Showdown at the Clubhouse | Amp Software Vs. Amps

Feb 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Mike Levine

           
 

AMP-MODELING SOFTWARE AND VINTAGE AMPS GO HEAD-TO-HEAD

BONUS MATERIAL
Take the Listening Test

How to Do It?

I wanted to include all the modelers on the market that emulate specific vintage amps. Because I needed to be able to switch seamlessly between modelers during the listening tests, and in an attempt to keep some limits on the number of products involved, I decided to stick with software modelers only. That ruled out hardware-based modelers. Considering how vital its PODs are to the modeling field, I felt particularly bad about omitting Line 6. I found out through the company that it was on the verge of releasing POD Farm, a software-only modeler, but it wouldn't be available in time for our testing.

The products I ended up selecting were Digidesign Eleven, IK Multimedia AmpliTube 2 and AmpliTube Jimi Hendrix, Line 6 Amp Farm 3.0, Native Instruments Guitar Rig 3, Peavey ReValver MK III, and Waves GTR3.

I initially considered having a guitarist in the studio to play through the amps and modelers live, but I ultimately chose to record DI examples in advance. Once at the studio, I could instead send these files through the amps using a reamping device and through the modelers within Pro Tools.

Some people will say that using a prerecorded track through a reamper takes away from the natural interaction between guitar and amp live in a room and the loading of the pickups that occurs. That is a valid point for certain types of guitar parts, but the truth of the matter is that plenty of tracks get recorded with the guitarist either in a different room from his or her amp or recorded through a DI to be reamped later. I also felt that using the prerecorded DI track would assure that the performance would be identical when it was pumped through the amp and the modelers. This would level the playing field and remove the possibility that a better performance on a particular pass would influence the panelists as to what sounded best.

I contacted all the software manufacturers to request copies of the software to use for the testing. I was a little concerned that they might balk at being part of a test that could possibly indicate that their products weren't able to duplicate the sound of vintage amps convincingly. However, that was not the case at all. My contacts at the various companies were all quite agreeable to the idea and seemed confident about how their products would fare in the testing.

Methods and Parameters

After doing some research on various product-testing methodologies, I decided that a single, very basic blind test would be the most appropriate — that is, a blind comparison of the same example played through the amp and the modelers, with the panelists voting on which they thought was the real amp. In addition, I would ask the panelists to say which of all the sounds was their favorite for each example.

FIG. 2: The real things (from left to right): the 1964 Fender Twin Reverb, the 1980 Marshall JCM 800 with 4 5 12 cabinet, and the 1963 Vox AC30 Top Boost.

Particularly tricky was trying to find common amps between the modelers and what was in the Clubhouse's collection. Although the general impression is that all the modeling software emulates the same basic group of vintage amps, it's more complicated than that. The Clubhouse had a couple of amps that most of the modelers did: a Vox AC30 Top Boost and a Marshall JCM 800. The studio had a 1963 version of the AC30 and a 1980 version of the JCM 800, so we were in business with those two.

Finding common Fender models, however, was more complicated. The studio had a '69 Bassman, but most of the software packages emulate the '59 Bassman. The circuitry between the '59 and '69 amps is quite different, so I had to rule out using a Bassman. Meanwhile, some of the modelers emulated Deluxe Reverbs, and some Super Reverbs, but the most commonly modeled Fender amp (other than the Bassman) was a Blackface Fender Twin Reverb. Luckily, the studio had such an amp, circa 1964, so that became the third amp in the testing (see Fig. 2).

Get with the Programming

Because there were only three amps that had enough matches among the modelers, I decided to do two tests for each amp, using different settings on the amps and modelers for each test. I recorded a short example through a DI that was stylistically appropriate for the particular amp. I used my ESP 400 Series Strat (with Lace Sensor pickups) for most of the examples, but I also borrowed a Les Paul from a friend for a couple of them.

Once the DI recording was done, I tweaked the software models of those amps in my studio, making the basic parameters (such as the amount of gain and the tone settings) of the various modelers' sounds as similar as possible. The one x factor was that I wouldn't have access to the real amps until the day of the testing. Then, I'd have to quickly adjust them so their settings would be similar to those I'd used on the modelers.

As the date of the session got closer, I realized that instead of trying to run the DI tracks through the modelers in real time at the studio, I could bounce the tracks through the modelers in advance, and just bring those files with me to the Clubhouse. This would make it easier for the studio to run the examples back-to-back for the panelists. Because amp modelers tend to be CPU intensive, having four or five of them open simultaneously would have been a major strain on the studio's Mac Pro and Pro Tools HD system. An additional advantage of using the prerecorded examples was that I could include Peavey ReValver, which, at the time of the testing, didn't have an RTAS version and therefore couldn't be run live in Pro Tools without using a VST-to-RTAS wrapper. (Peavey plans to have released an RTAS version of ReValver by the time you read this.)