Maybe I'm late to the party, but....

I went to a friends rehearsal the other night to hear a problem with his amp.
When I arrived they were jamming away, so as usual I was checking out everyones set ups.
The other guitar player was using a Epiphone LP and a Bassman, but after they finished a song, he has noodleing around and I was hearing some real good reverb. So my curiosity got the best on me and I was looking to see what pedals he was using, but couldn't see anything that would get the sounds from a bassman that I was hearing. Afer they stoppped for a smoke brake, I ask him what he was using, so he showed me that behind the amp on a small table was an IPad. He was using a Peavey modeling program called Agile Amp kit.
He had reverb as well as all the good stuff being controlled from his IPad, then the signal from the headphone output was sent through an adapter to his amp.
Well I couldn't wait to try this set up, so a trip to Radio Shack for the adapter and I downloaded the basic program and used a 5f1 that I built with a Weber alnico and I got to tell you the sounds was incredible.
The reverb whicj sounded a little strange coming out of my 5f1 was very good.
I still have a lot of experimenting to do, but this sounded better than any pedal reverb I heard, and you can set the Ipad up with all the overdrive you want and adjust yhe output volume down to bedroom levels and it still has that big tone that normally you would have to crank up the amp to get.
I haven't had t he chance to crank the 5f1 up to see how it sounds when maxed out, but The one I heard at the rehearsal sure sounded sweet.
I't not suggesting anyone buy an Ipad just to have reverb on an old champ
but it sure got my curiosity peeked.
Like I said this may be old news to this forum, so maybe I'm late to the party.

Line 6 better watch their arse. that thing's $20 (if you already have an ipad)

After reading about Paleolithic Oldowan, Acheulean, and Clovis stone tools, then brushing up on Native American material culture for an upcoming archaeological dig... I have come to realize - technology advances without regard for our sentimentality.

I can't believe digital amps are starting to sound decent and computers have turned into phones - which have now turned into amps.

I still love my tube amp and pedal builds, but to replace a pedal board with an iPhone does have its own sorta cool.

That's new to me. Interesting.

I may have to go get one.

I have seen this, but not in a "real" band setting, just guys noodling at home. I have however seen multitrack recording, and one time watched a guy at a big club mixing FOH while walking around the place with his ipad! This was for Drive By Truckers too! Not joe blow down at the blues club. Pretty cool.

Cripes, I still haven't worked out how to use my modelling amp. I think I'm gonna go back to acoustic, and back to mono, while I'm at it. Dylan you Judas!!

I always wanted a Bassman that I could use as a speaker for my
I-pad. :mrgreen:

I have seen this, but not in a "real" band setting, just guys noodling at home. I have however seen multitrack recording, and one time watched a guy at a big club mixing FOH while walking around the place with his ipad! This was for Drive By Truckers too! Not joe blow down at the blues club. Pretty cool.

Most likely he was controlling the mixer with his iPad, and not mixing with the iPad per se :wink:

Still pretty cool! And really useful to tweak the mix so it works everywhere in the room, not just behind the board.

He had reverb as well as all the good stuff being controlled from his IPad, then the signal from the headphone output was sent through an adapter to his amp.


what is the adapter? just something to get from 3.5mm stereo to 1/4" mono?

The set up is, you plug an Apogee Jam into the Ipad using the 30pin connection, then plug the guitar into a 1/4 inch plug at the other end of the Apogee. Then use a 1/8 to 1/4 adapater to plug into the headphone jack on the Ipad to accept a regular guitar cable then on to your amp.
Play around with this quite a bit last night and still haven't scratched the surface.
I played every type of guitar from acoustic to solidbody to big box jazz and they all sounded pretty damn amazing.
The reverb and tremolo sound very authentic, at least to my ear. The numerous pedal effects would take months to really get to know. I played around with an Octaver pedal, and soloing with my big box jazz guitar produced some very interesting sounds, enough to fuel ones imagination for quite some time.
Over 50 years of guitar picking and I never cared for effects. I just wanted my guitar and amp if choice, any pedals that I have accumulated over the years are in a box with 20 years worth of dust on them.
What did try was daling everything in like I wanted it using headphones, I turn the headphone output volume on zero and turned the 5f1 volume up to max, then increased the headphone output volume one click at a time, the tones including the reverb sounded great and the touch sensitivity was something you'd just have to try for yourself.
more later as I learn more.

