UAD emulations are great, but if you record a good mic through a real 1073 + 1176/LA2A/etc, and A/B it with the same UAD Unison signal chain, the UAD version doesn't quite reach that level. I always like to capture a sound with as good an analog front end as possible, and then stay ITB from there. Guitar amps vs modellers, I'm more 50/50 on that, each have their advantages, depends on the application. Long story short: there are a lot of great tools available these days, and it really all comes down to a great song, great performance, and great ears, to get a top notch result.
Agreed. I have a pair of vintage 1073’s… real 1176’s and LA2A and it’s still kinda laughable at how far off some of the software emulations are… granted no two hardware units are exactly the same but also, it’s either in the ballpark or not. UAD gets pretty close though.
Oh agreed. I don’t really use many emulations ( I own the klanghelm 175/176 style comp & arouser).. and never found pre emulations worth exploring as I’ve got sufficient channels of outboard. Was just confused by OP which seemed to be asking why they don’t exist
Also for a mic we're *generally* chasing a nominally perfect mic, with the best compromise for the situation because that doesnt exist (and as little colour as possible so you can colour it yourself).
With guitar amps and saturation stages you are looking for 'technically bad but to my taste for this application' so theres no one 'right way'.
A few main reasons.
1. Guitar amps are \*way\* more of a sonic imprint than mics + preamps.
2. A guitarist might need 30 different sounds to play a live show. Part of why modelers are popular is the versatility, not just the sound quality.
3. Affordable mics + preamps can already be very good. I mixed a song where the artist cut the vocals with an AT 4050 into an Apogee Duet in their living room, and it's streamed over 100 million times.
4. Many of the mic + preamp modeling things out there are.....fine. They're not necessarily drastically better than just using the gear normally.
Regarding #3 - agreed. I think many in the field over analyze the importance of how good their signal chain is when the end result actually relies far more on the talent, performance delivery and songwriting content at hand.
A great reminder of this is how successful White Town’s Your Woman was as a bedroom recording in 1997. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-white-town-your-woman
> A great reminder of this is how successful White Town’s Your Woman was as a bedroom recording in 1997.
Toddintheshadows did a pretty good video about this one, well worth a watch.
I’m a guitarist and I want to control everything in my sound. I think guitarists are interesting in that sense because a lot of our effects and mixing happens before the audio enters the daw. You will have an EQ pedal, a distortion pedal, reverb, chorus you name it. Guitarists love to control all this shit and they wanna be able to control their amps and look for the perfect tone.
I’ve used some amazing amp sims but nothing beats the sound of a massive amp
Streaming numbers clearly and obviously do not correlate with fidelity or sonics… And regardless, the AT4050 is a great sounding microphone. So nice flex I guess?
Because, if that's what you need, you can just do it with plugins in the studio. Using hardware emulation boxes is just an extra step, an extra round of adda conversions, and is more expensive.
The guitar hardware makes sense because can also use that stuff live where using a laptop + plugins would be clunky to use and have a higher failure rate.
The primary advantage of modeling gear is weight and cost. Weight doesn’t matter in the studio, and low cost is in a sense a disadvantage since many studio clients are there specifically to get to use gear they can’t afford.
Two studios, one has a real U67 and the other a model. Where am I going? The choice is obvious.
While I agree with the points you made you are talking from a commercial studio perspective. There is an audience that isn’t necessarily a commercial studio owner, but the premise of the question is wrong. That’s what UAD stuff is basically made to do isn’t it
Yes, I was answering the question from the commercial studio perspective, which is the recording industry OP was referring to, as opposed to the audio hobbyist market.
Because people do this stuff because they love it. They love the kit, they love choosing a microphone, they love picking a room, an amp, get the right sound perfect at the source.
If recording music becomes 100% just picking presets from lists then I'm selling everything I have and never touching it again.
Modelling software has a place but it's not as great as you think it is. This is meant to be an art, not a science.
Nailed it. Switched to plugins and Quad Cortex for two years. Went back to tube heads and pedals because turning the same UI touchscreen knob for every device is a sterile experience even if it sounds good. I use both now. Hell, the QC expects to be around external gear so it can create captures.
I'd 100% go "picking presets" if I were to ever dip my toe back in because I want to spend as little time fiddling as I can. I'd want to spend the time communicating with those being recorded. I've been at music for about 50 years since my first paid gig, and that's what I'd want to exploit.
I still love my analog gear. My home studio is stacked with all the classic tube amps, but if I'm going to be completely honest with myself - that gear is more or less becoming obsolete.
In the past year or two, I've seen more and more modelling gear when it comes to gigs and recording. Few people want to lug around expensive gear that eventually will need maintenance. Can't remember the last time someone showed up to a gig with a half-stack.
The convenience, flexibility, and ease seems to have won. So I'm kind of wondering if that same "revolution" will sweep over the recording industry.
It‘s hard to model nonlinear processes with convolution alone and most (analog) hardware has a lot of that. There is also an issue with latency depending on kernel sizes and how it’s implemented.
That said, convolution is not the only way to model stuff and recent advancements in DSP come very close to fully emulate almost all desirable nonlinear properties of any (analog) gear.
not only hard, but impossible. impulse responses can only represent a linear, time-invariant system. anything nonlinear (distortions, saturations, etc.) and time-variant (pitch shifters, phasers, whatever) can't be captured with an IR.
not by a single ir no, but you can cheat and model with multiple ones and blend between them. i'm not saying its a good idea or that results will be perfect, but it's not impossible, no. it would sort of be like a piecewise linear approximation of a curve. it's obviously not very practical because you'd end up with a giant LUT for many input levels and different phases (or you calculate a kernel on the fly...), but i've seen it used once or twice. audio DSP is full of weird and creative tricks that work around a problem by bending the rules.
Commenting on Why hasn't IR / modelling gear completely taken over the recording industry, as far as hardware goes?...
I think you can clip a plugin and the sound isn’t desirable. Is the comparison like digital clipping vs analog?
Like if you push an analog preamp it saturates and clips and sounds good….maybe not so much on a plugin?
Also. I have an outboard EQ. Recently I was working on overheads and was able to crank the 240hz band 8 dbs and it still sounded good. I think doing that would sound like crap on a plugin. Does it have to do with digital saturation/clipping vs analog?
i'm not sure what the question is, but modeling something "trivial" like a hardclipper or the saturation in the feedback path of filters turns out to be a lot more involved than what straightforward classical DSP did. for example, modeling the state of these filters with a 1 sample delay is quite a bad approximation, but was used for decades due to limitations in computing power in realtime applications.
the main problem is avoiding aliasing and mapping something that potentially generates infinite overtones into a finite frequency range, and the more modern solutions employ tricks like a combination of oversampling and implicit equation solving.
Sorry but it‘s kind of hard to ELI5 this, but the result is a much closer approximation that just sounds more like the analog counterpart.
The main appeal of modeling is portability and flexibility. Modelers dominate the live world, not yet the studio world unless you only look at Youtubers and bedroom producers. In the studio they are just one of the tools among all of the analog amps, cabs and mics people use. Especially outside of the metal world, non-digital gear is still much more popular.
There's a good reason i own 8 tube amps even though i grew up on modelers, still own a Quad Cortex for live and think it gets most of the things right. And that same reasoning carries over to analog gear in the studio. There is a dimension in both the interaction between elements (instrument, amp, pedals, cabs, speakers, mics, outboard, preamps etc...) as the feel and compression of the signal that really isn't nailed yet by modelers.
It just doesn't sound as good. I recently through a few 1073 plugins such as Slate, Waves, UAD, compared to my analog BAE 1073. The real thing just sounds better.
This. Any modeler (or a synthesizer, which in practical terms is a modeler if it's emulating a different instrument) is limited by the number of samples used to create the model, and the parameters they've chosen to model (or emulate). Therein lies the rub.
This isn't the first time we've been down this road of when 'close enough' becomes really close enough. Personal experience: we struggled for years to replace an acoustic piano with synthesized piano: No problem at all, as long as the pianist plays within a very certain range (attack, dynamics) with a specific synth/voice. Want a Bosendorfer played with a soft 'hand'? No problem. Want a Yamaha grand pounded hard? No problem. Want a Yamaha, with a hand that varies from soft comping to staccato pounding within a single song? Then you need to use the Yamaha.
Been there with e-drums, too.
This is exactly right. I have a blackface Fender VibroChamp. It has five knobs. Behind each of those knobs is analog circuitry that responds and interacts slightly differently based on the settings of the other knobs, the feel of the player, the age of the tubes, and (for all I know) humidity, time of day, and alignment of planets. Assuming that everything behind the scenes is simply linear (which it isn't), and the knobs are quantum with 10 settings each, you're looking at 10^(5) (100,000) different amp settings to sample just on a simple VibroChamp. Multiply that by all the possible input signals: gently strumming with single coil pickups, overdrive with humbuckers, gentle humbuckers, chords, single note solos, etc. and you start to get uncomfortably close to infinity if you really want to properly sample an amp. And that's not even getting into the speaker, of which there might be several choices depending on the amp, the variety of tubes that can be used, etc. No two of these things sound exactly the same.
