The big WEAKNESS of MODELLING...

[bgmacaw]

I'll just leave this here...

Pearl Jam break out digital amps and rare Gibson guitars on US tour

Mike McCready is now rocking Fender Tone Master combos, while Stone Gossard and Eddie Vedder have been wielding obscure Gibson models

www.guitarworld.com

 

[getbent]

I'll just leave this here...

Pearl Jam break out digital amps and rare Gibson guitars on US tour

Mike McCready is now rocking Fender Tone Master combos, while Stone Gossard and Eddie Vedder have been wielding obscure Gibson models

www.guitarworld.com

View attachment 983070

can't be true someone above said that all engineers and all recording artists find artifacts in digital amps and refuse to use them and everyone loves tube amps. Silly me, everyone I know has been using stuff like Amp Farm for like 20 years in big studios... they just haven't seen the learned post above. Plus Pearl Jam is probably lying because, you know, facts are just opinions... and opinions are facts.

 

[Jupiter]

[...]facts are just opinions... and opinions are facts.

NO ONE DISPUTES THIS

 

[telemnemonics]

if i did this while my wife was at home i would hear her voice hit her sweet spot...lol. my origin 50 doesnt really do the creamy distortion its more crisp crunch tone. my 68 prri doesnt do this ether and i prefer to use pedals with it. the bj3 i use to own did that a little but i just didnt like the tone of that amp no matter how you dialed it. i wished i had a bassman or a showman.

Soundproofed studio, rehearsal space, or new wife.

Seriously though?
Why are so many guys marrying gals that can’t stand guitar players playing guitar???

Live volume is harder but marrying like that is just nuts.

 

[telemnemonics]

can't be true someone above said that all engineers and all recording artists find artifacts in digital amps and refuse to use them and everyone loves tube amps. Silly me, everyone I know has been using stuff like Amp Farm for like 20 years in big studios... they just haven't seen the learned post above. Plus Pearl Jam is probably lying because, you know, facts are just opinions... and opinions are facts.

They require artifacts to anchor the NFT to.

 

[telemnemonics]

NO ONE DISPUTES THIS

Inconceivable!

 

[bgmacaw]

Why are so many guys marrying gals that can’t stand guitar players playing guitar???

I think the answer to this question is that guitar players are giving their attention and money to something other than the woman in the equation. I've seen this same thing happen to guys who are into boats, motorcycles, golf or whatever else. The only exception I've seen are situations where the couple have the same hobby/passion or where they've developed kind of a mutual understanding with each others'.

 

[wangdaning]

Fair enough, @aw73
It does seem like a dumb thing to fight over though. Do artists who paint have online arguments about the merits of their art output based on the composition of their brush bristles and whether they have composite paint pallets vs. traditional ones made of exotic wood of the ookuwungee tree? Maybe they do.

Oh, they most certainly do, and it is cruel. There is also method of paint mixing, the material of the canvas, it goes on and on. There are large cliques, and many painters are outright refused entry into galleries based on the materials they use. To be honest, the guitar and amp you use seems like a children's argument compared to painters.

 

[Craig Williams]

is still the digital hi's...

especially with cleaner tones like Deluxe,Vox etc

I'm a tube guy but I've tried every modeler on the market (Fractals,Atomics,Boss,Helixes etc.)...they all have this kind of digital harshness in the hi's,especially when you hit the strings hard ...and I've tested them A/B

and if you turn the hi's down, it doesn't RING anymore,like tube amps do

THAT's why tubeamps are still no 1

I don't mean the Kemper..never tried one so far...and of course it's a cloner...different animal

I tend to agree with you re newer modelling units. I find them a little too hi fi for my liking. Maybe it's just an old guy thing but I read about a guitarist who was asked if he used modelling and he said nah, I still like to feel my pants leg flapping in front of a nice amp. I was a tube guy, strictly Fender for years. Super Reverbs and Deluxe's mainly. Last tube amp was the sweetest Super I have ever owned. Anyway, a little 70's JC60 (Jazz Chorus) popped it's head up for around $100 in mint condition and it did and still does blow me away. I have had a few SS amps in the past and whilst initially I thought they sounded good (Peavey bandit, Fender Mustang) usually got bored with them after a short time. The JC solid state of course but it has a warmth and character all of its own combined with a real clarity. Now the Super to me will always be the holy grail and still is. I play fairly clean and use a Strat. But the Roland is a just a bit more portable and very little investment so I sold the Super on about a year ago and can't say I am sorry. Enough of that.....

