Free Amp

Free Amp 2 is a Guitar Amplifier Software Simulator, designed to be easy to use yet powerful.
And it is indeed quite easy: you download the zip archive, unzip it to find inside it just one .dll file, which
you have to put inside your VST folder in order to be read by your Host application (since FA2 doesn't run as a stand-alone).
Then you just have to launch your Host (which may be any VST capable sequencer) and activate FA2 as track insert, grab your axe, turn on the preamp and start playing....
The graphic interface is well organized, and all guitarist will feel completely at ease since each function is linked to knobs and pedals as the real thing so, if you want to activate the Chorus, just press the Chorus "pedal"... you wish then also to add a reverb?
Press the Reverb "pedal": this way you can activate all "pedals" you wish, then turn the knobs and modulate each
effects accoding to your ears.

When you press "Synth Setup", you also access to an interesting feature: a synth thought to work with the guitar signal input as a base for further calculations. If you select a different amp (let's remember you can pick the one you wish among seven of them), you can perfectly hear the change in the type of sound produced and combinating it with the "overdrive" function, it allows you to have a really wide range of sounds: for example, you may select a Cracktube amp while using a "Harmonic1" on the overdrive, getting a clean with really soft overdrive (like Marshall for example) or you may select a Smooth Amp and "Tube" on the overdrive "pedal" to get a mid/bass rich tone, giving you a cool blues sound. If you have a MIDI controller, you can use the Learn function to move knobs and faders through it, while if you have also a MIDI pedal, then you can fully enjoy the WahWah (if you don't have one, you can still use the Auto-Wah and adjusting its settings you can get some pretty results too). Each "time based function" can be synched manually, be it host based or with the magical tap-tempo feature (yes, there is this one, too...). The Overdrive set to "Drive" is a true earthquake: still, it is very flexible and you can get a smooth drive with chubby tones or more modern high frequencied ones.
Open your ears and eyes: it sounds STUNNING GOOD!!!! I really cannot believe to my ears, I've tested tons of software amp simulators, even those that are around the 500$ payware segment (and of course, you will not get the same amount of features or presets they sell, this is rather obvious, yet let me be precise on this) but this crushes them all when it comes to sound quality.

I've never noticed before any difference in the distorted "lead" sound while switching between bridge humbucker and bridge humbucker+ middle single coil or (this is absolutely amazing) between bridge humbucker and splitted bridge humbucker: if you have a good guitar you will DEFINITELY notice the difference with ANY change you made to the sound both before and after the jack input. The programmer really know his way, he created a solid software that apparentely never crashes, and allow me to underline again that this is FREEWARE. Does it has something that is not great? Well, nobody is perfect, then yes, there is a thing that is not so great: the Gate feature creates some noise, so I always turn it off, but I think this is almost irrelevant considering that you may add an external gate software on the signal chain and it is not hard to figure out how many choices are there. So let one final thing be very clear: so far, this is the best software amp simulator ever programmed, but I bet it can be surpassed by... FreeAmp3 :)