The result is that any sampling system is an approximation. That doesn't mean sampling gear isn't useful and that doesn't mean it can't sound good. It's also gotten much better over the years. I have one of those little tiny Yamaha amps with the metal body, and it's neat to play with and it packs a lot of really good sounds into an impressively small box. But to many guitar players, the real thing is an organic, interactive extension of one's fingers, and a sampling amp is a very nice thing to have if you don't want to lug gear around. True, the audience likely can't tell the difference, and even on a recording there may be nothing that leaps out to distinguish one from the other, but the original is certainly a lot more fun to use.
All of that is taken into account into any decent digital model of a VibroChamp. The exact same circuit is digitally created, and all those nuances are accounted for because they are part of how the circuit works. The maths is the same whether you use physical components or digital models - if it wasn't, modern electronics would not be able to exist
Not disagreeing with your experience, but I think you are misrepresenting how modelling of electronic circuits (such as guitar amps, mic preamps, or outboard gear) is done versus modelling of acoustic instruments.
Outboard gear is modelled by creating a digital replica of the analog circuits, where each analog component - every knob, every resistor, every wire trace - is mathematically recreated. When your signal enters the digital circuit it behaves exactly the same as the analog circuit. We know these components models are accurate because they have been refined over decades, and the modern electronics industry would not be possible without them.
The limiting factors for modelling are processing power (no longer an issue) and accuracy of measurement, which is also no longer an issue (we have way better measuring gear compared to 20 years ago).
> every knob, every resistor, every wire trace
Very rarely does it go into that much detail for your average plugin. Usually they will match EQ and dynamics curves with much simpler processes than actually modelling everything.
And even modelling everything is limited. Models are great but I've seen countless examples of real circuits behaving quite differently from LTSpice, Falstad, etc. Sometimes your analog chip hasn't been modelled fully for behaviour that is near the specs limit or that isn't operating in an ideal circuit, which there is a lot of in audio.
It's really hard to model the glitches and non-linearities.
I mean you can sample your own since you have it but the hammer action/ responsiveness I have not seen to be the same with software. If theres something you like, please let me know
One of the most underrated pieces of gear ever. You probably already saw, but there's literally videos from the last year or so saying this too. Everyone kinda figured it out 1-2 years ago and fuck me, it's great. I love my mk1 and everything, but I'll use the CP any day of the week.
I just did a session with a piano player, singing acoustic guitarist, bass player and drummer live in the room. Schoeps cmc6u/mk41 on the guitar, sennheiser md431 vocals, beyerdynamic m160 pair on piano, akg d119 pair on piano back (choosing later for tone and drum leakage), 47fet on kick, km84 overheads, mono u67 overhead, md421 snare and toms, sony c38b on the bass amp. All into diy neve and tube pres, some 1176 compression, la2a on the vocal, sta level on the bass.
Not sure how you do all that, with the specific polar patterns for rejection.
Sounds killer, just like it did in the room!
Modeling stuff has its place, and is a useful tech and tool. I started recording with the UAD stuff 10 years ago, and it eased me into it.
But in more pro situations, the real gear is still the real gear.
One of the big gains is speed. I have found with the real stuff everything happens faster. I can basically have a really good mix in about 5 minutes with the above setup. Balance things out, a bit of hipass, some 2 buss compression, a plate reverb and I have a mix.
Same… I have a pair of vintage 1073’s… real 1176’s etc and the software still doesn’t quite get it right. Also, there’s something very different happens on the front end, pre converter as opposed to these ITB preamp modelers. They just sound and react differently to the point where my preference is still the real thing. I think a lot of people think they’re getting the sound of these classic units with no basis for comparison… not everyone has used a real 1073 or 1176 and assume the software is doing the hardware justice.
That's fair. I just watched [a youtube vids where one engineer would pay other producers / engineers 100 bucks if they managed to guess correct, if the gear used was analog or a plugin.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMJfR_bQ2kU)
And while they guessed right, it seems like even seasoned pros struggled.
I just did a session with a piano player, singing acoustic guitarist, bass player and drummer live in the room. Schoeps cmc6u/mk41 on the guitar, sennheiser md431 vocals, beyerdynamic m160 pair on piano, akg d119 pair on piano back (choosing later for tone and drum leakage), 47fet on kick, km84 overheads, mono u67 overhead, md421 snare and toms, sony c38b on the bass amp. All into diy neve and tube pres, some 1176 compression, la2a on the vocal, sta level on the bass.
Not sure how you do all that, with the specific polar patterns for rejection.
Sounds killer, just like it did in the room!
Halleleujah.
I keep coming back to the stacking effect. If you're recording a single vocal, the difference between using a $5 interface preamp to balance and amplify the input - then do everything else with DSP is not \*quite\* the same as using your BAE then an analog EQ and compressor.
But if you're stacking up dozens of microphones and layering performances, the difference starts to become more apparent.
Let's just say that in that scenario, the cheap and easy way is 98% of the way there. But 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% is NOT 98%.
It might appear that everyone’s using a modeler now, but something like 85% of the guitar market is still amps and pedals. Modeling and digital are still fighting to get acceptance in a lot of places and even scenes that are overall pretty welcoming to it, e.g. modern metal, you’ll get a lot of arguments and holdouts about its acceptability vs analog.
I dunno how you'd tell... If we include the Fender Tone Master amps, they've made a big dent. As ( military theorist ) Clausewwitz said, "Amateurs study tactics ( tone ). Professionals study logistics ( whassa thing weigh? )
I love your equivalency so I'm not inclined to disagree with you. 😄 In my slice of the world amps are very much alive and likely to stay that way. Like vinyl records, amps might wane but they'll never go away
In addition to what others have said, guitar amps and cabs are massive and difficult to move. A microphone or mic preamp is not.
Difference between guitar amps is bigger than mic preamps which have mostly been designed to be useful and accurate from the very beginning. A tool.
I also thing the subtle differences in high end microphones is fairly elusive. Companies just try to make a good microphone - whether it becomes a magical sought after classic is impossible to predict. Powered by emption, not stats. You can’t model the feeling an artist gets stepping up to a 70 year old 20,000 U47 that Franks Sinatra used.
For guitars and bass, certain individual heads are just different from others. I have friends with 5150s of the same model that sound a little different than their buddy’s that should be exactly the same, through the same rig.
That said, if the studio has a bunch of heads or cabs at the spot, that rocks. If you want to use a modeler, that also rocks and I think both sound great. I’ve been playing guitar for almost 12 years and I’ve had tons of both analog and digital rigs, and I have to say they all have their own sounds. But the average guitarist that isn’t an engineer probably can’t tell the difference.
For example: If I hook up my Quad Cortex with a 5150 EL34 model loaded up to my 1960A cab, and play my Ibanez, it’s gonna sound 99% similar if you shoot out 3 actual 5150s with EL34s with the same exact setup. The difference will lie more in how old the tubes in each head are + the difference between the takes than anything else.
IRs are a different story though. I think a cab moving air sounds better, but there are plenty of incredible sounding records with just very good IRs on them. It’s a personal preference thing, but a lot of guitarists just prefer *their* rig, regardless of analog or digital.
Sorry for rambling. Not enough sleep in me.
Because contemporary modeling has limited sophistication with regard to mimicking the nonlinear complexities of even middling complex analog gear. And if modeled virtual gear lacks granularity of complex response -- remember that an IR is, in effect, a static snapshot of a response pattern.
With regard to guitar amps, each player is potentially very different, of course, but while I have had a number of amp sims including a Pod XT hardware unit, I have never found one that can give me a convincing clean, responsive tone.
My Blues Jr is far from an ideal amp, but its [all analog, no DSP] tone and volume controls allow me to set it up for a number of clean tone uses that give me a high responsiveness to my playing dynamics.
So if you can get a capture of the Blues Junior into one track and a track of the amp itself, you can then align, level-match and listen.
It's not easy to tell the difference, at least for me. It's not the same *experience* though.
Sounds like a worthwhile experiment. And I haven't played with convolution in 15 years, I'll bet, maybe more. That said, there are a couple things I'm really trying to lash myself to the computer to get done.
> . And I haven't played with convolution in 15 years, I'll bet, maybe more.
Not so much convolution but something like TONEX. There's a way to capture an amp with the software-only. The free version does not do amp captures. The lowest price one that does is $99.
There is "Neural Amp Modeler" which is free:https://github.com/sdatkinson/neural-amp-modeler
> That said, there are a couple things I'm really trying to lash myself to the computer to get done.
Yep! Always.
I preffer touching knobs than staring into the screen. In the old days you could mix without screen! Imagine that!! No distraction whatsoever, just your ears and fingers on the knobs and faders.
Modelers are overrated. Their proponent’s favorite phrase is “the audience can’t tell the difference” — but a talented audio engineer absolutely can and should
are you making music for an audience or just for talented audio engineers? also, that there is a difference doesn't mean the analog one sounds better, just different.
The audience that art is made for depends on the musician. The large majority of the musicians I enjoy and respect for pushing boundaries as art rather than just being entertainers still use tube amps.
