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

Softube's Amp Room is on the whole an excellent platform. The Marshall suite is simply crazy good. In short: this is the sound. If I could only have one amp simulation plugin, this would be it. Having the Vintage and Metal suites as well adds more flexibility, but I could really do it with just those five classic Marshalls from between 1965 and 1987. After fumbling around in the dark for more than a year, it seemed like everything fell into place at once when I got those Marshall tones humming. The JMP 2203 sim alone is incredible, I could record an entire album using nothing but the various tones available in that sim.

Amp Room is difficult to get into, because it doesn't give you the instant gratification of other plugins I've tried and bought. In a sense, the plugin is really accurate, because I experienced much of the same confusion with it as I did trying out the actual amps (or at least reissues thereof). As far as I've been able to determine, Softube have captured Marshall's own reference amps from the vault at Bletchley. That is, they aren't the hot-rodded, boosted, idealized versions one often gets in plugins and modeling gear (including Marshall's own Code series, I might add!). Those amps aren't high-gain amps in the modern sense, which means that they need a little push in the front to get the chug. Fortunately, the suite includes three simulated overdrives (the yellow, the green and the Marshall Guv'nor). Once I found out which one to use (hint: just as in real life, it's the yellow one!), I knew we had a winner here.

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 whatever suites and individual amp plugins you might own. If you get one of their standalone studio-oriented plugins, such as a compressor or a reverb, that plugin also 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. My personal favorites for guitar are the Wasted Space lo-fi reverb and the Tape Echoes. If you are a chorus person, my best recommendation is get whatever Amp Room suite that fits your taste and style, and 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". Of course, the visual interface is still based on the actual hardware, making it fairly easy to guess what Softube were going for. 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 what sounds like a 5150. Both suites are excellent and add plenty of variety, including lots more effects and cabs, to the Marshall amps. I'm especially impressed by the Hiwatt for clean tones, and the Rectifier (with the green overdrive in front!) for the chug.

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, enough so 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 in a pinch.

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 the occasional lead, but rely on more British-sounding plugins for my heavy rhythms. This was the plugin that really showed me what this technology could do. I find it particularly satisfying that Neural DSP add features here and there (a doubler and a pitch-shifter in this case), which they subsequently roll out to other products in their range. The tuner seems to be consistently excellent across all their plugins: in fact, I have been known to load up a Neural DSP plugin when tracking stuff even if I'm not using it for the tone, simply because the tuner is that good.

The Fortin Cali Suite and Fortin Nameless, also by Neural DSP, might not be as feature-packed as the Petrucci plugin. I got them because they were considerably closer to my tonal ideal (read: Marshall). The Cali has a particularly muscular sound with tons of gain on tap (also an absolutely glorious clean channel), and the Nameless can get positively filthy. There is a small selection of effects: a gate, an overdrive and a boost before the amp, and a delay and a reverb after it. The latter sound good enough that I find myself quite content even with the complete lack of modulation effects. For heavy rock and just about any metal genre, these two plugins are absolutely great, and I have also found that they complement each other splendidly for quadtracking. The Nameless adds a bit of sizzle on top of the more rounded Cali sound.

On the surface, the various Ampknobs by Bogren Digital might not come off as 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: the BDH 5169 (a copy of the original 5150 amp), the RevC (Mesa Dual Rectifier), the MLC S_Zero 100 (officially licensed), and last but not least the really excellent BassKnob (Ampeg SVT). All are excellent fun just to play around with, but are also every bit as useable as the more fully-featured plugins in my collection. They sound good throughout the gain range, most of them have a boost switch for that extra push, and they have a full set of features such as riff recorder, metronome and tuner.

This just in: Bogren Digital have released a trio of Marshall-inspired plugins: a Plexi, a JCM 800 and a JVM 410. They sound awesome going by the demonstrations I've watched. It's going to be interesting to see for how long I can put off buying them.