SustainerPlayer
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Jumble Jumble said:
Defintely. :icon_thumright:
Real amps vs fake amps
- Thread starter Jumble Jumble
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Defintely. :icon_thumright:
Patrick from Davis
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I would prefer to switch over to a modeling setup, but I am horrible with the interface. They frustrate the hell out of me. I can't let it go. The experience is miserable, and I hold a grudge. I am much better off with a limited number of controls to get it close and then figure the rest out with my fingers. I couldn't care less about the box that does it. So I'll wait until some one makes an interface that I am compatible with, not something I want to yard-a-pult into the next county. Until then, I gear up to build my own, because the clone kits are relatively easy, fun to build, and cost quite a bit less. The power of the modelers is staggering, and at some point it will be compatible with me. Just not currently. Soo, I'll be making community heat with my lil tube amps.
Patrick
Patrick
Cagey
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I've owned a number of fancy digital signal processors over the years, and even though I used to be a computer programmer, I'm also often frustrated with the controls on these units. They're always impenetrably complex due to the need/desire to have access to 50 bajillion functions and parameters with only a low-resolution two-line display or less and a couple/few knobs and switches. There's just nothing intuitive about the damned things, so the learning curve is steep and tall.
Fortunately, Fractal has some interface software for the AxeFx that makes it all dramatically easier. Load it on a laptop or an iPad and configure your little heart out. I understand Kemper is supposed to come out with something similar for their unit, too.
Now that the technology exists to reproduce the ancestors so perfectly, I'm wondering how long it's going to be before they start coming out with some simplified units that use the traditional set of knobs and switches to operate. I mean, what would be wrong with an AxeFx that looked like this?
Looks, works and sounds exactly like a JVM410HJS 100 watt Joe Satriani guitar amp head, but doesn't have any tubes/transformers/monster caps inside and only weighs 12 pounds. Price probably wouldn't be much different, and there'd be no learning curve. Put an ethernet or USB jack on the back so you can fiddle with the internals if you want to, but you wouldn't need to. Don't want a Marshall? Could do the same thing with an AC30 head, or an Uberschall, or a Diesel, or a Dumble.
Fortunately, Fractal has some interface software for the AxeFx that makes it all dramatically easier. Load it on a laptop or an iPad and configure your little heart out. I understand Kemper is supposed to come out with something similar for their unit, too.
Now that the technology exists to reproduce the ancestors so perfectly, I'm wondering how long it's going to be before they start coming out with some simplified units that use the traditional set of knobs and switches to operate. I mean, what would be wrong with an AxeFx that looked like this?
Looks, works and sounds exactly like a JVM410HJS 100 watt Joe Satriani guitar amp head, but doesn't have any tubes/transformers/monster caps inside and only weighs 12 pounds. Price probably wouldn't be much different, and there'd be no learning curve. Put an ethernet or USB jack on the back so you can fiddle with the internals if you want to, but you wouldn't need to. Don't want a Marshall? Could do the same thing with an AC30 head, or an Uberschall, or a Diesel, or a Dumble.
Cagey
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I agree. However, I wasn't going for appearance. My point was that there are those that want that old interface. They want to be able to turn around and tweak a pot, then keep going. Digging around through presets/scenes/menus/pages to find a parameter to tweak doesn't appeal.
stratamania
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Congratulations to Jumble Jumble, on the Kemper. That's a nice gesture from SD.
And that is something I can agree with on modellers, they give great flexibility, but the interface side isn't quite like traditional gear. But then again when I got a Roland GP8 when they first came out that was a change from floor pedals. So I can see why some like to stick with traditional gear.
On the Kemper, it seems once you have a preset or virtual rig loaded you do have fairly standard knobs to tweak. Video demo and explanation http://youtu.be/ZjdaZKpDwdU
Axe edit for the Fractal makes things a little easier too, but the thing also to remember is once you have a few basic presets you don't have to tweak forever or even touch advanced settings but they are there if you like to tweak more deeply.
Another interesting direction is something like the Hughes and Kettner Grandmeister 36 which is a fully programmable valve amp which may be the best of both worlds.
http://youtu.be/e5zMFOFfwnE it can be used traditionally or store 128 presets, which can easily be tweaked by the traditional looking Pots which are actually smart rotary pots.
And that is something I can agree with on modellers, they give great flexibility, but the interface side isn't quite like traditional gear. But then again when I got a Roland GP8 when they first came out that was a change from floor pedals. So I can see why some like to stick with traditional gear.
On the Kemper, it seems once you have a preset or virtual rig loaded you do have fairly standard knobs to tweak. Video demo and explanation http://youtu.be/ZjdaZKpDwdU
Axe edit for the Fractal makes things a little easier too, but the thing also to remember is once you have a few basic presets you don't have to tweak forever or even touch advanced settings but they are there if you like to tweak more deeply.