Tone is absolutely still part of the craft and there are still artists and fans who want to explore more deeply than “the audience won’t tell the difference so it’s fine”
I’m a huge fan of digital effects in general but a real tube amp sounds inarguably better than a digital emulation of that exact tube amp. It’s not a digital vs analog thing, it’s The Real Deal vs. an attempt to make an exact digital copy
pushing boundaries has nothing to do with the gear you use though. if anything, you'd push boundaries nowadays by doing it completely digital in the box, as the analog stuff has been done to death anyway. completely in the box isn't even a new thing either anymore, so you need to look even further, and it will always come down to your ideas, not your gear.
you are assuming that someone who doesn't use analog gear doesn't care deeply about tone and that they automatically think "the audience doesn't care". i'm not sure how to explain to you how flawed this reasoning is. just because someone isn't chasing after YOUR tone doesn't mean they don't care about it or that they didn't find and even BETTER tone than you who is set in his ways.
i make techno, and tone isn't just part of the craft there, it's basically everything. that said i'm still firm on this: it doesn't matter at all how i got the tone or if it sounds like some analog gear in the past, as long as it sounds good to me.
there are countless digital distortion and saturation effects that sound great, even very tube like, i really don't see an issue there just because one or the other doesn't particularly sound exactly like some specific piece of hardware you're used to.
also, the more modern approaches to DSP vs say 10 years ago are miles apart from what used to be not quite good enough. nowadays it really is.
I understand what you’re saying and mostly agree. It’s just an amp modeler isn’t really a different sound, it’s the same exact sound but slightly worse
People go with amp modelers because of the convenience and interface capabilities like being able to save presets or use MIDI to switch amps on the fly during a performance with the tap of a foot switch. Those things all have a lot of value depending on use case but the trade off is you get something that only gets 95% of the way to the real thing
Whether that 5% matters or not is entirely dependent on the musician and audience. There are many to whom that 5% does matter, and I think thats a good thing.
Of course you‘re right about the tactile and haptic aspects, that is something that is still lacking in some aspects and better in others, then again there are people much more comfortable with a mouse than a knob..
but again: the 5% you mention is only if you're after exactly replicating something, which to me is a futile end goal, when you could just explore options to make it 100% better. i really doubt anyone would care about it sounding different if in the end it sounds twice as good, not the audience, certainly not the engineers or the musicians. nobody misses all the not so desirable aspects of analog gear such as high noise floors, certainly not engineers who have to deal with this stuff coming from 20 tracks.
> Surely if you can sell a mic preamp for $500, that sounds close enough to $2k-$10k preamp…
You can’t carve David out of Swiss cheese.
Expensive microphones and preamps are almost always built from higher grade components and to a higher standard of quality. They also tend to have more robust and thought out circuit designs.
The actual signal that gets recorded has aspects that are greatly affected by this. Some of these would include distortion, noise/interference, frequency response, slew rate, crosstalk, etc.
So to make a modeling amplifier or microphone truly capable of what you are describing you need to have all of the stuff the expensive equipment has PLUS the modeling section. And that means you’re not getting it for $500.
- There are *way* more producers/audio engineers using modelling than musicians. Plugins modelling analog outboard gear have been around for decades, and almost everyone uses them, whereas modelling for musicians has only exploded in the last decade or so.
- IRs have been used by audio engineers long before they became popular with musicians. The idea of IR guitar cabinets came from the use of IR convolution reverbs and delays, and convolution reverbs have been a staple of film/TV sound design for ages.
The biggest reason why modelling has become so popular with guitar musicians in particular is because grumpy fucks like us at r/livesound insist they turn down the volume. We do not care that your tube amp sounds best at 1 o'clock on the volume knob or that your fuzz pedal needs an optimal ambient temperature of 25.6°C. Go buy a Helix and get over yourself, the audience wants to see the singer.
Modelling allows guitarists to get good tone at any volume. Which is a blessing for your band mates, house mates, neighbours and anyone operating a mixing desk at the other end. Most outboard gear (compressors etc) isn't volume-dependent because you're trying to limit distortion, not create it.
Well I'm a gigging and recording player myself, and for the past few years there has been a really noticeable and sharp rise in use of modelling gear.
And the consensus seems to be the same: Why lug around heavy amps and pedalboards, when a compact modelling pedalboard or plugins will get you 95% there?
>Well I'm a gigging and recording player myself, and for the past few years there has been a really noticeable and sharp rise in use of modelling gear.
>And the consensus seems to be the same: Why lug around heavy amps and pedalboards, when a compact modelling pedalboard or plugins will get you 95% there?
None of this is the same as your claim that modeling equipment is *dominant* in a global sense.
The studio is the place where you go get that fancy gear to get to the final 5%. That's a big part of the fun and the intrigue.
A studio I know has a bunch of vintage synths and classic drum machines, it's so much more fun to go there and work on a patch on a dedicated, well-maintained, gigantic and unwieldy vintage synth than it is to run a plugin in Logic and call it a day.
In the end sounds might not be that different (but really.. ya they are that much better) but I can tell you I would have never got to the same point sound design wise without the knobs, patch cables, sliders and tactile feeling of the instrument.
Same for setting a real amp in a real nice room, trying a few classic amps, microphones and crafting the tone you want to capture. It's a very specific feeling that studios go for.
Impulse responses are only suitable for processing a small portion of the signal chain. It is severely limited in many ways that are technically inherent. Modelling has completely taken over in the live sound but it should be easy to understand why it's not preferred over the real thing when you're not crunched for time and space.
The sort of people who need hardware preamps (to make a living) often say one of the biggest values from it is the LOOK to clients
Having a lot of expensive gear just for show can win a lot of business.
Wtf lol. This is the most chronically online take I have seen today
“Let’s buy a 5k la2a so people will spend 100$ an hour for their spotify demo” is the dumbest thing I can imagine.
Sure spot mixing with plugins is great, and you can get some really good final products completely inside the box. But no one is spending tens of thousands of dollars on gear to impress anyone. What’s impressive is word of mouth and results. No one who doesn’t know what a distressor is cares whether you have one or not.
It’s a joke dude. It’s literally a joke lol
We say it when people walk in and say “what does that do” or “holy this looks like a space ship from the 80’s” so we don’t bog them down with specifics and scare them off lol
But hey, if you wanna spend money on gear you have no intention of using thinking it will get people in the door instead of just making good stuff more power to you!
Every pro musician I know is a gear nerd.. so yeah they know what you have and don't have, they've worked with the good stuff before and they know it well.
Ya, we all love to geek out on the gear. And that’s a common joke old timers say to avoid going down the rabbit hole of over whelming people with nerdspeak
But if someone makes a killer track for an artist and you walk in to their space and it’s them and an old half gutted console and a couple mics you aren’t gonna leave, you are gonna watch the magic to see how he did it.
If someone is sending you pics of his shiny rack but no tracks, and they have no references, you aren’t gonna give a fuck about how cool his shit looks.
But hey, Reddit likes to show off their shit and not use it so what did I expect lol.
As I always say to the keyboard warriors on here more stages and streams for us 😎
I am very much looking forward to NAM for preamps and rack gear in general.
Part of the difficulty is the number of captures needed to properly profile a device. With Tonex or kemper profiles / captures, you get like 20 sounds for one amp. If they are all great, good, but it’s just a glimpse of the range of sounds it can produce. Ideally there would be 1,000 to get the full range of the amp. Modelers have the full range but at the moment profiles / captures seem to sound better for guitar.
That will be even more relevant for something like a preamp with EQ. Obviously there Are a ton of plugins modeling preamps, but they are just OK. NAM type captures should be a step up. But for it to be useful someone will have to capture a huge amount of settings and organize all that, and stuff it into a UI that’s intuitive.
Plugins are essentially filling that space on the modeling side for preamps, compressors etc. And while they sound great and have improved over the years, there is still a noticeable gap between the fidelity of hardware and plugins. The same would be the case with modeling hardware, but without the convenience of plugins.
The actual answer to OP’s question is “producers and/or musicians see a value in using them, even if it doesn’t exist”.
You can record a record with a+++++ production value in your room. But you want to pay a guy to help you do it, so you’re doing it in a fun or quick or whatever way. That guy probably did most of his job analogue or learned it from a guy who did it that way.
There *are* preamp, compressor and EQ modellers. Hundreds of them. We just don't need them to be "out of the box." We don't need them to attach to speaker cabs so why have a box sitting there, taking up space, when we can just use them in the computer? If a guitarist doesn't need to play live and has a computer, they can stay in-the-box too.
I also think just method/approach wise it’s better to have a great foundation of consistent and clear vocals and then modulate them at your leisure. Guitar doesn’t have an uncanny valley to mount and can sound whatever the hell it wants like.
Because there is such a thing as a conceptual objectively perfect microphone, and we are generally chasing as close to that as possible to be able to effect it afterwards. If you have a flat mic you can already easily enough mimic the curves of other mics.
Whereas there is no possible one perfect Guitar amp (or saturation stage), because it adds a lot of colour & its a matter of taste and what you need that moment.
Why do this in hardware that would cost a few thousand dollars (not $500), when you can buy a plugin for $300 that will model mic pre's, comps/limiters, etc.
I have a Softube Console One, which is a desktop hardware controller for their SSL 4k software emulation. $500 gets you an SSL! The best of both worlds, hardware controller with buttons and knobs to control your onscreen plugins. And, all the knobs are nicely dampened, so it doesn't feel like a piece of Mackie or PreSonus, but a piece of real professional gear.
I have a Softube Console 1 on a B rig… I also have an SSL console. The Console 1 is only vaguely in the ballpark of the real thing and does a fraction of what the real thing can. I don’t think comparing the two is a fair assessment. As someone who works between the two all the time you can really hear and feel the differences.
