My Thoughts on Amp Modeling and Neural Captures
A kinda’ long read as I have way too much time now that I’m retired and am lucky to have some extra cash to try all this new stuff. 😉
And, most know me, I have absolutely no affiliation with any of these companies, I have no dog in this. I just love the thrill of trying new gear.
Love to hear your thoughts on the whole recent Modeling/NAM capture thing. I know it's skyrocketed the last couple of years.
First off, please don’t flame me for my personal experiences. (Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on anything, I probably will be – thx)
Some of my experiences certainly might just be my error, but, this is what I’ve heard and felt. I am sure many of you probably will have differing results depending on how you are using it or the environment your using it in.
Here we go...
I've been chasing home recording amp simulators since they came out. Remember Rockman, Pod, Tech21 Sansamp, Digitech, Voodoo Valve, Atomic AmpliFire, Art Power Plant etc. I pretty much tried any box that had a 'Cab simulated' output jack. Most early units were all analog. I used my Art Power Plant for years on a lot of recordings. It has great, realistic crunchy Marshall tones, a one trick pony for sure. I also have my Digitech 2101 studio tube processor. I still play it and it makes me smile even today. I used it on my last album for some parts. There is crazy magic in that box. I had a buddy over last week and played it for him and he was floored by how great it sounded, especially compared to the new digital stuff. Huge, warm, fat tones that no modeler matches.
I started down this new, digital rabbit hole almost 20 years ago now! I got my first Fractal Axe-Fx when they came out in 2006. Can you believe that was 20 years ago! The Fractal uses proprietary modeling and not actual amp captures. Yes, they do have a ‘Tone Match’ feature that can do something similar. I thought it might be just the thing for recording as it’s so much easier than mic’ing a cab and blasting away at at home and way easier on my poor wife, who works from home and doesn’t want to hear me recording the same damn guitar riff over-and-over, rattling pictures off the wall and driving the pooch crazy - haha. One cool thing was, it was fast saving patches vs remembering analog knobs for matching sounds when re-doing parts.
Let’s start with early recording. When I got the first Fractal, it’s was a freakin’ blast. So many patches that are fun to play and yeah, I could sound like EVH or Gilmore or Jimi. Jamming’ at home with albums was fun, especially sounding just like those LP tones. But, after close scrutiny, they really didn’t sound that great. I just wasn’t getting tones that sounded better than my live amps mic’d.
I tried using the Fractal live, but, using it was a challenge. I ran it through two, Atomic Reactor FR, Full-range 50 watt 6L6 tube-powered cabs which at the time were the best sounding full-range FRFR cabs available. I do have to say, it was damn cool hearing everything in stereo through two big-ass cabinets! Delays, Chorus, Rotary etc was mind-blowing. Programming the Fractal wasn’t too hard, I figured it out pretty quick, even without using the manual.
My biggest complaint was getting all the patches’ volume to be consistent. I know that sounds easy, and should have been, but damn, I had the hardest time programming them to all match in a live setting. I would do my best programming at home but, at the gig, all went to hell. The band and the FOH sound guys hated me for a while as I would be tweaking the levels all night. Not fun. Thinking back now, I probably should have maybe added an Expression pedal block for overall volume to make it easy to adjust on-the-fly. I ditched that rig live and just kept the Axe-Fx at home.
Then, the Kemper Profiler came out. This was before they had a floor version. It was either a rack unit or the toaster oven-size thingie. It came with or without a built-in power amp, which was easier to incorporate into a live rig. But, OMG, I hated it, hated it! I still have freakin’ nightmares about it. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to create what I wanted. Must have been me or the way my brain works, but programming it made absolutely no sense to me. Forgetaboutit trying to use it for live work. Plus, I didn’t think it sounded any better than the Axe-Fx for recording. I still see a lot of bands on Premiere Guitar 'Rig Rundowns' using them live. I gave it a shot and finally passed it along to someone who was smarter than me - haha.
So, after not rocking my world, I gave up on this digital modeling/capture stuff. Yeah, this was all early tech and still growing for sure.
Stay tuned, more to come…
I just went back and rocked my old amps. Lots of cool tube stuff: Matchless, Bogner, Carr, Amplified Nation, Headstrong. Recording wise, I am also totally into the Synergy inter-changeable module gear. All tube, all analog and records amazing. I used it on 90% of last album and the sounds I recorded were as good as mic'ing my cranked amps. And, way more dog/wife-friendly too.
