TonyFlyingSquirrel
Master Member
- Messages
- 4,528
For recording, I used Line 6's POD Farm with good results for several years, but when I switched to Mac, got Pro Tools and the subsequent upgraded interface, I lost POD Farm and have been recording with my POD HD500X, with good results, but I miss being able to just pull up a plugin on the computer and get going when I have tracks that don't need expression pedal active, i.e.; volume swells or was-pedal use.
I've been checking out 3 in particular recently.
The first is STL Tones. 2 particular bundles. One of them is the Howard Benson bundle, and the 2nd is the Will Putney Bundle. I like some of their productions and mixes, but I found the Will Putney bundle to be the most useful to my application, and it leans towards my favorite high gain amps, the Bogner Ubershaal and the Diesel VH-4. While I found the distortion pedals used in the front end of these amps a bit too hot for my taste, once I dialed them back a bit, I was able to get some very useful tones that felt like the real deal, as I have some experience with each of these amps and know how they react, and the ability to have 2 amps simultaneously for a truly stereo rig. The Will Putney bundle can be found here, and a 10 day free demo version is available for download, which is how I evaluated it. https://www.stltones.com/…/stl-tonality-will-putney-guitar-…
Next was the Positive Grid Bias Amp & FX bundle.
This is also a trial download and has some very extensive features such as the ability to custom build an amp by combining varying preamp, power amp, and power transformer combinations otherwise quite expensive and impractical outside of software. There are other features such as pre-eq and post-eq aside from the tone stack in the amp, the ability to move effects anywhere in the signal flow as desired, and the ability to have 2 amps simultaneously for a truly stereo rig. With a bit of tweaking, I was able to create some very usable tones that provided a great deal of flexibility.
Positive Grid's trial downloads can be found here:
https://www.positivegrid.com/demo/
Third, was Neural DSP Technologies: Nolly plugin. Nolly is the former bass player/engineer/producer of the Washington DC band Periphery, who spear headed the "Djent" sub-genre of Heavy Metal music a little over a decade ago. Nolly is well respected for amount of nuance that goes into his mixing and productions, and he is an expert in sound design on a variety of instruments. He is also quite handy with a soldering iron and has personally undertaken many very unique amp modifications over the years on his studio amps in order to get the kinds of tones out of his recording partners & clients. The GUI to the Nolly plugin is similarly simple in layout, but flexible enough to get a wide variety of sounds across multiple genre's, wether those tones are low, mid, or high gain in their application. This is one area where I think that the Nolly plugin stands out from among the other two plugins reviewed. With the Nolly plugin, I was actually able to grab about 5 presets directly from the library of some of my favorite amps and use them as my own. This is the very first time whether in a hardware device or software that I have been able to accomplish this result. The Nolly is far more nuanced in the attention to detail in the sound design in my observation of having experience with these amps modeled. It took a moment of scrolling through presets to find usable tones, and seconds in tweaking others to taste. The Post EQ (Graphic) is one of the more realistic graphics I've experienced in software. There is far less line noise in this plugin that the others, and the noise gate is far less quirky, reminiscent of an older Drawmer rack mount noise gate from the early 90's. The delays and reverbs on the Nolly are pure sweetness, so clean and pure, and the delay is especially flexible in its sync/mono/ping pong assignments. A 14 day trial version of the Nolly plugin can be found here: https://neuraldsp.com/products/archetype-nolly/
Of all three plugins reviewed, only the Positive Grid bears any modulation effects, but the STL and the Nolly more than make up for this omission by the quality of their tones.
Of the three plugins reviewed, my pick goes to the Nolly.
Simply the best quality, ready to use tones upon launch, simple GUI, and tones that not only serve heavy genres well, but a variety of them with just these 4 amps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV_1cQ3vfKw
I've been checking out 3 in particular recently.
The first is STL Tones. 2 particular bundles. One of them is the Howard Benson bundle, and the 2nd is the Will Putney Bundle. I like some of their productions and mixes, but I found the Will Putney bundle to be the most useful to my application, and it leans towards my favorite high gain amps, the Bogner Ubershaal and the Diesel VH-4. While I found the distortion pedals used in the front end of these amps a bit too hot for my taste, once I dialed them back a bit, I was able to get some very useful tones that felt like the real deal, as I have some experience with each of these amps and know how they react, and the ability to have 2 amps simultaneously for a truly stereo rig. The Will Putney bundle can be found here, and a 10 day free demo version is available for download, which is how I evaluated it. https://www.stltones.com/…/stl-tonality-will-putney-guitar-…
Next was the Positive Grid Bias Amp & FX bundle.
This is also a trial download and has some very extensive features such as the ability to custom build an amp by combining varying preamp, power amp, and power transformer combinations otherwise quite expensive and impractical outside of software. There are other features such as pre-eq and post-eq aside from the tone stack in the amp, the ability to move effects anywhere in the signal flow as desired, and the ability to have 2 amps simultaneously for a truly stereo rig. With a bit of tweaking, I was able to create some very usable tones that provided a great deal of flexibility.
Positive Grid's trial downloads can be found here:
https://www.positivegrid.com/demo/
Third, was Neural DSP Technologies: Nolly plugin. Nolly is the former bass player/engineer/producer of the Washington DC band Periphery, who spear headed the "Djent" sub-genre of Heavy Metal music a little over a decade ago. Nolly is well respected for amount of nuance that goes into his mixing and productions, and he is an expert in sound design on a variety of instruments. He is also quite handy with a soldering iron and has personally undertaken many very unique amp modifications over the years on his studio amps in order to get the kinds of tones out of his recording partners & clients. The GUI to the Nolly plugin is similarly simple in layout, but flexible enough to get a wide variety of sounds across multiple genre's, wether those tones are low, mid, or high gain in their application. This is one area where I think that the Nolly plugin stands out from among the other two plugins reviewed. With the Nolly plugin, I was actually able to grab about 5 presets directly from the library of some of my favorite amps and use them as my own. This is the very first time whether in a hardware device or software that I have been able to accomplish this result. The Nolly is far more nuanced in the attention to detail in the sound design in my observation of having experience with these amps modeled. It took a moment of scrolling through presets to find usable tones, and seconds in tweaking others to taste. The Post EQ (Graphic) is one of the more realistic graphics I've experienced in software. There is far less line noise in this plugin that the others, and the noise gate is far less quirky, reminiscent of an older Drawmer rack mount noise gate from the early 90's. The delays and reverbs on the Nolly are pure sweetness, so clean and pure, and the delay is especially flexible in its sync/mono/ping pong assignments. A 14 day trial version of the Nolly plugin can be found here: https://neuraldsp.com/products/archetype-nolly/
Of all three plugins reviewed, only the Positive Grid bears any modulation effects, but the STL and the Nolly more than make up for this omission by the quality of their tones.
Of the three plugins reviewed, my pick goes to the Nolly.
Simply the best quality, ready to use tones upon launch, simple GUI, and tones that not only serve heavy genres well, but a variety of them with just these 4 amps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV_1cQ3vfKw
