Amps (and Plugins)

I used to have an amp wishlist, just like the guitar wishlist where I’ve happily managed to cross off most of the entries. Ironically, now that I technically have the means, I have lost much of the interest in getting those amps. It's like I cannot bring myself to get excited about them the way I still can about guitars.

Maybe that is because the guitar is the actual instrument and the amp merely a means to make it louder. Possibly I’ve got used to the convenience of playing through whatever backline has been provided, and/or that I relish the challenge of always trying to make do with what I have, above all always aiming to sound good—or at least like myself—no matter what. It could be that as volume levels rise, my ability to tell one guitar tone from the next one is lost in the general mayhem. As long as the tone has that perfect combination of attack and compression, I usually do fine.

As a corollary to that last point, I can be pretty picky with my recorded sound, but there I have the luxury of variety with digital amps, and, more recently, plugin effects for my computer. That neatly takes care of one nagging issue, namely that I live in an apartment, and consequently I just cannot record nor practice at the volume levels required to get even a low-wattage tube amp to cook just right.

I think the overarching reason is that I have found my sound and found my amp.

Blackstar Studio 20

When I first went shopping for a tube amp head, I thought I needed 50-100 watts and at least three channels. Basically the choice boiled down to either a Marshall JVM 410 or a Mesa Dual Rectifier. Instead, an intrepid salesman did the incredible and sold me what I actually needed. That is, 20 watts and two channels from Blackstar: the Studio 20 head.

I did not reach this purchase decision lightly, and in fact spent quite some time fretting over whether I would come to regret it the way I did with that Peavey back in '99. That time I had passed over the Marshall because I had been cheap. Was I going to make the same mistake twice?

I only had to use the '20 for a few solo noodling sessions, two rehearsals and a gig to come to the conclusion that it was just perfect. 20 watts were just about enough for my intended use (albeit slightly overpowered for my old covers band), and upon further reflection, I realized that I really don't need more than a clean and a distorted channel. Especially not with an amp that is as dynamically responsive as this and many other Blackstars. Should I want more, there are boost and overdrive pedals, for nuance, I can actually play the electric guitar and manipulate my playing dynamics, the volume and tone settings, and pickup selection. What took longer than that was for the thing to prove itself in the reliability department. After a scare pretty early on, it has kept ticking like a Swiss watch since 2012.

What I absolutely didn't see coming was how this purchase would turn everything on its head. I had grown accustomed to trying out all these excellent amps in the store and elsewhere, only to have my heart sink upon further inspection of the price tag. For a while after getting the '20, I kept this up out of sheer force of habit, but soon realized what an immense paradigm shift had just occurred. After getting through those vital first days and weeks, I have never had the slightest buyer's remorse. On the contrary, checking out expensive name-brand amps has left me rather cold, if not disillusioned, more like is that all there is?

There have been occasions where the Studio 20 has come across as a bit weak, but those situations have often involved overly-loud bass players, and have been resolved simply by asking the offending party to turn down a tad. A couple of years ago, I would hear this strange impurity in the sound when playing with lots of distortion at maximum volume, but I don't hear that anymore. It could be that I've recently taken to rolling off much of the bottom end. Maybe the amp can assert itself a bit better when it isn't forced to project all that bass as well?

That said, I do actually get the urge to replace or at least complement the amp every once in a blue moon or so. Those impulses somehow seldom survive the next good night's sleep, at the very least they are gone by the next time I get to play through it. That makes it a lot more likely that was I rather than the amp that was having a bad day. I think that the best thing I could say about this amp is that if it were to be stolen or break down utterly, I would want to find myself another one on the used market.

Marshall

The choice of Blackstar flew in the face of the fundamental fact that I am a Marshall player at heart, in the same way and for the same reasons as I've always preferred Fender and Gibson. It came down to one simple thing: when I was in the market for a new tube amp, Blackstar had something available with a feature set and power level that suited my requirements, and a price tag that was a good match to my bank account. Marshall did not. Their 5-watt and 20-watt lunchboxes came later; at the time they only had the big 50- and 100-watt heads, like it was still 1979. It seemed like whenever they released something, it was always anniversary-this or reissue-that—no innovation, just the same old sounds and features over and over again, and at horrifying power levels. Then they got into the headphone and Bluetooth thing and I just gave up.

Eventually, I was won back by two things: the Code amps proved that Bletchley were willing to innovate, and the small DSL heads and combos told me that they weren't oblivious to the changing trends in the guitar industry. I have had some very pleasant experiences with Marshall's most recent products, and they have given me a much-needed reminder that the brand has a very special place in my heart. I don't own a Marshall primarily because my main amp is still exactly what I need, and barring theft or a major malfunction, they're going to have to give me one in order to persuade me to switch back.