Another interesting direction is something like the Hughes and Kettner Grandmeister 36 which is a fully programmable valve amp which may be the best of both worlds.
http://youtu.be/e5zMFOFfwnE it can be used traditionally or store 128 presets, which can easily be tweaked by the traditional looking Pots which are actually smart rotary pots.
jackthehack
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Although I mentioned I didn't care for modeling units, I DO like this an awful lot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4OQ0w_q6AU
Works as good/better than in the video; just moved, when I get my studio set back up I'll record some stuff and post. I would be using it miked as in the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4OQ0w_q6AU
Works as good/better than in the video; just moved, when I get my studio set back up I'll record some stuff and post. I would be using it miked as in the video.
stratamania
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Tonar8353 said:All I have to say is you have not lived until you crank a 100 watt Marshall and go from zero to blowing walls down.arty07: Oh I miss those days.
PS If you want to argue with me don't bother because I will not be able to hear you! :laughing7:
What ?
Great stuff, but not always possible alas...
stratamania
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Here is an interesting tidbit, which may change modelling as we know it.
http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/7951.T/key-developments/article/2891556
http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/7951.T/key-developments/article/2891556
stratamania
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Here's a good video on the fractal featuring Animals as Leaders.
http://youtu.be/U7xJUqfHYa8
http://youtu.be/U7xJUqfHYa8
Gee, I seem to have missed lot of fireworks... goopy, ploppy brown "fire"works? I have been a bit lost in space, who woulda thunk that at my age a dedicated walnut/bloodwood SLIDE guitar + a cheap Digitech RP250 modeler + a not-so-cheap Pigtronix Infinity looper could jack me back to those 9-hour practice days.... I must confess, I have been a "modelor" of sorts for a very, very long time. :sad1: Remember Tom Scholtz's original "Rockman" thing, guaranteed to sound like "Boston-in-a-box"? It actually sounded worse, which is quite a trick when you consider that Boston sounded like... the Allman Brothers, as played by the robot from "Lost In Space." (Speaking of goop, Boston and the rapid, near-Mansonian shifts of the whole Jefferson Starshitt family were my first clue that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong with rock 'n' roll.)
And the Zoom 505 II... apparently some of the newest Zooms are quite amazing, especially as, mentioned somewhere above, you turn OFF the amp models and just use the effects. But they just can't escape the lingering miasma laid down by those hideous 505's... Where I got aboard many years ago, I had reached the howling point trying to get anywhere more than two stompboxes to work together without a ridiculous amount of fiddling, just to get ONE combination to work right. This was way before you could just buy switchers right out of a magazine - internet? Huh? There were some rumored magicians like Pete Cornish in England and that LA guy, but there was a big move on to giant racks - which sounded more awful the more stuff put in them. ANY time you plug three preamps into each other you have destroyed "volume sensitivity", the ever-popular BOSS pedals are the worst at that - ON and OFF, that's about it.
Two fundamental problems (still!) each stompbox has it's own amplifying/buffering jacks/housing all that stuff; most stomps to this day don't have anything like a "blend" control that lets you add, say, screaming fuzz, at, a 5% level.... so you're stuck with bi-amping already. More cords, jacks, boxes. And then Digitech's lovely Genesis 3 popped with a great chorus, great delays, great reverb, internal bi-amping, Line 6 POD's got more press but to this day Digitechs sound like the musicians had veto power over the engineers, rather than vice-versa.
There are some things to learn, like: turn off everything. Turn on one thing, see what it sounds like, what all the knobs do. Turn it off, turn on another thing. Etc. Use what you need. ONLY... (?) Digitech's latest chip they call the "AudioDNA2"; swell, they couldn't help but notice just how many "learned" "intelligent" "musicians" simply insisted that individual stompboxes just always sound better, because they just do, so; Digitech started building their "Hardwire" series of stompboxes. For $160, you can buy a box that has just the reverbs from their $99 RP155 modeler. For another $150, you can buy a Hardwire delay that has just the delays from the $99 RP155... Overdrive, sure! Chorus, great! And they must sound better, because they're selling like crazy, they get great reviews, they really do have the rever... well never mind.