The real beauty of this stuff is you no longer need to haul an amp to any gig where there will be a PA - you just plug straight into the board.

Someone needs to come up with a user configurable foot controller that allows you to control the settings.

oh true, the sound man was not running signal through his ipad while mixing. It was definitely just the control surface, that is what I meant. The multi track recording was pretty cool. Can't remember the interface, but it worked seamlessly.

I have seen this, but not in a "real" band setting, just guys noodling at home. I have however seen multitrack recording, and one time watched a guy at a big club mixing FOH while walking around the place with his ipad! This was for Drive By Truckers too! Not joe blow down at the blues club. Pretty cool.

Hey! I saw that guy too at the Truckers show

best time I've seen them... I saw them in Vancouver though. The new addition young guy bass player from The Dexateens was awesome. Made my day to see his ****** eating grin all night long, looking like his dreams were coming true.

***edit... sorry for taking the thread off track.

The real beauty of this stuff is you no longer need to haul an amp to any gig where there will be a PA - you just plug straight into the board.

Someone needs to come up with a user configurable foot controller that allows you to control the settings.
How much difference, if any, is there in sound quality between using an iOS device (Apple phone or tablet) and dedicated multieffects pedals like the Zoom G3 (http://www.zoom.co.jp/products/g3/demo/), which seems to be receiving a lot of positive reviews?

Dedicated pedals have some definite advantages, including lower cost, the foot controls Keyser Soze mentioned, much more durability than a tablet or phone, and in some cases like the G3, better ergonomics as well. The G3 has real knobs and buttons you can put your hands on instead of having to poke at little icons and images on a glass screen. And thanks to Moore's law, every couple of years the computational power of DSP chips goes up and their price falls, so that it becomes possible to stuff higher and higher quality software models into dedicated hardware multi-effects.

So in making a decision between dedicated hardware (like the G3) and software running on a generic computer (like the iPad) it comes down to whether there is sufficiently improved sound quality to justify the much higher price and other disadvantages of using a computer instead of a multiFX pedal.

The link I posted above has a number of videos comparing classic tube amps with the corresponding digital amp models in the Zoom G3. Of the demos on that page, the one of the 65 Fender Twin Reverb surprised me - listen to that one with your eyes closed and see if you can pick out the point where the real amp stops playing and the Zoom's digital model takes over.

To my ears the Marshall model is not as successful, and harsher-sounding than the real thing. I have no interest in either Diezel, real or fake.

Still, I'm impressed by the capabilities of the Zoom G3 and the quality of its amp models and effects, particularly when compared to popular amp modelling hardware from just a few years ago.

On the other hand, I haven't heard the sound quality of the software models running on iOS devices (iOS is Apple's operating system for their phones and tablets). So I haven't been able to compare them with the quality of the models in, say, the Zoom G3.

The G3 sells for two hundred bucks, versus eight hundred and thirty dollars ( http://www.target.com/p/Apple-64GB-The-new-iPad-with-Wi-Fi-4G-Black-MD368LL-A/-/A-13999155#?lnk=sc_qi_detailbutton ) for the Apple fondleslab. That's a lot for what's essentially a netbook that lost its keyboard and gained a touchscreen. Eight hundred bucks will buy a lot of music gear - including both a Zoom G3 and a real tube amp to plug it into!

For those people who already have an iPhone, I do see the appeal of being able to use it for private music practice with a guitar and a pair of headphones, though. Having a backing track, effects, and amp models in a pocket-sized device is definitely appealing.

The G3 has similar abilities (onboard drum machine, onboard looper, onboard amp models and effects), but it's not as small as a phone and you certainly can't slip it into your shirt pocket. And for quiet guitar practice at home the other advantages of the Zoom over a delicate Apple product are not as important.