Digital Amps

One of the more gratifying things about modern guitar technology is that we long ago reached the point where the tone of a digital simulation truly captures that very specific feel of the strings that you could previously only get from a tube amp. It used to be that you could kind of hear what they were trying to simulate. Nowadays my reaction is more in the style of "holy shit, that's a JCM 800!"

What the digital stuff cannot do, at least not yet in my personal experience, is to capture the experience of being in the same room as a tube amp. There is a ferocity and presence to an old-school analog amp that digital and solid-state gear just can't duplicate. Still, having said that, I might very well have bought my last tube amp. The convenience of digital simply cannot be overstated, and I've already observed that I'm not all that picky about the sound. I'm really curious to see how much mileage I could get out of one of those new pedal-format amps.

For a good many years, I found it worthwhile to keep abreast of changes in the digital domain, upgrading every so often to take advantage of new tech and price drops, just like in the computer world. I've never really felt constrained or dissatisfied, yet there's been a feeling of constant improvement. The Fender G-DEC was noticeably better than the Digitech RP100, the Blackstar ID:30 better still, and, as long as I played to its strengths, the Marshall Code 25 represented just about the pinnacle of digital sound quality.

That I haven't purchased any new amps since the Code might have something to do with that I don't see how they could be made to sound better. But it's mostly because I use my computer to handle the simulation software. I haven't used any physical amps for recording since some time in 2021, only plugins.

Softube Amp Room

When I check out digital gear, the first thing I always do is subject it to The Marshall Test. If I can get a bright, saturated and aggressive Plexi or JCM 800 tone out of it, then it's okay. If not, then it needs to really shine in some other way.

My quest for the perfect-sounding Marshall-style plugin led me to the company that had worked with Marshall to create the emulations in the Code amps: Softube. Sure enough, they had an officially licensed Marshall plugin. But when I downloaded the trial version of their Amp Room, Marshall Edition, it just didn't work for me. The user interface was so confusing and counterintuitive that it distracted me from dialing in any tones I liked.

That sent me on a major quest to hunt down the perfect substitute. I did uncover a few candidates—some damn fine ones, to be honest, about which I will talk shortly. But it was obvious that none gave me exactly what I was after. Since I have this affection for Marshall, it might very well have been psychology at work: I didn't really want anything else than the product that had their logo on it.

It wasn't until 2023 that Softube came around to updating the Amp Room interface to bring it more in line with the emerging interface standards on the market. That and a healthy discount during Black November was enough to make me click the Buy button, and the Marshall suite has been my primary plugin-based sound ever since. Three of the Marshall sims powered the re-recording of my solo album; indeed, the project didn't really seem to take off until I had those tones available.

The potentially confusing thing with Amp Room Marshall is that Softube has modeled these virtual Marshalls on the originals as they actually are, not the hot-rodded idealized versions you often find in other simulations. None of them is really a metal amp in the modern sense. That is: until you use either of the included virtual overdrive pedals (take your pick between the green and the yellow) to focus and boost the input section. I have always been iffy about requiring pedals to get my sound, but if everything anyway happens inside the box, then I can back off on my principles slash obsessions. The yellow overdrive pedal in Amp Room gave me exactly the sounds I wanted. Since that moment, I have been able to spend hours just wailing through the JMP 2203 sim.

Since then, I've gone on to expand my Amp Room with the Vintage and Metal suites. The vintage amps include two different Fender sims (silver- and blackface), a Vox and a Hiwatt. Fender amps are just about as legendary as Marshalls, and about the only thing missing from them is that luscious spring reverb. I have thus far not been able to get the sound I want out of the Vox, but the Hiwatt emulation is simply incredible for cleans.

I originally thought that Amp Room Metal was going to be completely superfluous, at best something to use for the odd accent here and there. Instead I find myself going back to these amps and my growing list of personal presets for them. I have yet to dial in anything usable with the Engl amp model, but the Mesa Rectifier is simply unbelievable, and complements the third model, Vildsint, a 5150 soundalike, really well.

One of the biggest selling points of Softube's virtual instruments, amps and effects is that everything is one big ecosystem that works together in a really smart way. If you own an Amp Room suite and/or the Modular synth, and you buy for instance their Tape Echo, that echo unit is not just a separate plugin in your DAW. It also becomes a module that is ready to drag and drop in both Amp Room and Modular. If you are a chorus person, I wholeheartedly recommend waiting for a good discount on Softube's Model 84 synthesizer, an emulation of the Roland Juno-60. Even if you won't touch synths with a ten-foot pole, the chorus module alone is easily worth the money. It is worlds better than the chorus that comes with Amp Room.