I started going down the rabbit hole with modelers and just wasn't getting the sounds I wanted and had to do all sorts of stuff just to get my base sound back to what I wanted, which is effectively the natural sound of my amp. Actually was using a JC or Twin model (without cab). To be fair I haven't had any of the real high end stuff a Nux MG30, Podgo and Line 6 HX Effects. Some effects were awesome..particularly mods, reverbs etc but could never find a compressor or drive that I liked. Or vice versa. My biggest bug bear was though the fact even with all effects turned off on all of these units I couldn't get back to parity of my amp. Was tainted before I even switched anything on.

After a while I figured out there is a whole new shift out there where the actual modeler is now really the amp and effects. The actual amplifier or whatever is being used to actually amplify the sound is secondary. Even the guitar tone could nearly be considered to be secondary now. As long as it has a decent output and feels good / plays to the owners liking. These are only my thoughts by the way. I live in Thailand and often bands / artists do 3 or 4 gigs a night....just go from pub to pub play an hour here and there. The venue usually supplies a few neutral amps (Fender Champions) or they just come out of their modelers straight into the PA. Makes life a lot easier not lugging an amp around not to mention EQ'ing it etc. The other side of the fence are the home recorders...hoping to make something hit on you tube or social media and again these platforms seem to be ideal for this. So to this end I can really see where they have their purpose and in fact it looks like it will be the way of the future. I already see the prices of older heavy tube amps starting to wane here at least anyway. I know there are guys out there using the modellers as live effects / stomp boards as well and no problem with that if they have the tones you like.

I have gone the other way. Got myself an old Boss GT-3 and GT-5 plugged into my 70s JC60 and have all my old 80s 90s tones again. Happy as a pig in mud

 

[aw73]

Soundproofed studio, rehearsal space, or new wife.

Seriously though?
Why are so many guys marrying gals that can’t stand guitar players playing guitar???

Live volume is harder but marrying like that is just nuts.

most woman i know are just like this. did you get your mate from another planet or something?...lol

sometimes i get sick of hearing myself play the same thing over and over so i know someone else would. sometimes silence sounds good.

cant afford soundproof studios.

 

[northernguitar]

most woman i know are just like this. did you get your mate from another planet or something?...lol

sometimes i get sick of hearing myself play the same thing over and over so i know someone else would. sometimes silence sounds good.

cant afford soundproof studios.

My missus likes to hear me play. No one likes to hear me learn. I get it.

 

[aw73]

I'll just leave this here...

 

[Blrfl]

I have yet to find a floor modeler or modeling amp that sounds and feels like the UAd/Brainworx combo. The stuff that is comparable: Kemper, Quad Cortex, etc., is around 2 grand, and I'm not ready (yet) to lay down that amount of dough.
...
*I wish UAd would develop a pedal with even just one amp in it - and I don't even care what amp: Fender, Vox, Marshall, whatever - that feels, reacts and sounds like their software.

Know how I keep harping on computing power being a limiting factor? This is why.

I make my living adjacent to high-performance computing for research and get to see the kinds of things they model and simulated all the time with very large amounts of computing power. Even as a jaded curmudgeon, I'm awed that they can do things like figure out exactly how a car body panel will behave in an accident or model the planet to predict the weather. It's not that modeling as a technology is flawed, it's that you can't put a top-notch model into a floor unit in a form factor people will be willing to use at a price they'd be willing to pay. The compromises required result in less processing power and corners being cut in the algorithms to make them run in real time within that limit.

Clock speed isn't an apples-to-apples comparison but, as a very-rough metric, it's good enough to run the gamut of floor units:

The DSP in a Kemper Profiler is two cores at 200 MHz or 400 MHz (0.4 GHz) total. That's very slow by today's standards, but Kemper's not doing component modeling and they've clearly done a lot of work to make their methods work in a constrained environment. The high price on those is likely funding the ongoing development of the software rather than the box running it.

The DSP in low-end Zoom products is a single-core TI chip that runs at about 500 MHz (0.5 GHz).

The Quad Cortex is 4 cores at 500 MHz each, so 2 GHz total.

The Axe-Fx III is 2 cores at 1.25 GHz each so 2.5 GHz total.

