looking for a vst fx that can accurately recreate the boston guitar sounds using a d.i. guitar sound as the source.

 

There's some Tonex captures of it, but I can't remember the username of the person who created them - they shouldn't be too tricky to find on tonenet!

 

its mostly chorus, reverb and sustain, you can tweak it with some delay/echo.

 

Neural Amp Modeler is free and has some captures of the unit. But as stated it's not that hard to dial in
with distortion, chorus and verb plugins. Not that I would ever want to. Live on stage a real Rockman
pumps out the most godawful tone IMHO.....like a hive of angry bees in a coke can. Just having the sound
of the Rockman at your disposal will not make you sound like Tom Scholz on a Boston Record. There was also
millions of dollars of other studio gear involved in creating the Boston sound.

 

There's one in Amplitube, I've never had a real one so I couldn't tell you if it's a faithful reproduction.

 

I had a real one in the '80s but sadly lost it at a rehearsal somehow (packed everything away, checked around the room as usual to make sure we had everything - got home and it was missing). I never got a chance to try it through a PA but I thought even then it probably wouldn't work well. By today's standards it's pretty pointless having one, the sound quaility wasn't great even then. More of a rehearsal device.

 

The "real (i.e., first Boston album) guitar sound was pretty complex. There are whole YouTube channels about it. The consensus seems to be it's an amp powersoaked into a 2nd amp but I forget the details.

 

Last edited: Nov 22, 2023

I've got a real one, haven't used it in decades. Mostly used it to practice when I lived in an apartment. at the time it was quite high tech, an amp you could clip to your guitar strap and plug your headphones into. It was a sound similar to some of the police (andy Summers) sounds, and also some U2 at the time. Never tried to play any Boston on it, by then I'd heard every Boston song about a billion times and the glory had faded. Saw them live once or twice, and they were quite good.

I've kept it around in case I want to throw it into a signal chain sometime just to see what random shit it could add to the sound..