Guitar, straight to the line in in my computer.

January 16, 2011 6:23 PM

Software amp modeler on par with the POD?

I'm a longtime user of the old Line 6 POD 2.0. Great device, but Line 6 Edit is some pretty horrible software, and I don't think they're working on it anymore. Every so often, it has a problem connecting to the POD, and the custom tones I've worked on are lost to me.

So, I think I'm going to move on. I've heard pure software amp modeling has gotten good. Any recommendations?
posted by ignignokt (6 comments total)

I might not be as picky as some, but I like both Amplitube and NI Guitar Rig. The amp simulator in Apple logic is decent, too, but not as good.
posted by umbĂș at 7:47 PM on January 16, 2011


There's nothing out there (yet) that sounds as good as a real amp, but that being said, I really like what IK Amplitube can do. The downside is IK Multimedia isn't as good as most other software companies at having anything remotely generous of a crossgrade/upgrade pricing scheme. Often, you'll have to pay a lot more for upgrades than comparable competitors' products.
posted by chimaera at 9:11 PM on January 16, 2011


Overall, I end up using Guitar Rig more than anything else. I find it a lot more intuitive than Amplitube. Amplitube probably has slightly better clean sounds -- especially the licensed 'Fender' version -- but I find I can get to the sound I want much faster with Guitar Rig.

Either of these are going to sound worlds ahead of the POD.

A couple points worth thinking about --

-- Most of us don't us a huge variety of guitar sounds so it's better to buy something that does your signature sound well than to worry about doing a ton of other stuff.

-- You can substantially improve most amp sims by disabling the speaker simulation and sending the signal instead through a convolution reverb loaded with an impulse response from a real speaker. This sounds more complicated than it is... basically you load up Space Designer or whatever as a plugin after the amp sim, and load one of the responses you can find on the web, or in Recabinet. That's it. (I think the latest version of Recabinet is a stand-alone plugin actually).

-- The amp sim in the latest version of Logic *is* pretty darn good.
posted by unSane at 5:12 AM on January 17, 2011


(Almost everything in my recent tracks, including the basses, is thru Guitar Rig).
posted by unSane at 5:12 AM on January 17, 2011


Thanks, guys - I haven't even thought of latency, but I'll give Guitar Rig a shot first, as there seems to be a consensus on that. Eleven's web site is confusing as hell - is there a hardware component to it?

unSane - you have a good point. I only play with four different sounds: crunchy, sludgy, lead, and clean, so I just need it to do those well and be easy to use.
posted by ignignokt at 5:56 PM on January 18, 2011


It's worth fiddling around with the latency until you get it right. Logic has a low-latency mode which is really worth getting to know as it works well even when you have a trillion plugins going.

I can play fine with latency under 20ms... anything more than that and it gets a bit tricky. But I've never not been able to get the latency down to an acceptable level even on low end systems, speaking OS X here.
posted by unSane at 6:34 PM on January 18, 2011


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