Very useful tools. Nice clean signal chain. No bleed - even when recording with a group. I have a Pod XT bean and Amplitude. Lots of good sounds in each. Now - any one sound can be beat with the right amp/pedals/mic/room. But without a room full of amps and good facilities for isolation you will find a lot of uses for the modeling devices. When they are the best sound you can get in the most practical way go ahead and use them. Don't listen to the Luddites who object to them on principle.

'Luddites'

Thats my new word for the day,
thanks Bob!

Count me in the column of "for" amp sims.

A bad amp plus bad mic technique in a bad room = a horrible sound even with the best player.

A good player plus a Pod or plug-in in a bad room with a bad amp is still in luck.

Sure you may not get the *100%* from it, but you'll get perhaps the *85%* or *90%*

+1 on the "yea" column. I really like my J-Station for the flexibility and the fact that I don't have a great amp or room. So much that I had to get another one from ebay when my original one finally died (so sad that you can't get them new anymore).
I've not really done anything with software plugins. One of their advantages is you can change the settings after the track is already recorded. With the j-station, you can also record a "dry" signal via the S/PDIF so you could similarly change settings after the fact (sort of like digital re-amping). I'm not a pod user, so I don't know if they have that feature, too.

well, even if i must admit that those things are really practical, i really think that they make you sound exactly like your neighbour... And that's the problem with today's recordings... Everything seems to sounds the same, and that's because of those thing.

I've been using a POD for some time, but i haven't touched it since i discovered "real amps"...

There's nothing like feeling the mass of air goin through your guts....

I'm not a "fan" of them but do use them regularly. My fav of them is Guitar Rig. For me it's had the most easily accessible/configurable sounds. Amplitube is a close second...but I generally use it mostly for effects. NOTE: I've only got the original versions of these plugs. I don't use them enough to fork out the dough to upgrade them.

I've never used a POD but I've seen a few very good cover bands that have them. These guys really knew how to get into that thing and bleed every ounce of sound out of them. They can go from Hendrix to Tool to Eric Clapton with a click of a foot switch and each guitar sound is great...live.

Like mwacoustic, I too have a J-Station which is a bit old at this point but it's darn easy to use and I can get some pretty good sounds out of it. It's my go-to box for jamming and with the included software you can get pretty deep into creating sounds with it. That said, I don't really like how it sounds recorded...although I've never recorded it through a cab. To me it sounds a bit too grainy/digital.

If you need a sound that you don't want to have to spend $2000 to get, spending a couple hundred bucks on one of these is a great alternative.

Just as a side note, I've been recording practice sessions of a country/blues band with live amps - a Blues Jr. and a Matchless Hurricane. The Matchless started to hum a bit last night, and it looks like it's due for a retube. Low maintenance is another point for the digital gear. (The fact that digital gear tends to fail catastrophically when it goes is a point against.)

There's nothing like feeling the mass of air goin through your guts....

I agree with this, but I think it's important not to let it influence your judgment if it isn't relevant to the application. If you are recording or sending a live signal through the PA none of the paying customers get to feel the moving air of the amp. The key question is how to send them the best signal with the resources available to you.

I've heard good results with sims. In fact, I've raved about guitar tones that I later found out were sim'd. Tricky.

I've personally never been able to get one to sing, though.

And there's something infinitely more seductive about a real unit with real knobs. I've wanted to try something like [[url=http://[/URL]="http://www.mojopie…"]this[/]="http://www.mojopie…"]this[/] for a while for demo'ing songs, if nothing else.

take a look at this:
(Dead Link Removed)#332537

I have a KORG D16 that I got in 2000 and the >only< reason I don't give it away is because of the digital modeling abilities.

I know, it's not a plugin, but you do have to plugin!

I use Guitar Rig & my own amp modeler plugins :)

I'm for them, especially when I need an 11th hour guitar track on a project and all that's available is me, my wife's Squire Strat and Fender Frontman 25 amp, LOL. I have a few different ones, the one I like best is a freebie from Voxengo, I have actually been able to emulate tube resonance with it. Makes a lovely howling noise. 8)

I have many of these plug-ins and I think they are fantastic....

However.....

There is one area where they fail to produce....
"Playing into the feedback".

I have recorded many great guitarists whose technique involves at least some degree of playing into the feedback generated by playing close to their amp.

This is nearly impossible with a plug-in (or at least not practical), or for that matter when playing in the control room and sending their guitar signal out into the studio to real amps (which I used to think was so clever).

I have the KORG D32XD - love it's amp sims. I also have the Amplitube, Waves, and more.. I truly love them all. They really do perform as stated if you understand guitar amplification.

There is one area where they fail to produce....
"Playing into the feedback".

not anymore. there's a new plugin called "acoustic feedback" by softube which emulates a natural feedback. didn't try it, but the samples on their website sound quite impressive.

i like amp sims. i have the line6 toneport gx with the gearbox software. sounds good, though not as good as amplitube. but the toneport costs only 70€ compared to over 300 for amplitube...

ouzo77 wrote:

There is one area where they fail to produce....
"Playing into the feedback".

not anymore. there's a new plugin called "acoustic feedback" by softube which emulates a natural feedback. didn't try it, but the samples on their website sound quite impressive.

OK....I must look into that.
I don't really see how it could work because the act of leaning into or away from your guitar amp to produce different amounts of feedback tone on a moment by moment basis would still seem to require the guitarist to lean into or away from some speaker enclosure.

LATER: Ok...I see.. you have to turn a knob to control the feedback amount after the fact.
A useful tool for an engineer, but there's no way these guitarists who play that way would give up on it and try to fiddle some knob after they played the track. Impossible really because the guitarist would have to guess how what they are playing would respond to slight changes in feedback.

I'm a total gear snob when it comes to my guitar rig: Soldano SLO100, Soldano Racks, Bogner Fish pre, VHT power amps, etc.

That said, the some of those amp plug-ins don't sound half bad. They don't have the same picking dynamics as a high-end tube amp, but they sound better than a cheap solid state amp any day of the week. Not to mention when I'm doing some quick writing/recording on the fly, it's whole lot easier to just use a the amp plug-in for the rough draft than it is to set up a real amp set up.