Amp sims have really stepped up their game in recent times, maybe they'll actually surpass real amps soon - a real amp is also about the room acoustics and you can't really carry it to different rooms for different tones. A real amp still has the edge but for how much longer? I'd like a small desktop tube amp with speaker, something like the Yamaha THR series but none-digital with a valve. But it's all becoming a grey area - why not just a tube preamp and IR on the track?

 

the most versatile vsti is currently most likely Neural DSP Plini...but nothing beats good hardware yet anyway...

 

I just LOVE my Iridium (I play a strat), but few months ago a friend of mine let me try his Nux Solid Studio, which costs less than one third the Iridium, and that thing blew my socks off. Seriously thinking about grabbing one of those cheapos Solid Studio. Incredible stuff.
Also, regarding your video, Rhett kicks major ass.

 

Oh yeah, for literally any piece of gear, you can always find people who love it, people who think it's 'meh', and people who straight-up hate it (or claim to - I've quite often found that the most vocal opponents of a lot of gear have very little actual hands-on experience with it).

In my experience, a lot of the time when people say they can't get a good tone out of a Helix/Fractal/etc, it's often down to a combination of expecting them to do something they're not designed to do, and user error:

What I mean is that so many people are going into using eg. a Helix, expecting to hear a sound come out of it that sounds exactly like standing in a room next to a fully cranked Marshall/Diezel/whatever, and those folks will be disappointed, because that's not what the unit is designed to deliver - it's designed to sound like what you hear coming through the monitors / your IEMs when playing through a mic'ed up cab, and that sound is (usually) very, very different to standing in a room while a VH4 annihilates your hearing.

The other thing I see happening super often is that people dial in settings on a virtual amp that they likely would never use on the real thing - the number one thing being they crank the master volume up to levels that would shake the fillings in their teeth out on the real amp, and then they wonder why their tone suddenly sounds loose/flubby/blown-out.

Yes, it's great that you have the option of cranking a 100W head up to 11 in a modeller without having to book an appointment with your audiologist shortly after, but that doesn't mean you actually need to, because I'd be willing to bet that almost no-one here has ever a) played a 100+W head with the master dimed (and not attenuated), and more importantly b) got a usable recorded tone out of the experience.


Based on experience, a huuuuuuuge number of people who post on forums writing off all modellers as "trash" haven't taken even the smallest amount of time to understand what sound they're actually designed to achieve - most of them tend to plug in, flick through a couple of presets (which, on practically every modeller, are literally the worst way to discover/understand what the unit is capable of) go "This doesn't sound like I'm sitting in a room beside an amp" and immediately decide it's terrible.

The truth is that the current generation of modellers, whether it's a Helix, Fractal, Kemper, Neural, etc are all fully capable of being indistinguishable from the real thing in a track/on stage. Just like you would sit with a new amp, figuring out what it's capable of, how its controls interact, how different guitars respond to it, you need to get a feel for how a modeller is gonna respond.

(If the only thing you do is jam by yourself, then potentially a modeller may not be the ideal choice for you - especially if you've spent years jamming with a low-med wattage amp beside you in your bedroom/living room/etc - but tbh I don't really feel that they're designed with that use case particularly high up on the list of priorities).

I've produced tracks in the past for artists with Marshall endorsements, using the Helix on 100% of the guitars, and had Marshall execs compliment them/me on "capturing the true tone and spirit of the brand".

Sure, it can be fun discussing the tiny intricacies of modelling accuracy, the strengths/weaknesses of certain platforms, etc but the fact is that we're now at a point where the technology just isn't the limiting factor anymore. I'm not saying that modelling is 100% perfect, but I am saying we're at a point now where I personally don't particularly care about the final 1 or 2 or 5%, because I'm already getting pretty much every tone I need/want, and saving a shitload of time, while keeping myself/the client in the creative headspace for longer.

If you then add stuff on top, like the ability to perfectly recreate studio tones live, I'm more than happy to live without the headaches and expense of keeping a bunch of tube amps running flawlessly 100% of the time. Not saying I don't use analogue as well (I use a load of pedals, and I'm a big fan of the SalvationMods preamps) but if I had to choose one or the other, it'd be my Helix every time.

 

Last edited: Sep 22, 2021

Interesting post.
I used for several years two different sets, one with a very loud Mesa combo with my everchanging pedalboard, or my trusty GT6 or GT8 straight into a PA. And it seems to me that the gamechanger came with the IR loaders. Even with a cheap modern IR loader running a good IR file it is possible to have a clean (even a crunch) guitar tone almost impossible (or extremely difficult) to achieve with digital modellers from, let's say, 5-10 years ago. The leap in sound from a COSM modeller like my GT6 and even a cheapo IR loader is incredible.

 

let's start with 1 million USD. I'd love to get me a new world class studio.