Opinion: The axeman cometh

Posted on 30 Nov 2009 at 17:14

 

Gallery

The upshot of the test, using five completely different amps, was that the expert listeners were able to pick out the real amp from the simulations only 38 per cent of the time. With distorted sounds, that fell to just 25 per cent. That's only a little better than random guessing. Perhaps more significantly, even when they could discern the real amp, it was usually not the one they thought sounded best!

Rip rig & panic

This result was enough for me to take another look. I've been recording a few tunes using Cakewalk Sonar 8, which was a present from Mrs R. It came bundled with Native Instruments Guitar Rig, which was one of the programs tested by Electronic Musician. I had mistakenly dismissed it as rubbish and never bothered to even install it.

One of the problems you get when recording any instrument, but especially a guitar, is that if you don't like the way the sound works when mixed with the other elements, you're stuck with it. Or you record it all over again using a different sound created with a different guitar/amp/effects box. This is tedious to say the least.

A way round this is to do what the professionals call 're-amping'. You play the guitar straight into the recorder, so there's no tonality imparted by the amplifier at all. You then take that signal and route it out through a real amp, and mix the result. Re-amping using Guitar Rig (or any of the other programs in the Electronic Musician test) is simple. The only problem is that the time you save is spent messing about trying out totally different sounds just because you can.

I installed Guitar Rig on my £400 Toshiba laptop, which was linked to a Lexicon Alpha USB interface I bought for £36 off eBay (after my expensive Edirol one had blown up). So now my tiny office is home to three Marshall stacks, two different Vox models (as used by the hirsute Brian May), a HiWatt (as used by Pete Townshend) and many more. And the results sounded brilliant. To illustrate the process and quality of the amp simulators, you can download some sample MP3 files from www.underdev.co.uk/shopper264.html.

Code to joy

When I installed Guitar Rig, I had a choice of 10 different amplifiers and even more speaker cabinets, plus 20 or so vintage effects simulations. The default installation set up the software in demo mode, which meant it worked for 30 minutes then stopped. I couldn't save any changes, so every restart meant I had to redo all the tonal tweaks.

The simple answer was to register the software using the code provided, which I did. This was followed by a system restart, whereupon my choice of amps went from 10 down to a miserable two, one of which was good only for heavily distorted noises that would be great if I was backing Ozzy Osbourne, but I'm not. Bloody software companies!

Author: David Robinson