Guitar Rig Pro 7

Guitar Rig was the first plugin I really tried, and the first one I bought. Its German origins notwithstanding, it's a Swiss Army knife of versatility, a veritable inspiration box. There are some really good amp models in there, but where I find that Guitar Rig really shines is with the effects models. Some of them are studio-grade reverbs, delays and compressors (a number of which, incidentally, sport the Softube logo). Others are surprisingly good renditions of classic stomps like the Boss CE-1, the Electric Mistress flanger, the Phase 90, just to mention three perennial favorites. I think the effects alone are worth the price, especially since there is a really good Leslie emulation in the package, and those are not easy to make believable digitally. Guitar Rig immediately replaced my pedalboard and digital amp as the go-to platform for my endless sessions of modulated delay noodling. It is as of right now also my bass amp of choice. The Bass Rage in combination with the Citrus guitar amp (read: an Ampeg SVT together with an Orange) gives me a mid-forward slightly overdriven sound that is close enough to Geddy that I don't want to use anything else.

Neural DSP Archetype Petrucci/Fortin Nameless/Fortin Cali Suite

Neural DSP generally go for capturing a single amp, or representing the desired tones of just one individual artist. The feature set varies quite a bit from one plugin to the next, but they're very solidly made and sound absolutely glorious. Indeed, it was one of Neural's products that first demonstrated to me how insanely good this technology can be.

As a long-time Dream Theater fan, obviously anything that has John Petrucci's signature on it will get my attention, even though his Music Man guitar and Mesa amp are priced quite out of my league. I suppose that an amp sim plugin is the next best thing. This plugin goes for the maestro's signature Boogie tones and does a wonderful job of it. The acoustic amp is for piezo pickups, so I have not had the chance to properly evaluate it. The other three work great. I am especially impressed by the clean-to-crunch amp. In contrast to many other clean channels, that seem to go from anemic to clean to slight breakup, this starts out with a full, round, clean sound and then increases the gain gradually until you hit rock crunch. It makes it a lot more usable in my opinion. If anything, the selling point of the Petrucci suite is the lavish effects selection: six effects before the amp, three after it and then a volume pedal. That is if you don't count the global pitch-shifter, the doubler and the very accurate tuner. The tuner does appear to be Neural DSP standard-issue, and I see that they are updating more and more of their plugins with the global utilities.

The Fortin Nameless and Fortin Cali Suite are kind of approximations of the British sound that I love so much. After I discovered Amp Room Marshall, both of them were essentially overtaken by events. Neither is as fully featured as the Petrucci plugin or anything by Softube, and that is to their detriment. That notwithstanding, they do sound excellent. The Cali has an especially delectable clean sound, more like a Fender than a Marshall. The Nameless was obviously meant to take the modded Plexi/800 thing and turn it up beyond 11, and as such succeeds brilliantly. I especially like that Neural have updated it with the pitch-shifter and doubler, as well as added the very nice-sounding delay and reverb from the Cali Suite. In spite of not seeing much use as of right now, these two plugins do make me really curious to try out the original hardware.

Bogren Digital Amp Knob

Bogren Digital is my most recent acquaintance in the plugin field. I was skeptical of a plugin that only had a gain knob and a boost switch, yet it was intriguing that it could still be a serious option. It turns out that just like certain one-knob pedals, if the fundamental sound is good, then you actually don't need all that much control. Actually it's kind of liberating to not have to make all those decisions when tweaking tones. And it's not that these little plugins are starved of features either. There is a built-in tuner, metronome and riff recorder, and you can substitute the included speaker simulation for any impulse response file.

I tested the various 5150 Amp Knobs, mostly because I wanted to have that kind of tight, modern metal tone available, and the BDH 5169 (the original block-letter 5150 amp) came out on top. It sounds awesome and is actually really versatile! Switching the boost off and backing the gain down to 2-3 creates a pretty nice rock crunch sound. I was impressed enough that I eventually decided I had to have the RevC Amp Knob as well, a classic Mesa Rectifier. It's been a while since I found the Recto sound appealing, but it's actually growing on me thanks to this plugin and the Softube emulation. Finally, we Bogren customers recently got an early Christmas present: a free license for the MLC S_ZERO 100 Amp Knob. They also market a fully featured plugin that models the actual amp. This Amp Knob is really well thought out in that the gain knob has three stages. The first third has clean to edge-of-breakup tones, the second crunchier rock stuff, and the third and last the full-on metal and lead sounds. Couple it with delay and reverb in my DAW, and it's a fantastic lead tone.