Amp sims (best of the best, STL Tones Howard Benson, Mercurial, Kuassa, Neural DSP, Nembrini, Softube, JST Tones., IK Multimedia eh, they are at the bottom with positive Greed.

Plugins (not in eco systems?)

• Whamy and many more By Kuassa
• CryBoy Crybaby by Polychrome DSP
• Crybaby by Nembrini
• Polytune Tuner by TC Electronics
• The Scream by Cytomic
• Hornet Valvola Tube emulation (EL34 etc etc) plus more Boss like pedals.
• Plugin Alliance pedals
• TSE080 TS9
• Dimension D+Chorus Brigade by Universal Audio
• Roland Tape Echo
• Audiority pedals (chief Chorus, Distortion 1, Heavy Metal, Octover, Big Goat, But Fuzz etc)

 

S Gear + Nolly + Plini + Henson are still my top rated guitar softwares that I am using until today,

 

thank god you dont have Wong whatever his name is, this white funky guy, terrible ugly and always yapping all day

 

Not much wrong with Amplitube I thought, It's all in the fingers anyway, so she said

 

havent heard better than the lion 68 super lead plexi plugin yet. also mlc subzero 93

 

Bratwurst Fuzz is an absolute must have and it's free.

https://plugins4free.com/plugin/3825/

 

Guitar playing really is not in the gear you use. Even Kurt CobaIn said fuck the instruments and the amps (and he used ALLL the gear if you catch my drift as it were). It's how you are as to how your sound is

 

Last edited: Apr 24, 2025

I don't agree with this at all. Kurt supposedly said gear doesn't matter yet he had everything. Maybe for grunge that could be true, but not in general. This is the same thing as producers in multi-million dollar studios telling you gear doesn't matter. Of course it matters.

If you use some crappy fuzz plugin with a Squire it will be 100x harder to sound good than if you used a nice Big Muff and a Les Paul. Try to tell me with a straight face that a cranked JCM-800 is no different than some crappy plugin. It's nonsense and you know it.

I'm not denying that someone like Tosin Abasi can make anything sound brilliant. But very few of us have that kind of talent.

 

I might have been hammered drunk when I wrote this but I still think guitar gear is not as important as people make out, you can get a very good sound from an inexpensive guitar and a half decent amp (or a couple of free plugins actually) these days.

And I really don't think that if you suck at guitar then all the modelling technology on the earth is going to help you. So prioritise practice over obsessing over gear I think was the takeaway, again I don't know cos I was drinking 7% pear cider at the time.

(btw maybe Kurt didn't say that but I imagine that it's probably something he might say, in between smashing all of his shit up and whatever larking he got up to)

 

Last edited: Apr 25, 2025

You sure you aint drinking while commenting again?

 

I'm on the caffeine free Yorkshire tea now

 

I met Kurt years ago in new york just before they took off, at the music building, he had a knack for gear, he wanted my friends RAT pedal, an original large box, sounded wild like a Klon, even a year later Kurt asked him again if he can buy cause they stopped making them and he was unhappy with the new ones, I finally went to visit Nirvana at the space they where rehearsing in on the 7th floor of the music building, I sat through several jams until Kurt showed up with Courtney aka Yuki Ono, I offered to lend my Rat pedal but even this one was not as nice as my friends, we both went to see what was the difference and opened them up, we found apply all over my friends, its as modded Rat by Bill Finnegan, who invented the Klon Pedal, and he had added diodes we never figured out cause I called and got zero co operation from Bill, who insisted he does NOT will not share trade secrets, he says.

So if Kurt was such as guy who was clueless about pedals this debunked the myth, he knew allot, was very involved, he even said he preferred having all he distortion, tone on the flood and the amp just to amplify everything, he got a Boogie power amp, had Marshalls and all, but it what he used only to perform the songs so he had more things cooking.

 

song writing singing is not int he gear you use, this is correct, Kurt is not a so called Guiterists, he is a singer songwriter guitar player, hs tone depended on the gear he used, he was indeed involved heavily with pedals, he wanted this Rat Billl who made the Klon modded for a friend of mine, ended up dup with a Big MufF but he would try things so we are only see gear for songs at shows.

 

amplitube is a problem for the fingers, the latency is odd, feels like plastic, the bandwidth of all the knobs of their sim interfaces are limited, suck( I say this cause of tonex) so even if you have a great capture the sms you load them into do NOT help tweak your tone, lie was if they are literally 3 level captures low mid high, nothing like a real amp.

 

Sugar Bytes GUITARIST Demo Video

 

this guy tests marshall sims all the time, he still claims the howard benson is the best every other sims he says is 2 dimensional, howard benson is 4, he offered audio files to download and load in your own daw to test your sims to prove they cant sounds as full as the howard benson, including the caliburn sim, and you can hear how he blended the caliburn with the howard benson and its as not using its IRs, he used eq matching, and he said in a vide that when you finally get the same eq the weakness of the other sims show, maybe no gain during low volume and no boost in treble bright or master fader depending not he marshall type.