After my so-so intro to modeling, fast forward to now. Like many any of ya’ll, I read about 3-4 guitar mags a month and follow a bunch of YouTuber sites. The whole digital technology has evolved crazy fast lately, even in just the last year. There are so many new units from old standards: Fractal, Fender, Line6 Helix etc. And, newcomers: Headrush, Lava, IK Multimedia ToneX, Dark Glass Anagram, Neural Quad Cortex, plus a bunch of new companies too.
I bought the latest Fractal AM4 Amp/EFX floor modeler. I read it has the same amp sounds as the Fractal's big brother - Axe-Fx III , but only 4 programming blocks. So, you can’t create big complex patches. Probably fine for most peeps. I thought the sound quality was far better than the first Axe-Fx based from my memory, but I wasn’t floored. It did ‘feel’ good, probably the best of all the units I tried. It reacted the best to volume control and picking dynamics, which was nice. But, no touchscreen!! WTH? Everyone else has a touchscreen LCD. That bugged me. I kept trying to touch it, but I would forget that it didn't have that feature. I messed with it for a week and ending up returning it to Fractal as I was still in search of finding the holy grail of matching an analog amp.
Next, I read a ton about the Neural Quad Cortex as being the new hot shit. So, I bought one and right out-of-the-box, the amp tones were very good. I thought maybe even a little better than the Fractal. The QC uses actual amp captures vs. modeling. You can use the QC box hardware to capture your own stuff (or download them from 3rd party sites) The QC doesn’t use generic NAM which the world seems to be moving toward. (Neural Amp Models - I know that is confusing terminology) Who know, maybe with a Firmware update, they could accept NAM captures.
I liked the QC. It had some really nice sounding factory patches to show off the box. (One of my pet peeves, why do companies include preset patches that SUCK. Drenched with reverb or totally over the top with effects. How about just show us a basic amp and maybe a little room ambience. Everything doesn’t have to have crazy ping pong delay! Sorry, I digress) It wasn’t the easiest to program.
Downside, I found it hard to download new captures and more so, how to find them once you downloaded them! Some downloads come with or without IR cabs baked in, which is also a bit confusing. The unit is not very intuitive for programming, lots of sub-menus to do stuff. I had to search YouTube videos to figure it out. It should have been much easier. Maybe someday with new firmware. It has MIDI control for adding additional foot-switch controllers for live use. From a sheer tone and EFX standpoint, I can certainly see why it has rocked the gigging world. Overall, it was still slightly digital sounding when critically recording to my old-school, analog ears. And, I've read there has been some reliability issues with bands using them on the road.
The search continued.
I bought the new Dark Glass Anagram w/Guitar Essentials. This unit uses open format NAM capture files. And, it uses both regular NAM files as well as the newest NAM A2 captures. (OMG, my brain is starting to hurt again). This new NAM A2 thing, seems to be where the capture world is going. There are a lot of 3rd party programmers selling NAM A2 captures of amazing boutique amps. Plus, there is a cool site called Tone3000 where you can download and share free Amp, EFX, IR NAM captures, which is amazing and will keep the Anagram fresh. Plus, you can purchase some new amps and EFX off the Dark Glass site too. The Anagram doesn’t have internal hardware to capture your own gear like the Quad Cortex, so, that might be a downside.
I did find it super easy to download stuff from Tone3000. The Anagram has the most programming power of any unit yet. Funny, even being the smallest size of all the pedal units, it has by far the most processing power, 6 cores for pretty much any complicated patch you could ever come up with. Programming the Anagram was a a no-brainer. Super simple to program without having to open the manual. Amazing graphic representations of each amp, EFX etc. LOVE THAT! Check out the cool, touchscreen graphics!
Sound-wise, I thought it was even a another notch up from the Quad Cortex which doesn’t use A2. When you get into using amp captures, of course, a lot rides on the quality of those Captures and cab IRs. The sonic quality behind the latest high quality A2 amp models are the best yet.