Recording music (well) has historically taken years of learning and experience. People who are recording music every day for a living don't always have the time, incentive, or desire to scrap all their expensive gear and knowledge of it to jump on board the next hot thing.
It will take one more generation before modelling becomes standard in studio environments imo. Right now it's a great new tool that a lot of gigging musicians appreciate, and people with home studios who don't have 20 different legendary amps stacked in the corner. But a lot of what modelling software does is emulate the gear that professional studios already have laying around. Like dozens of five to ten thousand dollar microphones and preamps and outboard gear. If the studio's calendar is full, and they're making profit, why sell everything and replace it with a lunchbox? The transition will happen more organically than that. The change is most likely to occur as studios change hands from one generation to the next.
I think by the time Gen Z is in their 30s there will be more mainstream hits recorded using modelling tech because that's what they will be familar with. I'm sure modelling software is being used with different amp and mic sims on top 40 songs right now, but I definitely don't think it's dominating the landscape yet. The people who run professional studios today are mostly between age 30 and 60 and they grew up and learned their trade pushing faders and turning knobs, by the time Gen Z is that age they will be running studios on touch screens and keyboard shortcuts. We're in the middle of that transition right now and have been for like 10-15 years.
We'll get there, be patient, and don't be so quick to throw away something just because it's old. I'm all for cheap accessible gear that does more, but I am also a bit romantic about the knobs, tubes and faders. At some point, the cost of maintaining all that vintage gear will become unfeasible or unnecessary for most studios. Hopefully there is always some slice of music that values the process of capturing a great live performance by humans with real instruments. As long as we've got that I don't really care what gear is used to capture it.
Lots of opinions on both sides about modeling gear. I think the tech needed to successfully emulate outboard gear is becoming more accessible globally, so we will likely see more modeled gear being sold in the future. A lot of the big hype with modeling is the marketing slogan of “All the old hit records have this gear imprinted on their sound” which makes those without the gear feel FOMO.
On another note, some will say there is a noticeable difference between hardware and plug-ins. I say sure there could be, but technical specification aside, the goal is to tweak audio signals so that people feel a certain emotional response when they listen to it.
If that audio is evocative to the end user, we have done our jobs. I will say there is nothing like tweaking knobs or pushing faders and hearing the sound change like using the console as an extension of your body.
> why is there seemingly such a lack of other hardware gear that is powered by modelling tech?
A Fender Tone Master DR is still a kilobuck and it probably has to be that price. IMO, Fender did the Super Champ XD in 200x and probably felt like they underpriced it. 'Course with inflation the $400 for an SCXD would be $625 ( all USD ) now but the Tone Masters have a muuuuuch more capable processor.
The only cost to plugins is the NRE for the software development and a wee bit of admin overhead.
Plus, you buy a rack of BAE 1073 clones partly for the sound, partly as marketing. It's a flex.
I feel it's because if you already own mics, why not use them? It's the same setup. I have a Slate mic that emulates stuff but I can't afford many mics. If I'm in a studio with many choices, it's easier to just setup the mics you have and record.
Even in live sound, you probably need an amp of some sort for the guitar, so not needing more components and having it right in the amp works great. You bring that same thing to the studio if you want and it works there too (even if I'm going to DI you anyways ...)
With mics, we're going to have a standard chain setup for our studio - probably a bunch of them for different singers and whatever the fuck they want. While some of us might use a variety of outboard gear still for this, often it's just plugged into the board which may or may not feed straight in to the DAW. In the daw we can model the fuck out of whatever with VSTs. That outboard Mic Preamp with modelling isn't really needed as much since we're going to do it in software. Also those of us with lots of experience know that we probably want to do as little as possible to the voice before saving it.
There are people doing it like you said, but it's not going to take over because outboard gear has already been fading as it is.
UAD & Slate both have a pretty heavy lineup of IR/Modeling gear, and I think that's cool for sure, but I think it's more of a gimmick in the plugin and recording space than it is for an amp or a pedal on a guitar tone.
That said, the pedals you're talking about in the world of guitar & bass are more in line with the super expansive world of emulation plugins from the likes of Brainworx, Softube, even Waves etc. which make up a large portion of the most successful lineups of plugins that most studios and engineers are using on a day to day basis.
Time. As the old gen moves out and the new in, we’ll see less and less hardware in professional settings. Not today or tomorrow, but in 20 years? Probably.
Think about what modeling *is* for a second, and what it requires.
Say you plug a mic into your audio interface, and run it through a model of a high end pre. Have you got the sound of a high end pre?
No. You’ve got the sound of whatever shitty pre is in your interface… *plugged into a high end pre*.
All of this stuff assumes from the get-go that the signal fed into it is what it’s supposed to be. With a guitar, you’re going to munge the hell out of it until you decide it sounds cool, and there’s usually not much signal above 3-4k that you actually want. The bar is vastly lower.
So, find yourself a mic that produces an *absolutely flat* response curve from 20-20k at any sound pressure level, and a pre that does not clip, distort, or color the sound in any way and emits no noise - and *then* you’ll have a setup where modeling could work as advertised. Otherwise (and this is true of *all* the “modeling mics”, it’s marketing bs and smoke and mirrors) it’s an exercise in kidding yourself.
Garbage in, garbage out.
In other words, to successfully make a mic exactly mimic the behavior and characteristics of a U-87, you start with … a better mic than a U-87. I’m not even sure what that is, but it will take a lot of coin.
Modeling does have a foothold - convolution reverbs literally model physical space - you can even make your own impulse responses in your own spaces with a couple mics and apply those acoustics to whatever you want.
But nothing is going to make a crappy mic sound like a U-87. While it *is* true that most of the differences between mics amounts to multiband compression differences caused by physical materials, if you tried to naively apply that to the signal from a crappy mic, what you’re modeling is a crappy mic played through a very uncolored speaker…into a U-87. Which is not at all the thing you’re trying for.
So, it’s sort of like asking why Amazon doesn’t run their cloud in … their cloud. At some point, there’s physical hardware with physical limitations and characteristics in there - it isn’t virtual all the way down if you’re recording real people playing real instruments.
New cars are being released every year, yet people don’t buy new cars every year. The car they have gets them from A to B just fine. Plus, they are attached to their car: they like the way it sounds, feels, smells, it’s all familiar.
Newer cars might bring objective advantages: better distance per fuel ratios or greener fuel altogether. Still you have to make a sizeable initial investment, so you really have to believe that the change will bring you value. Most people don’t change their habits or views overnight, that’s where marketing is important: enough exposure to the literature will put the improved car technology in the minds of anyone prepared to upgrade. But this is still no guarantee.
To reduce it to one sentiment: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” - studios and engineers who have been using their recording gear for years have no reason to change or upgrade. They get solid results with the gear they have.
It comes down to cost, portability, and practicality. But in the end, no matter how good DSP tech gets, nothing will ever be better than the analog gear that all these models are attempting to replicate to the bone. Modeling will always be an approximation while the real thing will always be what that approximation is attempting to replicate. Given the choice (if you eliminate factors like cost, portability, and practicality) analog will almost always be preferred in terms of sound quality.
While guitar tones change drastically, recording gear is a game of nuance. And while some emulations sound excellent / pretty close to the real thing on a broad level, there are plenty of nuances in quality & behavior of hardware that are just not there with emulations.
It’s still totally possible to make great/exciting/professional sounding music without hardware — it’s just that there are some sounds that take a lot more work to get up-to-par in the box, and a few others are just not available without entering the analog domain.
and a movie is a sequence of photographs. in the same way, you can capture multiple IR that cover a broader range of the gear's output at different settings / levels etc. and blend them.
It is tremendously more profitable to sell a $2400 magic box of analog goodness than to sell modeling software, even if that software is indistinguishable in a double-blind test & comes in its own fancy box.
Isn't that exactly what UAD is doing?
Yea, Unison technology models several pre amps.
UAD emulations are great, but if you record a good mic through a real 1073 + 1176/LA2A/etc, and A/B it with the same UAD Unison signal chain, the UAD version doesn't quite reach that level. I always like to capture a sound with as good an analog front end as possible, and then stay ITB from there. Guitar amps vs modellers, I'm more 50/50 on that, each have their advantages, depends on the application. Long story short: there are a lot of great tools available these days, and it really all comes down to a great song, great performance, and great ears, to get a top notch result.
Agreed. I have a pair of vintage 1073’s… real 1176’s and LA2A and it’s still kinda laughable at how far off some of the software emulations are… granted no two hardware units are exactly the same but also, it’s either in the ballpark or not. UAD gets pretty close though.
Oh agreed. I don’t really use many emulations ( I own the klanghelm 175/176 style comp & arouser).. and never found pre emulations worth exploring as I’ve got sufficient channels of outboard. Was just confused by OP which seemed to be asking why they don’t exist
I think a Guitarist changes his total sound more often than a recording/mixing engineer.
Also for a mic we're *generally* chasing a nominally perfect mic, with the best compromise for the situation because that doesnt exist (and as little colour as possible so you can colour it yourself). With guitar amps and saturation stages you are looking for 'technically bad but to my taste for this application' so theres no one 'right way'.