Sometimes to sneak the best performance out of a modeler you have to "think like an engineer." I get into mild contretemps over at the Steel Guitar Forum, because those guys automatically stick a modeler - any modeler - on the "Fender Twin Reverb" setting, because old Twin Reverbs were/are great steel amps, in fact sometimes the cleaner silverface ones are better - that old 10-or-12 string C6th tuning needs so much headroom it can eat bass amps, some of them. But an engineer sees a "Twin Reverb" as an 85-watt tube amp, and starts arranging the drive characteristics around that. If you can find a 100-watt HiWatt model, much better, because even engineers know HiWatts stayed clean all the way up. Or, the little bi-amp trick of the Genesis 3 and the later POD's lets you run a dead-clean JC120 with a somewhat over-stimulated Marshall 100 watt, with a single knob to control the blend of 'em.
And everybody knows that speakers are compressors, right? And all tube amps function as compressors, in fact every stage of gain adds some to some degree, so if you have any hope of getting a modeler to do something familiar, you need to figure out it's compression hoo-hah, right? I guess I've been lucky, in that I had a couple of things work right for me. One was, using a SWR SM-500 bass amp as, essentially, a PA amp of my own - it's got fairly simple but effective controls over upper and lower midrange and the ratios of that to everything else, and after that - I just don't CARE if it sounds like anything but "good" and "effective" and, ummm, "not-sucky." Besides the obvious point of this:
Without a "hum/squawk/BZZZT!" randomizer/spookifier in there somewhere, it just couldn't seem real.
And the Zoom 505 II... apparently some of the newest Zooms are quite amazing, especially as, mentioned somewhere above, you turn OFF the amp models and just use the effects. But they just can't escape the lingering miasma laid down by those hideous 505's... Where I got aboard many years ago, I had reached the howling point trying to get anywhere more than two stompboxes to work together without a ridiculous amount of fiddling, just to get ONE combination to work right. This was way before you could just buy switchers right out of a magazine - internet? Huh? There were some rumored magicians like Pete Cornish in England and that LA guy, but there was a big move on to giant racks - which sounded more awful the more stuff put in them. ANY time you plug three preamps into each other you have destroyed "volume sensitivity", the ever-popular BOSS pedals are the worst at that - ON and OFF, that's about it.
Two fundamental problems (still!) each stompbox has it's own amplifying/buffering jacks/housing all that stuff; most stomps to this day don't have anything like a "blend" control that lets you add, say, screaming fuzz, at, a 5% level.... so you're stuck with bi-amping already. More cords, jacks, boxes. And then Digitech's lovely Genesis 3 popped with a great chorus, great delays, great reverb, internal bi-amping, Line 6 POD's got more press but to this day Digitechs sound like the musicians had veto power over the engineers, rather than vice-versa.
There are some things to learn, like: turn off everything. Turn on one thing, see what it sounds like, what all the knobs do. Turn it off, turn on another thing. Etc. Use what you need. ONLY... (?) Digitech's latest chip they call the "AudioDNA2"; swell, they couldn't help but notice just how many "learned" "intelligent" "musicians" simply insisted that individual stompboxes just always sound better, because they just do, so; Digitech started building their "Hardwire" series of stompboxes. For $160, you can buy a box that has just the reverbs from their $99 RP155 modeler. For another $150, you can buy a Hardwire delay that has just the delays from the $99 RP155... Overdrive, sure! Chorus, great! And they must sound better, because they're selling like crazy, they get great reviews, they really do have the rever... well never mind.
<- and this. None of the "classic" tones existed in a vacuum, they were chosen by musicians to fill up a certain range, space, impact with an intended emotional content, contrast with something else.... I've read a few reviews of the various machines where the reviewer proudly sat down in front of the Premier Guitar or Guitar Player staff playroom and one-by-one went through comparing a modeler or sampler to as many of the different "real" amps as they had. And I think, Gosh! What a great job! and Gosh! What a stupid review, with about the least applicable information possible.
Sometimes to sneak the best performance out of a modeler you have to "think like an engineer." I get into mild contretemps over at the Steel Guitar Forum, because those guys automatically stick a modeler - any modeler - on the "Fender Twin Reverb" setting, because old Twin Reverbs were/are great steel amps, in fact sometimes the cleaner silverface ones are better - that old 10-or-12 string C6th tuning needs so much headroom it can eat bass amps, some of them. But an engineer sees a "Twin Reverb" as an 85-watt tube amp, and starts arranging the drive characteristics around that. If you can find a 100-watt HiWatt model, much better, because even engineers know HiWatts stayed clean all the way up. Or, the little bi-amp trick of the Genesis 3 and the later POD's lets you run a dead-clean JC120 with a somewhat over-stimulated Marshall 100 watt, with a single knob to control the blend of 'em.
