For the longest time, I have been a dyed in the wool hardware solution based guitar player, preferring some sort of hardware for my amplification and sound/tone. Anything from a POD2, which I love, to a real amp with glowing tubes, like my Mesa Boogie Studio 22. Love that thing!!!

Run the POD direct or throw a mic in front of the mesa and I'm good to go. I didn't like or use amp sims.

A thread in another forum got me to thinking.... you see, for many years, I have not used amp sims because of the difficulty I have had getting a reasonable sounding tone that I could work with and like. Most sims can be brutally harsh or thin.

So last night I decided to spend a few hours with the sims. The family was out of town for a few hours shopping and the house was empty. So I fired up Sonar, loaded a blank project and started loading one by one, the 3 sims I have. I loaded Guitar Rig Pro4 from NI. There was a noticeable latency in it.... so I went to the Sonar settings and adjusted the latency in the audio drivers to 5ms and waaa laaa... perfect!

On to experimenting. I will save you the tedium of everything I did, but essentially, I loaded a number of models and did in fact find a number that, after tweeking, did sound good. In some ways, I could even say close to amazing. I saved a number of them as personal presets.

Playing with them in solo mode and also with BB playing a backing track yielded good results. I was going to record and post the song samples but..... not enough time.

SO, I have begun changing my official Anti-amp-sim position to one that is now open to the use of select sim models in future projects.

I will be informing you in the first few projects, the names of the sims and the amp models being used. After that, if you like the tone and ask, I'll give that info. BTW.... I have 2 more amp sims I didn't really experiment with due to time constraints. I think I need to register and unlock one of them.

Anyway, it was a fun time playing with the models and setting up a number of sweet presets. Marshall, Fender, Tweeds, Plexi.....

Perhaps you can teach an old dog new tricks.

edit: Parting question to guitarists here: Do you use sims? If so, which ones and why? Favorite models?

Last edited by Guitarhacker; 01/01/16 04:50 AM.
You can find my music at:
www.herbhartley.com
Add nothing that adds nothing to the music.
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