Now let's turn to the 2019 MacBook Pro on my desk. That runs at a minimum of 2.6 GHz, which is more than anything listed above. What I left out is that there are six cores running at that speed (15.6 GHz total), so you can run an awful lot of model and still have lots of power left to do other things like run a DAW. Four-core Windows PCs running at 3 GHz get about 12 GHz total, which isn't anything to sneeze at, either.


The Quad Cortex costs what it does because they've had to stuff a lot of horsepower into a small box that can survive playing at a bar without having special cooling requirements. Show up at a gig with a MacBook to run your model and I'm sure the anti-music stand crowd will be there in a flash to heap all kinds of scorn all over you.

 

[northernguitar]

My problem with a big investment in modelling is my inherent cheapness and my cynicism over the depreciating value of high tech. I have a Line 6 POD Live XT that was the bees knees. It’s collecting dust and has all the value and allure of a PC running Windows 95. Mass produced amps lose some value, but not in the same way. They never feel ‘obsolete’ to me.

 

[aw73]

My missus likes to hear me play. No one likes to hear me learn. I get it.

years ago i use to play with friends and we would play the same set of songs that we use to love but after we played them over and over i got so sick of hearing them i wouldnt even listen to them on the radio. oddly to me he didnt feel the same way.

sometimes i just need a break from any noise and as i get older i feel this more and more. so i can relate to someone not wanting to hear guitar playing.

 

[bgmacaw]

My problem with a big investment in modelling is my inherent cheapness and my cynicism over the depreciating value of high tech.

That's my concern as well. While the hardware involved doesn't depreciate quite as fast as general purpose computing systems, software and algorithms that control it tend to go away quicker and often are obsoleted by manufacturers. This leaves consumers with a less than ideal product or even a nearly useless "brick". For example, Fender's Fuse product used Microsoft Silverlight that was discontinued by Microsoft, forcing Fender to also discontinue their product if they didn't want to spend the money to rewrite it.

I've grown to prefer a hybrid method where I'll use a modular blend modeling and traditional amps. This makes it easier and cheaper to swap out failing components and replace old with new when applicable. It also makes it possible to have a variety of amps on tap that I couldn't afford otherwise although my Fender-ish tube amps are my mainstay amps.

 

[bgmacaw]

View attachment 983238 View attachment 983237

Stage dressing is a very important part of the act.

 

[Blrfl]

My problem with a big investment in modelling is my inherent cheapness and my cynicism over the depreciating value of high tech.

That's a side effect of buying cheap, and the cheap stuff isn't high-tech.

Everybody who bought the first Kempers ten years ago can upgrade to the same software as fresh-from-the-factory units. Same with the Helix. The extra up-front cost is for more-capable hardware that will last a long time and funds the development of improved software that owners usually get free. How cool is it that we live in an era where you can benefit from engineering improvements at no cost after you've already bought the product?

 

[northernguitar]

That's a side effect of buying cheap, and the cheap stuff isn't high-tech.

Everybody who bought the first Kempers ten years ago can upgrade to the same software as fresh-from-the-factory units. Same with the Helix. The extra up-front cost is for more-capable hardware that will last a long time and funds the development of improved software that owners usually get free. How cool is it that we live in an era where you can benefit from engineering improvements at no cost after you've already bought the product?

When the first AXE came out, I estimated it would cost me around CDN$6k to get everything I needed to play live. I could get that used for about $2k now. That’s too much to get in and too much to lose. I don’t know about Kemper. I tried a mate’s Helix, and I didn’t care for it, at all.

 

[MilwMark]

I suspect the reason some get salty is the insistence that tube is better as fact and SS or digital can’t do the same thing.

If someone can’t dial in a basic digital device to get pleasing highs and feel that allows them to ride the volume knob from clean to mean that is not because of the tech.

The Pod has done this for years (decades). A basic Katana or THR or Spark too - no computer of menu diving.

I have four pedals on my board. Including tuner. One OD. My whole sound relies on dialing in an amp for overdrive, rolling back the guitar volume and using my volume knob and attack for texture. Saving the OD just for lead boost.

Best amp to make this work for me, with real dynamics and pleasing EQ/gain structure. My 30+ year old JC77.

“I can’t dial in digital in a pleasing way”. Or “I can’t get myself to believe what I’m hearing/feeling when I play digital, or to stop questioning it”. Fine.

“Digital can’t” or “SS can’t”= no bueno.