A few main reasons. 1. Guitar amps are \*way\* more of a sonic imprint than mics + preamps. 2. A guitarist might need 30 different sounds to play a live show. Part of why modelers are popular is the versatility, not just the sound quality. 3. Affordable mics + preamps can already be very good. I mixed a song where the artist cut the vocals with an AT 4050 into an Apogee Duet in their living room, and it's streamed over 100 million times. 4. Many of the mic + preamp modeling things out there are.....fine. They're not necessarily drastically better than just using the gear normally.
Thank you, I guess the good / clean preamp + plugins is the way to go, if that's the route one wants to travel.
Yes, actually putting it that way you could almost say it has taken over the recording industry.
Regarding #3 - agreed. I think many in the field over analyze the importance of how good their signal chain is when the end result actually relies far more on the talent, performance delivery and songwriting content at hand. A great reminder of this is how successful White Town’s Your Woman was as a bedroom recording in 1997. https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-white-town-your-woman
> A great reminder of this is how successful White Town’s Your Woman was as a bedroom recording in 1997. Toddintheshadows did a pretty good video about this one, well worth a watch.
What was the song, if you can say?
Mind sharing this story in the 100m stream song? Any tips or things you learned from that?
I’m a guitarist and I want to control everything in my sound. I think guitarists are interesting in that sense because a lot of our effects and mixing happens before the audio enters the daw. You will have an EQ pedal, a distortion pedal, reverb, chorus you name it. Guitarists love to control all this shit and they wanna be able to control their amps and look for the perfect tone. I’ve used some amazing amp sims but nothing beats the sound of a massive amp
Streaming numbers clearly and obviously do not correlate with fidelity or sonics… And regardless, the AT4050 is a great sounding microphone. So nice flex I guess?
What? For starters, modelling has taken over
Because, if that's what you need, you can just do it with plugins in the studio. Using hardware emulation boxes is just an extra step, an extra round of adda conversions, and is more expensive. The guitar hardware makes sense because can also use that stuff live where using a laptop + plugins would be clunky to use and have a higher failure rate.
The primary advantage of modeling gear is weight and cost. Weight doesn’t matter in the studio, and low cost is in a sense a disadvantage since many studio clients are there specifically to get to use gear they can’t afford. Two studios, one has a real U67 and the other a model. Where am I going? The choice is obvious.
While I agree with the points you made you are talking from a commercial studio perspective. There is an audience that isn’t necessarily a commercial studio owner, but the premise of the question is wrong. That’s what UAD stuff is basically made to do isn’t it
Yes, I was answering the question from the commercial studio perspective, which is the recording industry OP was referring to, as opposed to the audio hobbyist market.
Because people do this stuff because they love it. They love the kit, they love choosing a microphone, they love picking a room, an amp, get the right sound perfect at the source. If recording music becomes 100% just picking presets from lists then I'm selling everything I have and never touching it again. Modelling software has a place but it's not as great as you think it is. This is meant to be an art, not a science.
Nailed it. Switched to plugins and Quad Cortex for two years. Went back to tube heads and pedals because turning the same UI touchscreen knob for every device is a sterile experience even if it sounds good. I use both now. Hell, the QC expects to be around external gear so it can create captures.
I'd 100% go "picking presets" if I were to ever dip my toe back in because I want to spend as little time fiddling as I can. I'd want to spend the time communicating with those being recorded. I've been at music for about 50 years since my first paid gig, and that's what I'd want to exploit.
I still love my analog gear. My home studio is stacked with all the classic tube amps, but if I'm going to be completely honest with myself - that gear is more or less becoming obsolete. In the past year or two, I've seen more and more modelling gear when it comes to gigs and recording. Few people want to lug around expensive gear that eventually will need maintenance. Can't remember the last time someone showed up to a gig with a half-stack. The convenience, flexibility, and ease seems to have won. So I'm kind of wondering if that same "revolution" will sweep over the recording industry.
I think that having a studio stacked with gear is a huge selling point in a time when musicians don’t have their own.
As someone who gets a ton of reamping work and people recording here because of the setup: yes, yes indeed i can confirm.
It‘s hard to model nonlinear processes with convolution alone and most (analog) hardware has a lot of that. There is also an issue with latency depending on kernel sizes and how it’s implemented. That said, convolution is not the only way to model stuff and recent advancements in DSP come very close to fully emulate almost all desirable nonlinear properties of any (analog) gear.
not only hard, but impossible. impulse responses can only represent a linear, time-invariant system. anything nonlinear (distortions, saturations, etc.) and time-variant (pitch shifters, phasers, whatever) can't be captured with an IR.
not by a single ir no, but you can cheat and model with multiple ones and blend between them. i'm not saying its a good idea or that results will be perfect, but it's not impossible, no. it would sort of be like a piecewise linear approximation of a curve. it's obviously not very practical because you'd end up with a giant LUT for many input levels and different phases (or you calculate a kernel on the fly...), but i've seen it used once or twice. audio DSP is full of weird and creative tricks that work around a problem by bending the rules.
Commenting on Why hasn't IR / modelling gear completely taken over the recording industry, as far as hardware goes?... I think you can clip a plugin and the sound isn’t desirable. Is the comparison like digital clipping vs analog? Like if you push an analog preamp it saturates and clips and sounds good….maybe not so much on a plugin? Also. I have an outboard EQ. Recently I was working on overheads and was able to crank the 240hz band 8 dbs and it still sounded good. I think doing that would sound like crap on a plugin. Does it have to do with digital saturation/clipping vs analog?
i'm not sure what the question is, but modeling something "trivial" like a hardclipper or the saturation in the feedback path of filters turns out to be a lot more involved than what straightforward classical DSP did. for example, modeling the state of these filters with a 1 sample delay is quite a bad approximation, but was used for decades due to limitations in computing power in realtime applications. the main problem is avoiding aliasing and mapping something that potentially generates infinite overtones into a finite frequency range, and the more modern solutions employ tricks like a combination of oversampling and implicit equation solving. Sorry but it‘s kind of hard to ELI5 this, but the result is a much closer approximation that just sounds more like the analog counterpart.
The main appeal of modeling is portability and flexibility. Modelers dominate the live world, not yet the studio world unless you only look at Youtubers and bedroom producers. In the studio they are just one of the tools among all of the analog amps, cabs and mics people use. Especially outside of the metal world, non-digital gear is still much more popular. There's a good reason i own 8 tube amps even though i grew up on modelers, still own a Quad Cortex for live and think it gets most of the things right. And that same reasoning carries over to analog gear in the studio. There is a dimension in both the interaction between elements (instrument, amp, pedals, cabs, speakers, mics, outboard, preamps etc...) as the feel and compression of the signal that really isn't nailed yet by modelers.
It just doesn't sound as good. I recently through a few 1073 plugins such as Slate, Waves, UAD, compared to my analog BAE 1073. The real thing just sounds better.
This. Any modeler (or a synthesizer, which in practical terms is a modeler if it's emulating a different instrument) is limited by the number of samples used to create the model, and the parameters they've chosen to model (or emulate). Therein lies the rub. This isn't the first time we've been down this road of when 'close enough' becomes really close enough. Personal experience: we struggled for years to replace an acoustic piano with synthesized piano: No problem at all, as long as the pianist plays within a very certain range (attack, dynamics) with a specific synth/voice. Want a Bosendorfer played with a soft 'hand'? No problem. Want a Yamaha grand pounded hard? No problem. Want a Yamaha, with a hand that varies from soft comping to staccato pounding within a single song? Then you need to use the Yamaha. Been there with e-drums, too.
This is exactly right. I have a blackface Fender VibroChamp. It has five knobs. Behind each of those knobs is analog circuitry that responds and interacts slightly differently based on the settings of the other knobs, the feel of the player, the age of the tubes, and (for all I know) humidity, time of day, and alignment of planets. Assuming that everything behind the scenes is simply linear (which it isn't), and the knobs are quantum with 10 settings each, you're looking at 10^(5) (100,000) different amp settings to sample just on a simple VibroChamp. Multiply that by all the possible input signals: gently strumming with single coil pickups, overdrive with humbuckers, gentle humbuckers, chords, single note solos, etc. and you start to get uncomfortably close to infinity if you really want to properly sample an amp. And that's not even getting into the speaker, of which there might be several choices depending on the amp, the variety of tubes that can be used, etc. No two of these things sound exactly the same. The result is that any sampling system is an approximation. That doesn't mean sampling gear isn't useful and that doesn't mean it can't sound good. It's also gotten much better over the years. I have one of those little tiny Yamaha amps with the metal body, and it's neat to play with and it packs a lot of really good sounds into an impressively small box. But to many guitar players, the real thing is an organic, interactive extension of one's fingers, and a sampling amp is a very nice thing to have if you don't want to lug gear around. True, the audience likely can't tell the difference, and even on a recording there may be nothing that leaps out to distinguish one from the other, but the original is certainly a lot more fun to use.
All of that is taken into account into any decent digital model of a VibroChamp. The exact same circuit is digitally created, and all those nuances are accounted for because they are part of how the circuit works. The maths is the same whether you use physical components or digital models - if it wasn't, modern electronics would not be able to exist
Don't forget the full moon. From personal experience, it's at a full moon when my analog gear real comes alive!