And everybody knows that speakers are compressors, right? And all tube amps function as compressors, in fact every stage of gain adds some to some degree, so if you have any hope of getting a modeler to do something familiar, you need to figure out it's compression hoo-hah, right? I guess I've been lucky, in that I had a couple of things work right for me. One was, using a SWR SM-500 bass amp as, essentially, a PA amp of my own - it's got fairly simple but effective controls over upper and lower midrange and the ratios of that to everything else, and after that - I just don't CARE if it sounds like anything but "good" and "effective" and, ummm, "not-sucky." Besides the obvious point of this:
Unless Seymour Duncan wants to give me big piles of cash to write about how he & Larry DiMarzio & Kent Armstrong & George L. stole everything they know from Bill Lawrence, pretended they invented it themselves and then threatened expensive lawsuits to "protect" their intellectual content - patenting "ZEBRA COILS?!?!" - well yikes. It might just take a little while to pay for itself.... Besides that, the main problem I would have was once I got it to do about four things really well, I wouldn't have any use for the other 11,293 noises it would do. Don't they get... moody sometimes... like real tube amps?
Without a "hum/squawk/BZZZT!" randomizer/spookifier in there somewhere, it just couldn't seem real.
S
swarfrat
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I used to joke that the rockman was the world's best MIDI tracking guitar and sampler all in one box. Anything you plug into it sounds the same coming out. Strat? Les Paul? Tele? Nylon strings? Kazoo?
It's a pity they didn't break out the MIDI out. That said, I have one if anyone wants one for nostalgia sake. Speaking of feeling nostalgic, I better go take some pepto.
It's a pity they didn't break out the MIDI out. That said, I have one if anyone wants one for nostalgia sake. Speaking of feeling nostalgic, I better go take some pepto.
Jumble Jumble
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Another quick clip, it takes active pickups really well. This is my red EMG strat (it's on here somewhere) into the Kemper running a profile of Gilmour's Hiwatt from the 70s. Bit of compression, bit of delay, and we're done.
http://soundcloud.com/richard-irons/coming-back-to-life-intro
http://soundcloud.com/richard-irons/coming-back-to-life-intro
You guys have probably seen these. :dontknow:
Kemper producer talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32kBaZFPzHs&feature=player_embedded#at=481
Axe FX verses Kemper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uWjdGfGWIQ&feature=player_embedded#at=1074
I don't own either of those, but find them very interesting. :icon_thumright:
Kemper producer talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32kBaZFPzHs&feature=player_embedded#at=481
Axe FX verses Kemper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uWjdGfGWIQ&feature=player_embedded#at=1074
I don't own either of those, but find them very interesting. :icon_thumright:
I still own, and will keep, a BOSS VF-1 - but it's got to be THE prizewinner of the tiny little 1" X 2" screen with seven different type faces and about five or six different ways to change volume that you know about and three or four secret ways... sometimes things BLINK! sometimes things get BRIGHTER! and then, dimmer... And it does do some really neat-o things, like out of at least a dozen delay "algorithms"* one of them lets you set up twenty different delays, from 0 - 400ms, panned from all the way left to all the way right, with as many repeats and at whatever volume you want, so you can hit that switch and make a single note crawl all the way around the room, getting louder, faster, up and down, maybe even time for a shimmy back-and-forth, but geez.... ??? And I do know the theory of how to set the thing up for live use, which is to choose the three, four, five "families" of good tones you will really need, all doodle-goosing aside then arrange maybe a half-dozen or so versions of each around sort of a central guess you make as to how much reverb, delay, chorus, EQ, pre-EQ, oh! it lets you move so many of the functions around so nicely.... The idea is to spend not-too-much "band time" peering down at the tiny screen and muttering, to the amusement->concern->gol-DANG of your bandmates... but I also have a Digitech RP250, which fundamentally just sounds good, I prefer their choices to those of the Line 6 engineers. And you've got four KNOBS that do the important stuff, and you can get them assigned quick enough. And it may be simplistic and it's 12-step down pitch shift might not be quite as accurate as the BOSS "bass guitar algorithm"* but it's RIGHT THERE. Big, Bright Screens... Adequate, if not GIant KNOBS, that CLICK... I've been getting deeply loopy lately and there's just no TIME for fiddle-faddle there, the loop DEMANDS... I OBEY....
*(ANYtime somebody starts talking "algorithms" when they mean "good squawk" I fear we have a problem, Houston....)
*(ANYtime somebody starts talking "algorithms" when they mean "good squawk" I fear we have a problem, Houston....)
TonyFlyingSquirrel
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I've done the blindfold test many times, and the nice thing about it, it removes the emotion and prejudice from the equation.
More often than not, even the snobbiest of tone purists can't tell the difference between most modellers and the real thing on a recording, which pisses them off even more because their bovine exhaust has been called.
More often than not, even the snobbiest of tone purists can't tell the difference between most modellers and the real thing on a recording, which pisses them off even more because their bovine exhaust has been called.
