Amp reivews

[crumhorn]

Being a pedantic geek so I had to work it out.

50Hz is somewhere between G and A flat, but closest to G, 60Hz is between B flat and B.

[crumhorn]

Just tried tuning with spectrum. It almost does it, but the resolution is not high enough. If you could zoom in horizontally it would be perfect. Maybe Abes could add a guitar tuner mode to spectrum that zooms in on the 2 octave range covered by guitar.

[Angstrom]

I use gTune on PC, a free tuner vst.
http://www.gvst.co.uk/gtune.htm

it's never given me problems and is light on CPU (as you'd expect)
I have several default racks for guitar and bass and it sits in all of them.

[bulo]

Why not simply load a synth or just go to preferences and use the tone test at 440 Hz for your A ?

[Angstrom]

that's a terrible idea for several reasons,
the main one being: the test-tone stops all other audio so you would not hear your guitar.
The second reason : guitar tuners are silent for a reason, nobody wants to hear a screaming sine.
third reason: a free VST tuner is the correct way to do this. It's made for the purpose, so why jump through menus trying to remember what E, A, G, etc are in freq ?

[Hermanus]

Or you could load a synth and you're good to tune your guitar' chords.

[TheLion1]

sorry but as a guitarist first id like to say that having a pedal tuner would be wayy more applicable than a plugin. this also goes for other effects (my Fuzz Face can never be replaced by 1's and 0's)

having said that, ive tried GR and AMP and im not really sure about either of them. i have a nice tube amp to compare them to and they always fall short. i can never get the sound beefy or full enough to my liking. but ive been playing with the same tone for a few years now. id much prefer to mic up the guitar amp. however, i do like to use GR and AMP for effects and whatnot. try adding the CABINET to a bassline. use the 4x10 bass cab with a dynamic microphone and dual output. adds some nice overdrive and some lows.

just my ywo cents

[agent314]

i have a nice tube amp to compare them to and they always fall short. i can never get the sound beefy or full enough to my liking.

I'm guessing you're running your amp through a 10 or 12" speaker, yes? And I'd also guess your studio monitors are maybe 8" at the most?

That's going to affect the perceived fullness of the sound. I've run GR4 as a preamp straight out to my amp's cab before, and it sounded pretty damn close to the real thing.

[sach160]

My 2 cents - I like a lot of ableton's bundled instruments (not fx) and softube's vintage amp room is the best guitar I've found and Ive tried them all. Amp - while it can have it's uses in a mix, when it comes to realistic amp sims it's not anywhere near the league of vintage amp room to my ears. A real shame. I don't understand why softube would provide a cheaper and so perhaps intentionally lower end amp sim. They've got a reputation as the best out there, this only hurts them as far as I can see...

[Valiumdupeuple]

that's a terrible idea for several reasons,
the main one being: the test-tone stops all other audio so you would not hear your guitar.
The second reason : guitar tuners are silent for a reason, nobody wants to hear a screaming sine.
third reason: a free VST tuner is the correct way to do this. It's made for the purpose, so why jump through menus trying to remember what E, A, G, etc are in freq ?

Hi Angstrom (I'm/was Bulo)
I'm personnaly using the test tone, and that's my prefered method.
Why? Because if you have a sine (ok, just turn down your monitor or the test tone level) while playing your A (for example), you can get an exact tuning very easily. When your A on the guitar approching your test tone you can clearly hear the shifting between the two tones. The more the tones match (or the closer they are), the slower the shifting is... the farest the faster the shifting is. When the shifting has gone it's pure joice!!
Then I tune other strings using harmonics (5th and 7th frets). I find that method giving the best results, because it's tuning your guitar according to... your guitar.
I mean, tuners doesn't care about how well your guitar is crafted, how unperfect are your neck, frets... and all that things that make a guitar impossible to play perfectly in tune alongside all the neck. Harmonics are better because they "take care" of that.

[Tone Deft]

bulo - try the 10th fret harmonics, great for getting the middle part of the fretboard dialed in.


Amp - I've played through it a few times, browsed the presets and haven't found anything I'd use on a guitar.

[Angstrom]

that's a terrible idea for several reasons,
the main one being: the test-tone stops all other audio so you would not hear your guitar.
The second reason : guitar tuners are silent for a reason, nobody wants to hear a screaming sine.
third reason: a free VST tuner is the correct way to do this. It's made for the purpose, so why jump through menus trying to remember what E, A, G, etc are in freq ?

Hi Angstrom (I'm/was Bulo)
I'm personnaly using the test tone, and that's my prefered method.
Why? Because if you have a sine (ok, just turn down your monitor or the test tone level) while playing your A (for example), you can get an exact tuning very easily. When your A on the guitar approching your test tone you can clearly hear the shifting between the two tones. The more the tones match (or the closer they are), the slower the shifting is... the farest the faster the shifting is. When the shifting has gone it's pure joice!!
Then I tune other strings using harmonics (5th and 7th frets). I find that method giving the best results, because it's tuning your guitar according to... your guitar.
I mean, tuners doesn't care about how well your guitar is crafted, how unperfect are your neck, frets... and all that things that make a guitar impossible to play perfectly in tune alongside all the neck. Harmonics are better because they "take care" of that.

Hi, here's a too long answer...
It's of course up to you how you tune, I always used to tune my guitar 'old school' just like that, wedge something on a synth key to get it playing a sine A and tune harmonically from there. That way at least I judged I'd be in tune with my own synth (was my logic). Fine enough. it works OK. We all used to tune harmonically back in the day when tuners were unheard of.

Thing ONE
Around 1995 a roadie friend explained that tuning 20 guitars harmonically over the din of the support act is near impossible, and it's essentially like saying "I always fixed my old car with this hammer, so that's the way I now fix my Lear jet. I got magic hands! I'm a freakin genius!". In reality some methodologies just don't scale up. Mistakes can be made, whether its on stage or in a recording.
I wondered : Why do his employers get careful treatment, and why did I give myself such shoddy once-over. Barely kicking the tyres? Basically - I had musicians arrogance in my own skillz, while he had an engineers carefulness. I decided I also needed to be a bit more careful.


Thing TWO
harmonic tuning has issues due to our even tempered scale. Check it out.
Tune as you are doing, then on the high E string play an A at the fifth fret and check it against your initial sine. I expect you will hear phase beating. The closest to an explanation on the net I could find is here http://www.endino.com/archive/tuningnightmares.html in the section called "MORE MATH: THERE WILL BE A QUIZ IN THE MORNING" !!!

I can't say I'm any kind of genius or expert at any of this - but one thing I realised was : I now know that there's a lot I don't know about the simple art of tuning a guitar. But lucky for me there's a device which can take care of this whole mess for me, so that's why I just use a tuner.

[Simbosan]

True that on the tempered scale thing, I always tune that way first the go back and 'make it sound right'

S

[agent314]

I've started tuning one string to a tuner/tuning fork (usually D or G) then tuning every other string to that one. Works way better on my guitars than string-by-string harmonics, which is what I used to do

[crumhorn]

I've started tuning one string to a tuner/tuning fork (usually D or G) then tuning every other string to that one. Works way better on my guitars than string-by-string harmonics, which is what I used to do

this + 1.

works way better than any other method for standard equal tempered tuning. Just make sure the 12th fret intonation is good on your chosen reference string. This blog post explains it well --> http://paraglider.hubpages.com/hub/Equa ... tar-Tuning