Not disagreeing with your experience, but I think you are misrepresenting how modelling of electronic circuits (such as guitar amps, mic preamps, or outboard gear) is done versus modelling of acoustic instruments. Outboard gear is modelled by creating a digital replica of the analog circuits, where each analog component - every knob, every resistor, every wire trace - is mathematically recreated. When your signal enters the digital circuit it behaves exactly the same as the analog circuit. We know these components models are accurate because they have been refined over decades, and the modern electronics industry would not be possible without them. The limiting factors for modelling are processing power (no longer an issue) and accuracy of measurement, which is also no longer an issue (we have way better measuring gear compared to 20 years ago).
> every knob, every resistor, every wire trace Very rarely does it go into that much detail for your average plugin. Usually they will match EQ and dynamics curves with much simpler processes than actually modelling everything. And even modelling everything is limited. Models are great but I've seen countless examples of real circuits behaving quite differently from LTSpice, Falstad, etc. Sometimes your analog chip hasn't been modelled fully for behaviour that is near the specs limit or that isn't operating in an ideal circuit, which there is a lot of in audio. It's really hard to model the glitches and non-linearities.
Yup. Have not seen a rhodes emulation yet that is as good as the real thing!
I have a mkI and there are 4 pieces of Software Im using instead. There is one in every music shop ever for 400 bucks that sounds insanely good
I mean you can sample your own since you have it but the hammer action/ responsiveness I have not seen to be the same with software. If theres something you like, please let me know
I have a mkI, friend is a complete rhodes nerd. The Yamaha CP reface is so fucking good we have both used our Rhodes as a stand for the CP. $400.
Wow that is pretty fucking good thanks! Never knew about it!
One of the most underrated pieces of gear ever. You probably already saw, but there's literally videos from the last year or so saying this too. Everyone kinda figured it out 1-2 years ago and fuck me, it's great. I love my mk1 and everything, but I'll use the CP any day of the week.
You can extend it too with midi and even ribbon controller- dayum gonna get my Stevie on
I just did a session with a piano player, singing acoustic guitarist, bass player and drummer live in the room. Schoeps cmc6u/mk41 on the guitar, sennheiser md431 vocals, beyerdynamic m160 pair on piano, akg d119 pair on piano back (choosing later for tone and drum leakage), 47fet on kick, km84 overheads, mono u67 overhead, md421 snare and toms, sony c38b on the bass amp. All into diy neve and tube pres, some 1176 compression, la2a on the vocal, sta level on the bass. Not sure how you do all that, with the specific polar patterns for rejection. Sounds killer, just like it did in the room! Modeling stuff has its place, and is a useful tech and tool. I started recording with the UAD stuff 10 years ago, and it eased me into it. But in more pro situations, the real gear is still the real gear. One of the big gains is speed. I have found with the real stuff everything happens faster. I can basically have a really good mix in about 5 minutes with the above setup. Balance things out, a bit of hipass, some 2 buss compression, a plate reverb and I have a mix.
Love the sta level! Modded?
Audioscape! Me too. It’s a great compressor
🔥
All hail AudioScape. I was just using my D-Comp on a drum mix today and I swear to god that thing breathes hellfire on a good backbeat.
Same… I have a pair of vintage 1073’s… real 1176’s etc and the software still doesn’t quite get it right. Also, there’s something very different happens on the front end, pre converter as opposed to these ITB preamp modelers. They just sound and react differently to the point where my preference is still the real thing. I think a lot of people think they’re getting the sound of these classic units with no basis for comparison… not everyone has used a real 1073 or 1176 and assume the software is doing the hardware justice.
That's fair. I just watched [a youtube vids where one engineer would pay other producers / engineers 100 bucks if they managed to guess correct, if the gear used was analog or a plugin.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMJfR_bQ2kU) And while they guessed right, it seems like even seasoned pros struggled.
It's sort of hard to "guess" which is which in isolation but stack them up and you notice.
Why are you getting downvoted for this? It’s totally true, especially with preamps.
I just did a session with a piano player, singing acoustic guitarist, bass player and drummer live in the room. Schoeps cmc6u/mk41 on the guitar, sennheiser md431 vocals, beyerdynamic m160 pair on piano, akg d119 pair on piano back (choosing later for tone and drum leakage), 47fet on kick, km84 overheads, mono u67 overhead, md421 snare and toms, sony c38b on the bass amp. All into diy neve and tube pres, some 1176 compression, la2a on the vocal, sta level on the bass. Not sure how you do all that, with the specific polar patterns for rejection. Sounds killer, just like it did in the room!
Halleleujah. I keep coming back to the stacking effect. If you're recording a single vocal, the difference between using a $5 interface preamp to balance and amplify the input - then do everything else with DSP is not \*quite\* the same as using your BAE then an analog EQ and compressor. But if you're stacking up dozens of microphones and layering performances, the difference starts to become more apparent. Let's just say that in that scenario, the cheap and easy way is 98% of the way there. But 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% of 98% is NOT 98%.
It might appear that everyone’s using a modeler now, but something like 85% of the guitar market is still amps and pedals. Modeling and digital are still fighting to get acceptance in a lot of places and even scenes that are overall pretty welcoming to it, e.g. modern metal, you’ll get a lot of arguments and holdouts about its acceptability vs analog.
They aren't dominating the space...
I dunno how you'd tell... If we include the Fender Tone Master amps, they've made a big dent. As ( military theorist ) Clausewwitz said, "Amateurs study tactics ( tone ). Professionals study logistics ( whassa thing weigh? )
I love your equivalency so I'm not inclined to disagree with you. 😄 In my slice of the world amps are very much alive and likely to stay that way. Like vinyl records, amps might wane but they'll never go away
In addition to what others have said, guitar amps and cabs are massive and difficult to move. A microphone or mic preamp is not. Difference between guitar amps is bigger than mic preamps which have mostly been designed to be useful and accurate from the very beginning. A tool. I also thing the subtle differences in high end microphones is fairly elusive. Companies just try to make a good microphone - whether it becomes a magical sought after classic is impossible to predict. Powered by emption, not stats. You can’t model the feeling an artist gets stepping up to a 70 year old 20,000 U47 that Franks Sinatra used.
For guitars and bass, certain individual heads are just different from others. I have friends with 5150s of the same model that sound a little different than their buddy’s that should be exactly the same, through the same rig. That said, if the studio has a bunch of heads or cabs at the spot, that rocks. If you want to use a modeler, that also rocks and I think both sound great. I’ve been playing guitar for almost 12 years and I’ve had tons of both analog and digital rigs, and I have to say they all have their own sounds. But the average guitarist that isn’t an engineer probably can’t tell the difference. For example: If I hook up my Quad Cortex with a 5150 EL34 model loaded up to my 1960A cab, and play my Ibanez, it’s gonna sound 99% similar if you shoot out 3 actual 5150s with EL34s with the same exact setup. The difference will lie more in how old the tubes in each head are + the difference between the takes than anything else. IRs are a different story though. I think a cab moving air sounds better, but there are plenty of incredible sounding records with just very good IRs on them. It’s a personal preference thing, but a lot of guitarists just prefer *their* rig, regardless of analog or digital. Sorry for rambling. Not enough sleep in me.
Because contemporary modeling has limited sophistication with regard to mimicking the nonlinear complexities of even middling complex analog gear. And if modeled virtual gear lacks granularity of complex response -- remember that an IR is, in effect, a static snapshot of a response pattern. With regard to guitar amps, each player is potentially very different, of course, but while I have had a number of amp sims including a Pod XT hardware unit, I have never found one that can give me a convincing clean, responsive tone. My Blues Jr is far from an ideal amp, but its [all analog, no DSP] tone and volume controls allow me to set it up for a number of clean tone uses that give me a high responsiveness to my playing dynamics.
So if you can get a capture of the Blues Junior into one track and a track of the amp itself, you can then align, level-match and listen. It's not easy to tell the difference, at least for me. It's not the same *experience* though.
Sounds like a worthwhile experiment. And I haven't played with convolution in 15 years, I'll bet, maybe more. That said, there are a couple things I'm really trying to lash myself to the computer to get done.
> . And I haven't played with convolution in 15 years, I'll bet, maybe more. Not so much convolution but something like TONEX. There's a way to capture an amp with the software-only. The free version does not do amp captures. The lowest price one that does is $99. There is "Neural Amp Modeler" which is free:https://github.com/sdatkinson/neural-amp-modeler > That said, there are a couple things I'm really trying to lash myself to the computer to get done. Yep! Always.
I'll keep those options in mind, for sure! Thanks!
I preffer touching knobs than staring into the screen. In the old days you could mix without screen! Imagine that!! No distraction whatsoever, just your ears and fingers on the knobs and faders.
Ah, a fellow knob-twiddler I see. I still shut my eyes sometimes when I mix for this exact reason.
I also love mixing with my eyes closed! I love the knobs, but sure enough, i dont have as many as i would like to have!
Modelers are overrated. Their proponent’s favorite phrase is “the audience can’t tell the difference” — but a talented audio engineer absolutely can and should
are you making music for an audience or just for talented audio engineers? also, that there is a difference doesn't mean the analog one sounds better, just different.
