Stealer which is a take on the obscure Park amps that was made by Marshall too. It had something that I liked in the response and when you cranked the treble up the distortion didn't become too unbearable.

Interface:
It could be bettered in some contast, especially when scrolling up and down the preset window. But generally speaking, simple layout, easy to get grip of. In the few times I've opened up Guitar Rig 4 again, after I bought S-Gear, I get so annoyingly pissed off by its unwieldy GUI in the Guitar Rig preset. I thought how on earth I could even ever cope with that unwieldy thing. S-Gear is way much more readable. But as it is, I want to have resizable graphics. I know I know. Very few have this feature anyway. But I think that it's important.

Features:
MIDI and hooking up events to tracks in other DAWS are no problems, at all, changing presets fast, and the most useful feature that they have included is in that in each preset, you have an A and B amp. I e you can keep the effects, the cab, and all the other things so you really don't need to completely change to another patch which makes it loads effects and reverb all over again. Which means that you can have overspill delays, between distorted and undistorted sounds. Very useful feature, but maybe not that unique.

But still today, since it's inception in 2011 (I think) it's still heads and shoulders above the rest of them, regarding these few amps, it has nailed. All the other may have more bell and whistles and thrown in the kitchen sink too, but bang for the buck in the amp side of thing, they're still ahead of the game.