Ableton Forum

I had so much fun playing with it, I thought to also ask you what you think...

sp.

Stunning sim. It's great for older school amping, but METAL is good for extreme rocking. IK makes beautiful products. I can't wait to find out what they do next.

Ps Their X-Gear is brilliant if you have more than one of their sims!

Of all the amp sims i have this one has the best JTM model of them all..
The rotovibe is worth the price of admission alone...
It does carry a big CPU tax though..

I very much agree with Homebelly. Lots of CPU needed (especially for the high res sounds). Worth it though.

I've messed around with Guitar Rig and Amplitube quite a bit, and I think Amplitube sounds much better. This coming from a guitar player of 20+ years who's owned lots of tube amps over the years. The simulations are excellent.

I did a bit of a shoot-out at home recently to find the one I liked best, here's what I found...

For testing I ran my Ibanez RG3120 Prestige into the Instrument input of my NI Audio Kontrol and hosted the VSTs in Ableton 7. I started with Guitar Rig combos again to use its high background noise in high-gain modes as a kind of base level. As usual the Plexi combo dialled up sounds like crap when playing lightly or resting between notes.

Amplitube 2 was up first, tested some high-gain modes. The master noise-gate is a great touch, and overall the tones are really usable, way more so than GR. In a straight-up Amplitube2 vs Guitar Rig 3 theres no contest, Amplitube is the clear and instant winner.

Amplitube Jimi up next, mostly centred around crunch and other old-school effects, sounds nice but overall doesn't sound too different from Amplitube2s rock presets.

Amplitube Metal is easily one of my faves. Straight up just playing with presets it went from insane gain to really sparkling heavy-metal-intro style cleans. The stomp boxes are great, so are the rack effects.

Flying Haggis has a really visually unique gui, looks awesome and has a decent range of tones and stompboxes but doesnt seem to specialise in any particular sound which can be a good thing depending on your needs. A good classic amp model.

Nomad Factory Rock Amp Legends is great. The first thing I did was select a high-gain mode and I got.. silence - until I bashed out a power chord, these guys have sorted out their background noise more than any of the other amps so far. Really nice rock tones, doesn't have changing amp pictures like the Amplitube ones though.

Studio Devil is another hissy one until I cranked up the noise gate, its a simple affair but its distortion was a little fizzy for my liking and the noise gate was introducing odd noise when it kicked in and out.

Steinberg Warp had a sleek gui and decently low background noise but like Studio Devil I had trouble getting a meaty, high-gain chug sound without either introducing too much fizx or background noise.

Waves GTR is another nice looking vst, great stompboxes, cool amps. Some very warm clean and rock sounds, but a little buzzy in the high-gain modes and trying to dial it out by backing off treble, gain etc just dulls the tone a little. Pretty good overall.

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I'll play around with them all some more but for me Amplitube Metal is the winner so far. Nomad is a close second in sound but overall it fell slightly short because of its lack of versatility and mostly static ui, compared to Metal which comes with all these shiny fun noisy toys which go from crystal clean to insane gain and everything in-between:

http://www.ikmultimedia.com/metal/



In fact its so good I'm considering getting the matching stomp controller, shame it costs so much though:

http://www.ikmultimedia.com/stompio/

Overall I'd say if you want virtual amp modelling with clean cleans, tonnes of high-gain and fx I'd rank them in this order:

Amplitube Metal http://www.ikmultimedia.com/metal/
Amplitube2 http://www.amplitube.com/Main.html?prod_AT.php
Nomad Rock Factory http://www.nomadfactory.com/products/va ... index.html
Flying Haggis http://www.db-audioware.com/flyinghaggis.htm
Amplitube Jimi Hendrix http://www.amplitube.com/Main.html?prod_ATJH.php
Waves GTR http://www.waves.com/content.aspx?id=93
Guitar Rig 3 http://www.native-instruments.com/index ... itarrig3se
Steinberg Warp http://www.steinbergcanada.com/products ... arpvst.htm
Studio Devil http://www.studiodevil.com/products/

FFS, Hendrix used Guitar Rig, everyone knows that.

beatpoet wrote:FFS, Hendrix used Guitar Rig, everyone knows that.

Yeah..
But that's not entirely fair.
His version of guitar rig was heavily modified by Roger Mayer.

Homebelly wrote:

beatpoet wrote:FFS, Hendrix used Guitar Rig, everyone knows that.

Yeah..
But that's not entirely fair.
His version of guitar rig was heavily modified by Roger Mayer.

True, Roger was great at the old custom skinning, it's all in those psychedelic front panels. No one had a GUI like Jimi.

ausgeno wrote:I did a bit of a shoot-out at home recently to find the one I liked best, here's what I found...

you missed Revalver MK 3.

http://www.peavey.com/products/revalver/

thats my favourite. not the best if you like lots of fx, but for getting the best guitar sound it does it for me.

I have Amplitube 2 + JHE. A heads up: turn off the cabinet sim and load a convolution plug with some of the quality impulse resonses freely available on the net (do a search for guitarhack).

As for high gain - on Windows there's the excellent Wagner Sharp as freeware. This plus a cab IR gets pretty good metal/hardrock tone.

yeah the guitarhack cab impulses are great. so good i actually put a copy on my site because people were having trouble finding them :

http://relivethefuture.com/music/patche ... pulses.rar