And by the way, the only other sims this guy recommends are not even Kuassa, its the polychrome dsp Nutcracker marshall, then Kuassa, mercurial, Neural DSPo Mesa boogie and Soldano, the wizards, bogrens are included with the Howard benson sim

 

I always rated Amplitube and Guitar Rig but preferred the sound of Amplitube 5. I didn't think it was plastic-y at all it's obviously an emulation but I got some satisfactory tones out of it.

I mean there's bound to always be a small amount of latency with anything computer generated but 1-2ms I can't really even detect, maybe your brain works faster than mine

I always thought the convenience of being able to emulate a rig in a few clicks without the need to have endless amounts of expensive gear, the cables, the patching of pedals and space that a pedal board requires, batteries, power, the noise and the general pain in the arse that having a 'real' rig comes with outweighed the small difference in tone and the tiny amount of latency introduced, I'm certainly not a guitar tone purist. Certainly for recording at home the sims have their advantages, if you're playing on stage and you turn up with a laptop you would deserve to be booed off.

Oh and regarding the Kurt Cobain issue, I think I was getting confused with a quote that he said something about good guitar playing getting in the way of creativity, I don't believe he ever mentioned not being interested in the gear, wires crossed here.

 

Last edited: Apr 26, 2025

Kurt was definitely way into his pedals. He believed that the amp should just be an extension of the pedals — or even better, that he could have a custom setup where everything was within arm’s reach. This was one thing I personally heard him talk about, and I thought it was really innovative at the time.
I worked as a secretary at the studios and had also been an assistant manager at a metal label in the past, so I was around a lot of serious musicians. From my experience, I'm convinced that the best songwriters and guitar players are always chasing tone. They hear multiple layers of sound in their heads that they are constantly trying to recreate.
Guys like Eddie Van Halen, Randy Rhoads — they're obsessed with tone. The rest — the ones who mostly stick with a tight, boosted tube Plexi sound with a midrange-heavy SD-1 pedal — are time-based players. They pick a style and stay inside it. When a player sticks to one amp, they usually adopt one of the many styles they can pull off, but they’re staying in one lane.
That's why I'm 100% convinced that the singers and guitarists who sit around like Kurt, or even guys deep into the country scene (yes, even strung out on heroin sometimes), talking endlessly about how to get the sounds they hear in their heads through pedals or console tricks — those are the ones who end up writing the best music. Everyone else plays along, some become solid, reliable musicians — even unique — but the true tone-chasers are always one, two, three steps ahead.

As for Amplitube: it’s at its lowest point right now, maybe even irrelevant compared to NAM, Tonocracy, STLTones, etc.
If IK Multimedia had any BRAINS, they’d fix all the issues with Amplitube which is a land out and alone sim for practicing learning songs or writing ideas using its multitrack recorded. — and sonically upgrade the range of their products to match even the free NAM interface, which already provides a much wider EQ and tone flexibility.
IK should bundle Amplitube and Tonex together for one price, and Tonex hardware buyers should get the full version of Tonex software for free.
Frankly, they pushed Amplitube for the last time if you ask me. It's now riding on the shoulders of Joe Satriani, Brian May, and a few others to keep sales alive.
In today’s saturated market, where software options are exploding and people are leaning heavily into capture-based sims, players are demanding better. If I were IK, I would start giving away all the software to anyone who buys Tonex hardware — and make it wireless, too.

And about Marshall —
What I heard from insiders is that even though Marshall was sold, the copyrights for the Marshall logo will never be respected again, especially in China. Companies will start using the logo freely without any meaningful legal recourse.
We’re already seeing the Marshall name appear on amp sims from STL Tones, Howard Benson, IK Multimedia (who already had a trademark agreement for the Slash AFD pack, for example). Soon, companies making Marshall knock-offs — like Friedman, Fortin, etc. — will also be able to openly use the "Marshall" name, simply adding their own mod names next to it, even legally.
I give it six months.
I also think we'll start buying modular software to create our own amp sims and mods. That's the direction I hear things are going.
Will the capture scene continue to grow? Probably — especially since more hybrid hardware pedals with IO, dual expression pedal support, program change, and preset buttons are coming out. They’re already here now, but I expect prices to drop fast by the end of the year.

 

I dropped any separate plugins now (Nembrini, separate amps ...).
And i compared all suites : Amplitube, Revalver, THU, guitar rig ...

At the end, i kept Helix native and AmpHub.
Both deliver in ALL domains, even obscure fuzz pedals.
Helix provide more effects than you will ever need.
They even modelled Fuzz Factory auto oscillation when you stop playing (and i have a REAL one too)
Polyphonic pitch, sustain ... and more.

The most complete ever (and sounding good) : Helix native

AmpHub if you only want good "basics", and even more : they included pitch shifter for drop tuning/harmonizer
Along chorus, EQ, Delay, reverb ... AmpHub can be a good solution too if you don't want "exotic" effects.

 

I remember the first generation of Guitar Sims and they were focused on latency and sound not this GUI nonsense.
Over the years the latency has been getting higher and higher on these sims and the insane GUI crap is behind the extra
latency behind it.


I am still on Guitar Rig 2.2 and Jamvox 2.01 for actual usages ( playing some hosting party events) and they have never failed me.