I didn’t mention this yet, but a lot of these digital units tend to have a slight bit of latency on pick attack to sound output. The Anagram felt great with virtually no latency. The Anagram doesn’t come loaded with a ton of amp captures, but the ones it does include are the bread and butter stuff and all sound killer. It does have a few cool ones that the others don’t have, like Hiwatt, Victory and Matchless amps. And with the Tone3000, you can find just about anything you crave. Live, this unit would be nice... The smallest footprint for a pedalboard, great sounds, easy programming for patches, scenes and EFX modes. It only has 3 foot-switch buttons, less than the other units, but does have MIDI so, you would probably need an external controller to access everything live. I’ve seen a few users that have them setup with a small external controller that lets you have discrete buttons for song change, scene change inside that patch and also can also turn on/off EFX. OK, I feel this is the nicest unit yet.
These are only a few of the current crop of digital amp options. I haven’t tried a Headrush, Fender ToneMaster and Helix which seem to have a big following and most accept NAM A2 now. Plus, a bunch of Chinese units that pop-up day-by-day and also use NAM A2. Who knows, there might be a sub-$100 stomp with NAM A2, it's still early this morning.
But wait, I have to add one more cool option to share...
I recently tried the latest Two Notes ‘Genome 2' software simulator. (They just released v2.1 as I posted this) It’s available in a Free ‘Intro’ version with just a few amps and effects. But, I was BLOWN AWAY by it. So, much so, I bought the full Suite Version (FYI: If you download the free Intro version first, you can upgrade to the full suite at a huge discount over buying the big suite first!) I know it’s not practical for live work, but I have to say, the recording tones are stunning and 1ms latency which is virtually nothing. You do have to use some sort of Interface I/O box (I have a Scarlet Solo) Sure, you have to have a computer to use it which is not as easy as a floor stompbox.
Genome uses both their own TSM-AI captures but can also use NAM A2 captures. The full ‘Suite’ comes with a ton of great amps, cabs and EFX supplied. And, with NAM A2 import, it’ll stay fresh. I can honestly say, the Genome sounds the best I have used yet. It might also have to do with the Two Notes DynIRs cabs. They are big on their cab IR capture technology which can make or break the overall tone. Simple block programming too. For home use, the Genome is perfect for recording. Trust me, try the Free Intro version and you will be amazed.
ernie
I’m pretty sure that was the beginnings of the video dance that got Billy dropped from his label.
Hey, it lines up with the second knob, what else do you want?
This guy is a good guitarist too.
My Thoughts on Amp Modeling and Neural Captures A kinda’ long read as I have way too much time now that I’m retired and am lucky to have some extra cash to try all this new stuff. 😉 And, most know me, I have absolutely no affiliation with any of these companies, I have no dog in this. I just love the thrill of trying new gear. Love to hear your thoughts on the whole recent Modeling/NAM capture thing. I know it's skyrocketed the last couple of years. First off, please don’t flame me for my personal experiences. (Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on anything, I probably will be – thx) Some of my experiences certainly might just be my error, but, this is what I’ve heard and felt. I am sure many of you probably will have differing results depending on how you are using it or the environment your using it in. Here we go... I've been chasing home recording amp simulators since they came out. Remember Rockman, Pod, Tech21 Sansamp, Digitech, Voodoo Valve, Atomic AmpliFire, Art Power Plant etc. I pretty much tried any box that had a 'Cab simulated' output jack. Most early units were all analog. I used my Art Power Plant for years on a lot of recordings. It has great, realistic crunchy Marshall tones, a one trick pony for sure. I also have my Digitech 2101 studio tube processor. I still play it and it makes me smile even today. I used it on my last album for some parts. There is crazy magic in that box. I had a buddy over last week and played it for him and he was floored by how great it sounded, especially compared to the new digital stuff. Huge, warm, fat tones that no modeler matches. I started down this new, digital rabbit hole almost 20 years ago now! I got my first Fractal Axe-Fx when they came out in 2006. Can you believe that was 20 years ago! The Fractal uses proprietary modeling and not actual amp captures. Yes, they do have a ‘Tone Match’ feature that can do something similar. I thought it might be just the thing for recording as it’s so much easier than mic’ing a cab and blasting away at at home and way easier on my poor wife, who works from home and doesn’t want to hear me recording the same damn guitar riff over-and-over, rattling pictures off the wall and driving the pooch crazy - haha. One