Plugins for Guitar

I knew from the get-go that it was perfectly possible to somehow inject my guitar into a computer and use software to make the sounds. After all, what is a digital amp or pedal other than a mini-computer for sound processing? It stands to reason that an actual computer would have far greater resources to achieve that.

In practice it's quite a different animal. There are a whole lot of things that have to happen in both the hardware and the software in order to make the induced current from my guitar into a pleasing guitar tone that comes out of my headphones or monitors. All this takes time, which eventually adds up, creating something that is referred to as latency. If the latency is more than just a few milliseconds, it's noticeable, and consequently becomes a problem.

I will never know whether there was anything I could have done to improve the latency issues of my first audio interface. All I know is that it was unusable the way it was. It was like playing with a weird echo. I would strike power chords and would hear plink-DJENT, plink-DJENT in my headphones. I had to record clean, add the plugin afterwards and hope I got the muting right, which isn't easy when I can't feel the sound out in real time. Hence, I insisted that I always have a good digital amp around, so I could feed the input of the audio interface with a ready-made guitar tone.

From that perspective, it was fortunate that my old interface conked out. Already out of the box, the new one was way better, which inspired me to get closer to the bottom with concepts like audio buffering. This in its turn managed to get me down to 6 ms of latency, which wasn't world-class, but it was workable. It opened up a rabbit hole that I'm still exploring and trying to learn about.

Softube Amp Room Marshall Edition

Even back when I wasn't the least bit interested in what Marshall had to offer, that sound was still my hands-down ideal. The first thing I inevitably did with a new modeller was to put it through The Marshall Test, i.e. find the "British Crunch" or "Plex" patch and try to get a 1959 or 2203 tone. If I couldn't do that, I wasn't interested. Therefore, when time came to explore the world of plugins, it felt natural to turn to my countrymen at Softube, who helped Marshall develop the Code amps, and eventually created their own suite of officially licensed Marshall amp plugins.

What happened next was that software weirdness, hardware limitations and user error conspired to make it essentially impossible to get a workable tone out of Amp Room before the trial period ran out, so I felt that I had to look elsewhere for my Marshall tones. I found some really nice alternatives, more about them in a bit, but it kept nagging in the back of my head that I wanted to like the Softube Marshall plugin but couldn't.

The alternatives I found were great, inspirational, everything I could have hoped for, but it bugged me that I couldn't like the Marshall plugin, whereas others seemed to get awesome sounds of it. Eventually, the tables were turned. When I had a bit more knowledge and wasn't overwhelmed by all the new stuff, I sat down with it again, and this time it worked exactly like I had hoped.

One mustn't forget that those old Marshalls aren't high-gain amps in the modern sense. They can get there, but need a bit of help to do so. As soon as I learned how to juice the input and focus the low end by putting the included yellow overdrive pedal in the signal chain, it all came together. I can only say that this is the sound. It is all I ever wanted. I can literally sit all evening and just shred, riff and noodle using nothing but the JMP 2203 model. It has been wonderfully inspirational, a clear step up from just about everything else I've ever used.

One of the neat little bonuses of using Softube products is that everything works together in one big ecosystem. If you have Amp Room, of course you can mix and match components across the four different suites. If you get a standalone plugin, that plugin becomes available as a module in Amp Room. It's the same thing with the Modular synthesizer, and quite a few of their other products. In fact, my best Softube recommendation for guitar is get one of the Amp Room suites, then wait for a deep discount on their Model 84 synthesizer. Even you refuse to touch synths, the chorus module in the '84 is well worth the (discounted) price.

The Vintage and Metal suites aren't licensed, so they contain what I've seen referred to as "bland-name products". There are two Fenders, blackface and silverface, a Hiwatt and a Vox in the Vintage suite. The Metal suite has another copy of the Marshall JCM 800 and adds a Mesa Rectifier, some kind of Engl and a 5150. Both of them are excellent. I'm especially impressed by the Hiwatt for clean tones, and the Rectifier (with the green overdrive in front!).

Other Plugins

The big disadvantage with amp plugins is that their resale value is essentially zero. On the upside, they usually aren't all that expensive to begin with, especially since manufacturers tend to offer pretty good discounts and other benefits. With a keen eye towards not letting my need for retail therapy run amok in this field now that I've curbed it somewhat on the hardware side, I do take advantage of some of the offers that come my way, and have amassed an interesting collection of virtual amps that give me great variety.

The most complete of my plugins is Guitar Rig Pro 7 by Native Instruments. It has a huge selection of amps and effects for both guitar and bass. The effects on offer are especially good, good enough that Guitar Rig allowed me to get rid of most of my pedal collection. All the little character bits and pieces are here, including a very good Leslie simulator, which is not that common. On the whole, the plugin bears the signs of software that tries to be too much to too many different players. I keep it around because my bass player also has it, so it's handy to share demo stuff between us without having to mess with freezing and rendering. I enjoy that it has some studio-grade compressors, reverbs and delays, which means we can even use it on demo vocals.

Next up is the Archetype Petrucci by Neural DSP. It goes for the signature JP clean and distorted Mesa sound, and contains a boatload of handy effects. If that sound is your thing, then this could very well be the only plugin you'd ever need. I like it for cleans and leads, and rely on more British-sounding plugins for my heavy rhythms.

With the Fortin Cali Suite and Fortin Nameless, both also by Neural DSP, we take yet another step down in applicability. The Cali does offer a Fender-type clean sound that is really nice, but both plugins are about capturing extremely high-gain Fortin amps. As such, they contain a gate, a drive and a boost. The Cali does have a really sweet-sounding delay and reverb, which Neural have recently rolled out to the Nameless as well in the latest update. For heavy rock and just about most metal genres, they are really good, and complement each other splendidly when double- or quad-tracking.

One thing that needs to be said about Neural DSP plugins is that they have the best built-in tuner of any software plugin I have ever tried. In fact, I tend to load up a Neural plugin even if I don't have any intentions of using that tone on that particular track, just because the tuner is so good. It also appears that effects, features and other utilities introduced in one package are soon rolled out to others as well.

The various Ampknobs by Bogren Digital might on the surface not appear to particularly versatile. I was even skeptical of them at first. But just as with certain one-knob pedals, if the thing is voiced correctly from the beginning, then you don't need all that extra control. Chances are that if you're like me, it just makes it easier to dial in the wrong settings! I currently own four of these little marvels, and I can only say that they are really fun to play through, and every bit as useable as the more fully-featured plugins in my collection. They sound good throughout the gain range, most of them has a boost switch for that extra push, and they have a full set of features such as riff recorder, metronome and tuner.