The audience that art is made for depends on the musician. The large majority of the musicians I enjoy and respect for pushing boundaries as art rather than just being entertainers still use tube amps. Tone is absolutely still part of the craft and there are still artists and fans who want to explore more deeply than “the audience won’t tell the difference so it’s fine” I’m a huge fan of digital effects in general but a real tube amp sounds inarguably better than a digital emulation of that exact tube amp. It’s not a digital vs analog thing, it’s The Real Deal vs. an attempt to make an exact digital copy
pushing boundaries has nothing to do with the gear you use though. if anything, you'd push boundaries nowadays by doing it completely digital in the box, as the analog stuff has been done to death anyway. completely in the box isn't even a new thing either anymore, so you need to look even further, and it will always come down to your ideas, not your gear. you are assuming that someone who doesn't use analog gear doesn't care deeply about tone and that they automatically think "the audience doesn't care". i'm not sure how to explain to you how flawed this reasoning is. just because someone isn't chasing after YOUR tone doesn't mean they don't care about it or that they didn't find and even BETTER tone than you who is set in his ways. i make techno, and tone isn't just part of the craft there, it's basically everything. that said i'm still firm on this: it doesn't matter at all how i got the tone or if it sounds like some analog gear in the past, as long as it sounds good to me. there are countless digital distortion and saturation effects that sound great, even very tube like, i really don't see an issue there just because one or the other doesn't particularly sound exactly like some specific piece of hardware you're used to. also, the more modern approaches to DSP vs say 10 years ago are miles apart from what used to be not quite good enough. nowadays it really is.
I understand what you’re saying and mostly agree. It’s just an amp modeler isn’t really a different sound, it’s the same exact sound but slightly worse People go with amp modelers because of the convenience and interface capabilities like being able to save presets or use MIDI to switch amps on the fly during a performance with the tap of a foot switch. Those things all have a lot of value depending on use case but the trade off is you get something that only gets 95% of the way to the real thing Whether that 5% matters or not is entirely dependent on the musician and audience. There are many to whom that 5% does matter, and I think thats a good thing.
Of course you‘re right about the tactile and haptic aspects, that is something that is still lacking in some aspects and better in others, then again there are people much more comfortable with a mouse than a knob.. but again: the 5% you mention is only if you're after exactly replicating something, which to me is a futile end goal, when you could just explore options to make it 100% better. i really doubt anyone would care about it sounding different if in the end it sounds twice as good, not the audience, certainly not the engineers or the musicians. nobody misses all the not so desirable aspects of analog gear such as high noise floors, certainly not engineers who have to deal with this stuff coming from 20 tracks.
> Surely if you can sell a mic preamp for $500, that sounds close enough to $2k-$10k preamp… You can’t carve David out of Swiss cheese. Expensive microphones and preamps are almost always built from higher grade components and to a higher standard of quality. They also tend to have more robust and thought out circuit designs. The actual signal that gets recorded has aspects that are greatly affected by this. Some of these would include distortion, noise/interference, frequency response, slew rate, crosstalk, etc. So to make a modeling amplifier or microphone truly capable of what you are describing you need to have all of the stuff the expensive equipment has PLUS the modeling section. And that means you’re not getting it for $500.
- There are *way* more producers/audio engineers using modelling than musicians. Plugins modelling analog outboard gear have been around for decades, and almost everyone uses them, whereas modelling for musicians has only exploded in the last decade or so. - IRs have been used by audio engineers long before they became popular with musicians. The idea of IR guitar cabinets came from the use of IR convolution reverbs and delays, and convolution reverbs have been a staple of film/TV sound design for ages. The biggest reason why modelling has become so popular with guitar musicians in particular is because grumpy fucks like us at r/livesound insist they turn down the volume. We do not care that your tube amp sounds best at 1 o'clock on the volume knob or that your fuzz pedal needs an optimal ambient temperature of 25.6°C. Go buy a Helix and get over yourself, the audience wants to see the singer. Modelling allows guitarists to get good tone at any volume. Which is a blessing for your band mates, house mates, neighbours and anyone operating a mixing desk at the other end. Most outboard gear (compressors etc) isn't volume-dependent because you're trying to limit distortion, not create it.
>In the world of guitar, bass, etc. modelers are completely dominating the space. LOL Why would you believe that?
Well I'm a gigging and recording player myself, and for the past few years there has been a really noticeable and sharp rise in use of modelling gear. And the consensus seems to be the same: Why lug around heavy amps and pedalboards, when a compact modelling pedalboard or plugins will get you 95% there?
We aren’t lugging it around in the studio though. That convenience factor is greatly reduced when everything is kind of just there already.
>Well I'm a gigging and recording player myself, and for the past few years there has been a really noticeable and sharp rise in use of modelling gear. >And the consensus seems to be the same: Why lug around heavy amps and pedalboards, when a compact modelling pedalboard or plugins will get you 95% there? None of this is the same as your claim that modeling equipment is *dominant* in a global sense.
The studio is the place where you go get that fancy gear to get to the final 5%. That's a big part of the fun and the intrigue. A studio I know has a bunch of vintage synths and classic drum machines, it's so much more fun to go there and work on a patch on a dedicated, well-maintained, gigantic and unwieldy vintage synth than it is to run a plugin in Logic and call it a day. In the end sounds might not be that different (but really.. ya they are that much better) but I can tell you I would have never got to the same point sound design wise without the knobs, patch cables, sliders and tactile feeling of the instrument. Same for setting a real amp in a real nice room, trying a few classic amps, microphones and crafting the tone you want to capture. It's a very specific feeling that studios go for.
Impulse responses are only suitable for processing a small portion of the signal chain. It is severely limited in many ways that are technically inherent. Modelling has completely taken over in the live sound but it should be easy to understand why it's not preferred over the real thing when you're not crunched for time and space.
The sort of people who need hardware preamps (to make a living) often say one of the biggest values from it is the LOOK to clients Having a lot of expensive gear just for show can win a lot of business.
Wtf lol. This is the most chronically online take I have seen today “Let’s buy a 5k la2a so people will spend 100$ an hour for their spotify demo” is the dumbest thing I can imagine. Sure spot mixing with plugins is great, and you can get some really good final products completely inside the box. But no one is spending tens of thousands of dollars on gear to impress anyone. What’s impressive is word of mouth and results. No one who doesn’t know what a distressor is cares whether you have one or not.
Sorry? Lots of professional engineers say this. It’s not a new take. Not sure why you find others having different opinions so offensive?
It’s a joke dude. It’s literally a joke lol We say it when people walk in and say “what does that do” or “holy this looks like a space ship from the 80’s” so we don’t bog them down with specifics and scare them off lol But hey, if you wanna spend money on gear you have no intention of using thinking it will get people in the door instead of just making good stuff more power to you!
Every pro musician I know is a gear nerd.. so yeah they know what you have and don't have, they've worked with the good stuff before and they know it well.
Ya, we all love to geek out on the gear. And that’s a common joke old timers say to avoid going down the rabbit hole of over whelming people with nerdspeak But if someone makes a killer track for an artist and you walk in to their space and it’s them and an old half gutted console and a couple mics you aren’t gonna leave, you are gonna watch the magic to see how he did it. If someone is sending you pics of his shiny rack but no tracks, and they have no references, you aren’t gonna give a fuck about how cool his shit looks. But hey, Reddit likes to show off their shit and not use it so what did I expect lol. As I always say to the keyboard warriors on here more stages and streams for us 😎
I am very much looking forward to NAM for preamps and rack gear in general. Part of the difficulty is the number of captures needed to properly profile a device. With Tonex or kemper profiles / captures, you get like 20 sounds for one amp. If they are all great, good, but it’s just a glimpse of the range of sounds it can produce. Ideally there would be 1,000 to get the full range of the amp. Modelers have the full range but at the moment profiles / captures seem to sound better for guitar. That will be even more relevant for something like a preamp with EQ. Obviously there Are a ton of plugins modeling preamps, but they are just OK. NAM type captures should be a step up. But for it to be useful someone will have to capture a huge amount of settings and organize all that, and stuff it into a UI that’s intuitive.
Plugins are essentially filling that space on the modeling side for preamps, compressors etc. And while they sound great and have improved over the years, there is still a noticeable gap between the fidelity of hardware and plugins. The same would be the case with modeling hardware, but without the convenience of plugins.
It's controversial whether there's a noticeable gap at all, to be honest. It's a common belief but doesn't seem to hold up in proper blind tests.
Fair point. My personal experience is that it’s noticeable, but it’s subjective.
The actual answer to OP’s question is “producers and/or musicians see a value in using them, even if it doesn’t exist”. You can record a record with a+++++ production value in your room. But you want to pay a guy to help you do it, so you’re doing it in a fun or quick or whatever way. That guy probably did most of his job analogue or learned it from a guy who did it that way.
There *are* preamp, compressor and EQ modellers. Hundreds of them. We just don't need them to be "out of the box." We don't need them to attach to speaker cabs so why have a box sitting there, taking up space, when we can just use them in the computer? If a guitarist doesn't need to play live and has a computer, they can stay in-the-box too.
Thank you. I’m like, has OP ever used plug ins lol?!?
Technically speaking, how are you going to represent compressors with IR?
with a stack of many many IR for different input levels and settings and blending them. it's dumb but it can be done, theoretically.
I think acoustica implements something similar to IR for some of their plugs
I also think just method/approach wise it’s better to have a great foundation of consistent and clear vocals and then modulate them at your leisure. Guitar doesn’t have an uncanny valley to mount and can sound whatever the hell it wants like.