cool thing was, it was fast saving patches vs remembering analog knobs for matching sounds when re-doing parts. Let’s start with early recording. When I got the first Fractal, it’s was a freakin’ blast. So many patches that are fun to play and yeah, I could sound like EVH or Gilmore or Jimi. Jamming’ at home with albums was fun, especially sounding just like those LP tones. But, after close scrutiny, they really didn’t sound that great. I just wasn’t getting tones that sounded better than my live amps mic’d. I tried using the Fractal live, but, using it was a challenge. I ran it through two, Atomic Reactor FR, Full-range 50 watt 6L6 tube-powered cabs which at the time were the best sounding full-range FRFR cabs available. I do have to say, it was damn cool hearing everything in stereo through two big-ass cabinets! Delays, Chorus, Rotary etc was mind-blowing. Programming the Fractal wasn’t too hard, I figured it out pretty quick, even without using the manual. My biggest complaint was getting all the patches’ volume to be consistent. I know that sounds easy, and should have been, but damn, I had the hardest time programming them to all match in a live setting. I would do my best programming at home but, at the gig, all went to hell. The band and the FOH sound guys hated me for a while as I would be tweaking the levels all night. Not fun. Thinking back now, I probably should have maybe added an Expression pedal block for overall volume to make it easy to adjust on-the-fly. I ditched that rig live and just kept the Axe-Fx at home. Then, the Kemper Profiler came out. This was before they had a floor version. It was either a rack unit or the toaster oven-size thingie. It came with or without a built-in power amp, which was easier to incorporate into a live rig. But, OMG, I hated it, hated it! I still have freakin’ nightmares about it. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to create what I wanted. Must have been me or the way my brain works, but programming it made absolutely no sense to me. Forgetaboutit trying to use it for live work. Plus, I didn’t think it sounded any better than the Axe-Fx for recording. I still see a lot of bands on Premiere Guitar 'Rig Rundowns' using them live. I gave it a shot and finally passed it along to someone who was smarter than me - haha. So, after not rocking my world, I gave up on this digital modeling/capture stuff. Yeah, this was all early tech and still growing for sure. Stay tuned, more to come… I just went back and rocked my old amps. Lots of cool tube stuff: Matchless, Bogner, Carr, Amplified Nation, Headstrong. Recording wise, I am also totally into the Synergy inter-changeable module gear. All tube, all analog and records amazing. I used it on 90% of last album and the sounds I recorded were as good as mic'ing my cranked amps. And, way more dog/wife-friendly too. After my so-so intro to modeling, fast forward to now. Like many any of ya’ll, I read about 3-4 guitar mags a month and follow a bunch of YouTuber sites. The whole digital technology has evolved crazy fast lately, even in just the last year. There are so many new units from old standards: Fractal, Fender, Line6 Helix etc. And, newcomers: Headrush, Lava, IK Multimedia ToneX, Dark Glass Anagram, Neural Quad Cortex, plus a bunch of new companies too. I bought the latest Fractal AM4 Amp/EFX floor modeler. I read it has the same amp sounds as the Fractal's big brother - Axe-Fx III , but only 4 programming blocks. So, you can’t create big complex patches. Probably fine for most peeps. I thought the sound quality was far better than the first Axe-Fx based from my memory, but I wasn’t floored. It did ‘feel’ good, probably the best of all the units I tried. It reacted the best to volume control and picking dynamics, which was nice. But, no touchscreen!! WTH? Everyone else has a touchscreen LCD. That bugged me. I kept trying to touch it, but I would forget that it didn't have that feature. I messed with it for a week and ending up returning it to Fractal as I was still in search of finding the holy grail of matching an analog amp. Next, I read a ton about the Neural Quad Cortex as being the new hot shit. So, I bought one and right out-of-the-box, the amp tones were very good. I thought maybe even a little better than the Fractal. The QC uses actual amp captures vs. modeling. You can use the QC box hardware to capture your own stuff (or download them from 3rd party sites) The QC doesn’t use generic NAM which the world seems to be moving toward. (Neural Amp Models - I know that is confusing terminology) Who know, maybe with a Firmware update, they could accept NAM captures. I liked the QC. It had some really nice sounding factory patches to show off the box. (One of my pet peeves, why do companies include preset patches that SUCK. Drenched with reverb or totally over the top with effects. How about just show us a basic amp and maybe a little room ambience. Everything doesn’t have to have crazy ping pong delay! Sorry, I digress) It wasn’t the easiest to program. Downside, I found it hard to download new captures and more