-Gnobuddy

The thing about a dedicated piece of musical gear is that it takes a bit of engineering to make an acceptable product and it sells to a limited sized market. The price is going to reflect that, on the other hand you have a mass market device who's development is spread over a wide base and the musical app is developed at a minimal cost (relatively speaking) that will be picked up over a larger market than for the musical gear. Also the computing hp of the hand held devices can hold their own as compared to a home computer of a few years ago and they will only get better. One day you will find a crop of guitar players that will come across a tube amp and think it is so cool to play something retro.

The thing about a dedicated piece of musical gear is that it takes a bit of engineering to make an acceptable product and it sells to a limited sized market. The price is going to reflect that, on the other hand you have a mass market device who's development is spread over a wide base

That's very true for generic PC's and maybe for some Android phones and tablets.

Apple, on the other hand, has never been known for budget prices. Their niche is to triple the price of the same hardware you'd find in a generic Intel PC, put it in a pretty box, and market it as something exclusive and special.

Wall Street loves Apple, because they have bigger hardware margins than any other electronics manufacturer selling in the USA. In other words, they sell cheap hardware at higher prices than any other manufacturer can manage, thanks to very clever advertising.

Translation: if you bought an Apple device, you paid through the nose for it, but you probably still feel that you got your moneys worth, thanks to Steve Jobs infamous reality distortion field (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field).

Also the computing hp of the hand held devices can hold their own as compared to a home computer of a few years ago and they will only get better.
It's quite true that there is a surprising amount of computing power in todays phones, considering their tiny size. Certainly more than some desktop computers from several years ago.

If you compare them with fairly current laptops and desktop computers, on the other hand, Apple's tablets tend to have pretty weak processors. The focus is on low power consumption and long battery life, not blazing speed. The A5 processor in the current crop of iPad's runs at a lowly 1 GHz, and throttles down from even that meagre speed to conserve power:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A5

For comparison purposes, the dual core, 64 bit Celeron E3300 CPU in the destop PC I'm using to type this runs at 2.5 GHz, two and a half times as fast as the iPad's processor. The Celeron was really cheap because it is at the bottom of the heap as far as Intel CPU's go - IIRC I paid around seventy bucks for both the CPU and the motherboard, on sale at Fry's Electronics a year or two ago. Today, you literally cannot find a CPU intended for a home computer that is as slow as the CPU in the iPad!

As another reference point, the AMD C-60 dual-core CPU in the $250 Acer Aspire One netbook (Target sale price) runs at the same 1 GHz as the iPad's A5. The netbook cost less than one-third as much as an iPad, but matches it in computing and graphics horsepower. And you get a keyboard, too, so you can actually do work on it.

The other advantage dedicated audio hardware (like that G3) has is that its DSP chips do only one thing - process the audio signal. On the other hand, the relatively weak 1 GHz CPU in the iPad spends a lot of its processing power doing the background things a PC operating system has to do - processing incoming data from the Internet connection, reading and writing data from hard drives, drawing pretty pictures on the screen, watching the touchpad for input from the users fingers, etc.

A dedicated hardware device like the Zoom G3 doesn't have to do any of this stuff, so it can do more audio processing with less computational power than any phone or tablet can. It's similar to the advantage hardware video game consoles have over using a PC to play games.

In a nutshell, software apps on phones and tablets have the advantage of flexibility (new software becomes available all the time, you're not limited to existing knobs and switches, etc). On the other hand, firmware running on special DSP chips in hardware multieffects pedals has the advantages of speed and price.

One day you will find a crop of guitar players that will come across a tube amp and think it is so cool to play something retro.

That day may already be here for many of the younger generation of players, like Tosin Abasi and his digital Axe FX "amplifier".

It seems that $2000 may already buy you a digital model that many say is virtually indistinguishable from the real tube amp (Kemper Profiling Amp). I look forward to the day when $200 buys you the same thing - but that day doesn't seem to be here yet!

In the meantime, it's still easy to justify the $500 tube amp that still sounds better than the $500 digital models!

-Gnobuddy

It's a binary world

I have this at my place...uses an iPad app as a librarian, to manage and rearrange pedals and amps in the presets. The CPU heavy lifting is done by the hardware. It's a good easy to way to go through stacks of effects when you're working out a sound. The whammy and octavers work pretty well.