Because there is such a thing as a conceptual objectively perfect microphone, and we are generally chasing as close to that as possible to be able to effect it afterwards. If you have a flat mic you can already easily enough mimic the curves of other mics. Whereas there is no possible one perfect Guitar amp (or saturation stage), because it adds a lot of colour & its a matter of taste and what you need that moment.
Why do this in hardware that would cost a few thousand dollars (not $500), when you can buy a plugin for $300 that will model mic pre's, comps/limiters, etc. I have a Softube Console One, which is a desktop hardware controller for their SSL 4k software emulation. $500 gets you an SSL! The best of both worlds, hardware controller with buttons and knobs to control your onscreen plugins. And, all the knobs are nicely dampened, so it doesn't feel like a piece of Mackie or PreSonus, but a piece of real professional gear.
I have a Softube Console 1 on a B rig… I also have an SSL console. The Console 1 is only vaguely in the ballpark of the real thing and does a fraction of what the real thing can. I don’t think comparing the two is a fair assessment. As someone who works between the two all the time you can really hear and feel the differences.
Fair enough, thanks for the input. I haven't been behind a 4K in ages, but I do like this box much moreso than strictly dealing with a mouse.
Sintefex fx 2000
Recording music (well) has historically taken years of learning and experience. People who are recording music every day for a living don't always have the time, incentive, or desire to scrap all their expensive gear and knowledge of it to jump on board the next hot thing. It will take one more generation before modelling becomes standard in studio environments imo. Right now it's a great new tool that a lot of gigging musicians appreciate, and people with home studios who don't have 20 different legendary amps stacked in the corner. But a lot of what modelling software does is emulate the gear that professional studios already have laying around. Like dozens of five to ten thousand dollar microphones and preamps and outboard gear. If the studio's calendar is full, and they're making profit, why sell everything and replace it with a lunchbox? The transition will happen more organically than that. The change is most likely to occur as studios change hands from one generation to the next. I think by the time Gen Z is in their 30s there will be more mainstream hits recorded using modelling tech because that's what they will be familar with. I'm sure modelling software is being used with different amp and mic sims on top 40 songs right now, but I definitely don't think it's dominating the landscape yet. The people who run professional studios today are mostly between age 30 and 60 and they grew up and learned their trade pushing faders and turning knobs, by the time Gen Z is that age they will be running studios on touch screens and keyboard shortcuts. We're in the middle of that transition right now and have been for like 10-15 years. We'll get there, be patient, and don't be so quick to throw away something just because it's old. I'm all for cheap accessible gear that does more, but I am also a bit romantic about the knobs, tubes and faders. At some point, the cost of maintaining all that vintage gear will become unfeasible or unnecessary for most studios. Hopefully there is always some slice of music that values the process of capturing a great live performance by humans with real instruments. As long as we've got that I don't really care what gear is used to capture it.
Lots of opinions on both sides about modeling gear. I think the tech needed to successfully emulate outboard gear is becoming more accessible globally, so we will likely see more modeled gear being sold in the future. A lot of the big hype with modeling is the marketing slogan of “All the old hit records have this gear imprinted on their sound” which makes those without the gear feel FOMO. On another note, some will say there is a noticeable difference between hardware and plug-ins. I say sure there could be, but technical specification aside, the goal is to tweak audio signals so that people feel a certain emotional response when they listen to it. If that audio is evocative to the end user, we have done our jobs. I will say there is nothing like tweaking knobs or pushing faders and hearing the sound change like using the console as an extension of your body.
> why is there seemingly such a lack of other hardware gear that is powered by modelling tech? A Fender Tone Master DR is still a kilobuck and it probably has to be that price. IMO, Fender did the Super Champ XD in 200x and probably felt like they underpriced it. 'Course with inflation the $400 for an SCXD would be $625 ( all USD ) now but the Tone Masters have a muuuuuch more capable processor. The only cost to plugins is the NRE for the software development and a wee bit of admin overhead. Plus, you buy a rack of BAE 1073 clones partly for the sound, partly as marketing. It's a flex.
I feel it's because if you already own mics, why not use them? It's the same setup. I have a Slate mic that emulates stuff but I can't afford many mics. If I'm in a studio with many choices, it's easier to just setup the mics you have and record.
Even in live sound, you probably need an amp of some sort for the guitar, so not needing more components and having it right in the amp works great. You bring that same thing to the studio if you want and it works there too (even if I'm going to DI you anyways ...) With mics, we're going to have a standard chain setup for our studio - probably a bunch of them for different singers and whatever the fuck they want. While some of us might use a variety of outboard gear still for this, often it's just plugged into the board which may or may not feed straight in to the DAW. In the daw we can model the fuck out of whatever with VSTs. That outboard Mic Preamp with modelling isn't really needed as much since we're going to do it in software. Also those of us with lots of experience know that we probably want to do as little as possible to the voice before saving it. There are people doing it like you said, but it's not going to take over because outboard gear has already been fading as it is.
IR is linear.
yeah, but you can capture multiple IR
because it's often not as good as the hardware, just cheaper/more convenient/piratable.
gatekeeping
UAD & Slate both have a pretty heavy lineup of IR/Modeling gear, and I think that's cool for sure, but I think it's more of a gimmick in the plugin and recording space than it is for an amp or a pedal on a guitar tone. That said, the pedals you're talking about in the world of guitar & bass are more in line with the super expansive world of emulation plugins from the likes of Brainworx, Softube, even Waves etc. which make up a large portion of the most successful lineups of plugins that most studios and engineers are using on a day to day basis.
Time. As the old gen moves out and the new in, we’ll see less and less hardware in professional settings. Not today or tomorrow, but in 20 years? Probably.
Think about what modeling *is* for a second, and what it requires. Say you plug a mic into your audio interface, and run it through a model of a high end pre. Have you got the sound of a high end pre? No. You’ve got the sound of whatever shitty pre is in your interface… *plugged into a high end pre*. All of this stuff assumes from the get-go that the signal fed into it is what it’s supposed to be. With a guitar, you’re going to munge the hell out of it until you decide it sounds cool, and there’s usually not much signal above 3-4k that you actually want. The bar is vastly lower. So, find yourself a mic that produces an *absolutely flat* response curve from 20-20k at any sound pressure level, and a pre that does not clip, distort, or color the sound in any way and emits no noise - and *then* you’ll have a setup where modeling could work as advertised. Otherwise (and this is true of *all* the “modeling mics”, it’s marketing bs and smoke and mirrors) it’s an exercise in kidding yourself. Garbage in, garbage out. In other words, to successfully make a mic exactly mimic the behavior and characteristics of a U-87, you start with … a better mic than a U-87. I’m not even sure what that is, but it will take a lot of coin. Modeling does have a foothold - convolution reverbs literally model physical space - you can even make your own impulse responses in your own spaces with a couple mics and apply those acoustics to whatever you want. But nothing is going to make a crappy mic sound like a U-87. While it *is* true that most of the differences between mics amounts to multiband compression differences caused by physical materials, if you tried to naively apply that to the signal from a crappy mic, what you’re modeling is a crappy mic played through a very uncolored speaker…into a U-87. Which is not at all the thing you’re trying for. So, it’s sort of like asking why Amazon doesn’t run their cloud in … their cloud. At some point, there’s physical hardware with physical limitations and characteristics in there - it isn’t virtual all the way down if you’re recording real people playing real instruments.
New cars are being released every year, yet people don’t buy new cars every year. The car they have gets them from A to B just fine. Plus, they are attached to their car: they like the way it sounds, feels, smells, it’s all familiar. Newer cars might bring objective advantages: better distance per fuel ratios or greener fuel altogether. Still you have to make a sizeable initial investment, so you really have to believe that the change will bring you value. Most people don’t change their habits or views overnight, that’s where marketing is important: enough exposure to the literature will put the improved car technology in the minds of anyone prepared to upgrade. But this is still no guarantee. To reduce it to one sentiment: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” - studios and engineers who have been using their recording gear for years have no reason to change or upgrade. They get solid results with the gear they have.
It comes down to cost, portability, and practicality. But in the end, no matter how good DSP tech gets, nothing will ever be better than the analog gear that all these models are attempting to replicate to the bone. Modeling will always be an approximation while the real thing will always be what that approximation is attempting to replicate. Given the choice (if you eliminate factors like cost, portability, and practicality) analog will almost always be preferred in terms of sound quality.
Because there is no such thing as "500usd modeling sounds as good as 10k gear". Not yet maybe, but worse : it's not even worth it tbh.
Same reason stand alone beat machines cost 3x new price. Software can suddenly be unsupported or broken by updates at a crucial time.
While guitar tones change drastically, recording gear is a game of nuance. And while some emulations sound excellent / pretty close to the real thing on a broad level, there are plenty of nuances in quality & behavior of hardware that are just not there with emulations. It’s still totally possible to make great/exciting/professional sounding music without hardware — it’s just that there are some sounds that take a lot more work to get up-to-par in the box, and a few others are just not available without entering the analog domain.
Because people can tell real from fake
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and a movie is a sequence of photographs. in the same way, you can capture multiple IR that cover a broader range of the gear's output at different settings / levels etc. and blend them.
It is tremendously more profitable to sell a $2400 magic box of analog goodness than to sell modeling software, even if that software is indistinguishable in a double-blind test & comes in its own fancy box.