The Guitar Thread

[SafeAsMilk]

Good luck getting your fingers around that guy! I have a tough time with 6-stringers with a thick neck, which is why I'll never be able to fulfill my dream of owning a B.C. Rich

[Animavore]

If it doesn't work out I'll sell it for over a grand and still win.

[electricwhiteboy]

Bought the Brian May pack on Amplitube. Very impressed with the sounds, less so with Amplitube and IK Media's sales tactics.

The presets are very good but some are clearly missing gear they were too tight to give you in an expansion package. As soon as you play around with the settings it falls to bits. It feels designed backwards, like they programmed all the preset tones first then built the interface after. It certainly doesn't behave like real gear, it behaves like a sliding scale between presets. Coaxing other tones than the ones they've given you, even with the full Amplitube package, isn't easy.

You can't actually build Brian's rig in a single instance of Amplitube. The pack has a work around which allows a three amp set up in a very limited way and only with his signature Amp. The delay, chorus, and harmonizer FXs are built into the amp and can't be switched out even if you have other Amplitube gear.

That said, the harmonizer is one of the best sounding I've heard and the Fox Phaser is great. I just can't use the harmonizer for anything else as it's built-in to the amp. The treble booster pedal can be put in other rigs, but as none of the amps behave like real tube amps it's fairly pointless to try and use it with anything else as it won't shape the sound in the right way.

[Animavore]

I had a pirate copy of Amplitube with the intention of buying it later but since I've decided I'm getting a Kemper I abandoned the idea of forking out for the full A4 package and am now using the free version which is laughably stripped back.

The package for just the Amplitube generic stuff is €149, which I don't feel like forking out for. Half that would've been a happy price for me. The generic stuff is decent.

I've tried other simulators and they're just not up to scratch at all. I downloaded the free software Tonelib yesterday after some people on Guitar Reddit convinced me it's just as good as the expensive stuff and it is in its shite. It's on level with Stark minus the cheek of being asked to pay for it.

I guess I'll have to make do until I get my Kemper.

[Animavore]

Ok. I was way too harsh on Tonelib. I figured out it lets you use IR (Impulse Responses) and has a number of them built in and lets you import any others you might have.

Massive improvement.

[electricwhiteboy]

I've heard Kempers in loads of demo, and once live. Friend of mine that runs a studio has tracked with one and raved about it. I can't honestly say if they're worth it as I've not played through one.

As I own three tube amps, getting a fews odds and sods from Amplitube for amps I couldn't justify ever buying, but would use for recording for really specific sounds was a great solution.

For the professional the Kemper is the obvious choice. For the home hobbyist like me, it's expensive and I would only ever use a handful of profiles that would largely sim gear I already had. What's the point? One of the problems with having lots of toys is the agony of choice. You piss about searching for "something" changing things you would never normally change other than once in a blue moon.

[Animavore]

I don't say this lightly when I say this is by far... by far the best .VST plugin I have found. I'm currently trialling it and the tones are amazing. I haven't even got passed the presets.

https://neuraldsp.com/products/archetype-plini/

[Animavore]

I decided to purchase Archetype: Nolly, which just came out today.



As much as I love Plini on the clean end this one is preferable to me on the heavy end. Not that it doesn't have sweet cleans and it has the same delay and reverb pedals after the amp for that progressive sound anyway. The package is limited, but for the amazing sound quality, which puts every other program I've tried to shame, I think it's worth. Its narrow scope will keep me focused on just playing and not getting side-tracked by too many options. I'll reserve all that for when I get a Kemper, which is still a year+ out.

[Animavore]

https://soundcloud.com/tom-byrne-514661 ... ly/s-1SlPP



A couple of presets by Nolly. 1) Pristine Clean 2) Blood Eagle 3) Delicate Clean 4) Warm Jazz 5) Liquid Shred

[electricwhiteboy]

I've worked out exactly what the limitation of amps sims is. They don't like to sit just on the cusp between two levels of distortion. I play very dynamically changing tone on the fly. Amp sims are way more tonally flat. If you dial a tube amp just so, there's a push and pull you can do with tone and dynamics. It's why vox amps don't sim well. There's such a smooth analogue tonal difference as the amp becomes saturated. What the sims have to do is split into different "settings" which aren't a switch on the actual amp, but a gradient dictated by headroom and signal strength. I think this is the characteristic of amps that Kemper and some of the newer software captures information about.

[Animavore]

I think some guy was talking about just that, or something like it, on the Nolly software. He mentioned the amp becoming saturated as he upped the gain and remarked on how it acted like a real amp where as other digital amps you have to tweak something else and try balance things.

[Animavore]

Can finally play Hope Leaves by Opeth. Instead of having to do a hand breaking stretch from 1 to 5 I can use the 6th fret on the 7th string to play it over only two frets.

[electricwhiteboy]

I invested in a pair of open backed monitoring headphones. It really helps to listen with something neutral when cooking up amp sim tones to hear in detail how it's going to sit in the mix. Even if you've got decent cans they will colour the sound, especially the low end and mids. Not having the objective reference of how the amp sounds in the room can make it tricky to really judge what's in the signal. That well rounded bass and smooth mids might not be present in the signal, but a product of the headphones boosting certain frequencies.

[Animavore]

Just coming on to one year since getting into guitar. Sharing some improv so you can gauge how I'm getting on.
https://soundcloud.com/tom-byrne-514661 ... l-nautilus

[Animavore]

My new guitar.



How it sounds.

https://soundcloud.com/tom-byrne-514661 ... ts/s-3MWm5

[felltoearth]

She’s a beaut.

[felltoearth]

Not really world changing, but my old Line 6 Spider died recently. I replaced it with a Boss Katana...good riddance Line 6.

Line 6 to Boss? Frying pan to fire?

[noncredo]

Not really world changing, but my old Line 6 Spider died recently. I replaced it with a Boss Katana...good riddance Line 6.

Line 6 to Boss? Frying pan to fire?

Probably, but its newer and sounds so much better. I only use it to noodle around at home. The Line 6 had a bad amp that would overheat at anything above moderate levels.

What amp do you prefer?

[felltoearth]

If I were in the market for one I would likely get Fender Jazz Chorus. Haven’t looked for a while but I think I would have a look at an Orange as well.

[noncredo]

I've played through my neighbors Vox. It sounds better than my "new to me" Katana, and much much better than my dead Line 6. I got a new guitar for Christmas so a new tube amp might have to wait a bit.