so, how to find them once you downloaded them! Some downloads come with or without IR cabs baked in, which is also a bit confusing. The unit is not very intuitive for programming, lots of sub-menus to do stuff. I had to search YouTube videos to figure it out. It should have been much easier. Maybe someday with new firmware. It has MIDI control for adding additional foot-switch controllers for live use. From a sheer tone and EFX standpoint, I can certainly see why it has rocked the gigging world. Overall, it was still slightly digital sounding when critically recording to my old-school, analog ears. And, I've read there has been some reliability issues with bands using them on the road. The search continued. I bought the new Dark Glass Anagram w/Guitar Essentials. This unit uses open format NAM capture files. And, it uses both regular NAM files as well as the newest NAM A2 captures. (OMG, my brain is starting to hurt again). This new NAM A2 thing, seems to be where the capture world is going. There are a lot of 3rd party programmers selling NAM A2 captures of amazing boutique amps. Plus, there is a cool site called Tone3000 where you can download and share free Amp, EFX, IR NAM captures, which is amazing and will keep the Anagram fresh. Plus, you can purchase some new amps and EFX off the Dark Glass site too. The Anagram doesn’t have internal hardware to capture your own gear like the Quad Cortex, so, that might be a downside. I did find it super easy to download stuff from Tone3000. The Anagram has the most programming power of any unit yet. Funny, even being the smallest size of all the pedal units, it has by far the most processing power, 6 cores for pretty much any complicated patch you could ever come up with. Programming the Anagram was a a no-brainer. Super simple to program without having to open the manual. Amazing graphic representations of each amp, EFX etc. LOVE THAT! Check out the cool, touchscreen graphics! Sound-wise, I thought it was even a another notch up from the Quad Cortex which doesn’t use A2. When you get into using amp captures, of course, a lot rides on the quality of those Captures and cab IRs. The sonic quality behind the latest high quality A2 amp models are the best yet. I didn’t mention this yet, but a lot of these digital units tend to have a slight bit of latency on pick attack to sound output. The Anagram felt great with virtually no latency. The Anagram doesn’t come loaded with a ton of amp captures, but the ones it does include are the bread and butter stuff and all sound killer. It does have a few cool ones that the others don’t have, like Hiwatt, Victory and Matchless amps. And with the Tone3000, you can find just about anything you crave. Live, this unit would be nice... The smallest footprint for a pedalboard, great sounds, easy programming for patches, scenes and EFX modes. It only has 3 foot-switch buttons, less than the other units, but does have MIDI so, you would probably need an external controller to access everything live. I’ve seen a few users that have them setup with a small external controller that lets you have discrete buttons for song change, scene change inside that patch and also can also turn on/off EFX. OK, I feel this is the nicest unit yet. These are only a few of the current crop of digital amp options. I haven’t tried a Headrush, Fender ToneMaster and Helix which seem to have a big following and most accept NAM A2 now. Plus, a bunch of Chinese units that pop-up day-by-day and also use NAM A2. Who knows, there might be a sub-$100 stomp with NAM A2, it's still early this morning. But wait, I have to add one more cool option to share... I recently tried the latest Two Notes ‘Genome 2' software simulator. (They just released v2.1 as I posted this) It’s available in a Free ‘Intro’ version with just a few amps and effects. But, I was BLOWN AWAY by it. So, much so, I bought the full Suite Version (FYI: If you download the free Intro version first, you can upgrade to the full suite at a huge discount over buying the big suite first!) I know it’s not practical for live work, but I have to say, the recording tones are stunning and 1ms latency which is virtually nothing. You do have to use some sort of Interface I/O box (I have a Scarlet Solo) Sure, you have to have a computer to use it which is not as easy as a floor stompbox. Genome uses both their own TSM-AI captures but can also use NAM A2 captures. The full ‘Suite’ comes with a ton of great amps, cabs and EFX supplied. And, with NAM A2 import, it’ll stay fresh. I can honestly say, the Genome sounds the best I have used yet. It might also have to do with the Two Notes DynIRs cabs. They are big on their cab IR capture technology which can make or break the overall tone. Simple block programming too. For home use, the Genome is perfect for recording. Trust me, try the Free Intro version and you will be amazed. ernie
I PM'd him on Facebook to see if he has any live Piper recordings. I'm not finding much of anything. I bought both of their albums via Columbia House back in the seventies. They are in storage.....forever.
