Need amp/effects pedals for blues, blues rock, classic rock

B

boss281

New member
So far I've been more satisfied with mic'ing my tube amps and personal pedal collection than any guitar plug in I've downloaded (only tried demos so far). I use a Peavey Classic 30 with hotter tubes and speaker, Peavey ValveKing, Vox AC15 and Fender Pro Junior III. Effects are usually OD, Distortion, Reverb, Delay and Wah. I sometimes throw in a noise gate as well.

Problem is I'm most creative at 6am and 11pm, and I don't want to disturb the household. I'd like to use my laptop/audio interface setup in the den with headphones to noodle, experiment and draft, and my studio setup for mic'ing live once I've figured out what I want to record.

Waves Audio products, at least the demo stuff, kept becoming unactivated and generating errors. Guitar Rig 5 and Amplitube are pretty good with a large selection, but a bit pricey (which I'll eat IF I have to). I just need a few good tube amps that can be pushed either with a lead channel or effects or both.

Thoughts? Sorry, I'm new to recording and a bit overwhelmed by everything. I just need to create short demos for use while building a band, and for sitting in with bands that need a temp guitarist.

Thanks.

John
 
PodFarm2 is pretty good. The standard version is relatively cheap but includes a decent selection of amps, canes, and effects, and if you find you want more down the road, the extra packs are reasonably priced, too.

There are, however, quite a few free/share/donationware plugs out there, and some of them get pretty good reviews. I'm not real familiar with any of them because I've had PodFarm so didn't really need to go looking, but if you google around, I bet you'd find something you can work with.
 
Ya, I can probably work with about anything, if I know what I want. My DAW gives me a lite Vandal and I got some old Shred releases, some Aradaz stuff. For silent, though, I can just fire up the amps with headphone jacks and the Tonelab ST

I'm thinking the poster just needs a tweed bassman with four alnico 10-inch and some pedals : )
 
I downloaded the amplitube custom shop application (which comes with a couple of minimal free amps/stomps) and was pretty impressed with just that, so I am going to "try before buy" on a few things and just purchase what works for me. Guitar Rig 5 demo is ok, but I prefer the sims that come in the $299 Pro package. Might do that another day... Thanks for the input.

Garww, just saw a used Bassman at the local shop Saturday, and I was REAL tempted...
 
I meanz virtual bassman hahahaha Ya, my eyes might light-up too. I'd probably at least look at the speakers. All thazt good stuff is out of my realm. now days. I was looking at used vk 112 online guitar center but I don't even have room for that
 
Well, I ditched both Guitar Rig 5 and Amplitube, I just can't get a decent tone on anything with the software emulations. Plus, again, Reaper seems more stable and drops out less if I don't have the effects loaded. So i'm back to mic'ing amps until my Boss ME-80 arrives.

Seriously, there isn't a good low cost collection of tube amps?????
 
boss281 said:
Well, I ditched both Guitar Rig 5 and Amplitube, I just can't get a decent tone on anything with the software emulations. Plus, again, Reaper seems more stable and drops out less if I don't have the effects loaded. So i'm back to mic'ing amps until my Boss ME-80 arrives.
Click to expand...

Baby and bathwater just headed out the door? The issue is likely something in your PC, as both those products work fine for tens of thousands of home recorders. Dropouts are commonly triggered/revealed by the software being used, but rarely *because* of the software.

I would have also recommended Amplitube, as I've personally used many of their rock and blues presets. The sub-$200 package comes with everything I need from super clean to gritty. I doubt you're that particular.

There's just so much control with Amplitube I have to doubt the earnestness of anyone who tries it and can't find acceptable tones for noodling. Pedals, amps, stacks/speakers, mic position/room effects, rack mounted effects...
 
Pinky said:
Baby and bathwater just headed out the door? The issue is likely something in your PC, as both those products work fine for tens of thousands of home recorders. Dropouts are commonly triggered/revealed by the software being used, but rarely *because* of the software.

I would have also recommended Amplitube, as I've personally used many of their rock and blues presets. The sub-$200 package comes with everything I need from super clean to gritty. I doubt you're that particular.

There's just so much control with Amplitube I have to doubt the earnestness of anyone who tries it and can't find acceptable tones for noodling. Pedals, amps, stacks/speakers, mic position/room effects, rack mounted effects...
Click to expand...

Lol, touche. You're right, I think it's my combination of HW/SW and the DAW's configuration that is getting in the way. I deleted all the plug-ins I was testing (I can always reinstall later), uninstalled Reaper, then cleaned up the system the best I could, and reinstalled Reaper about 1am last night. Reaper IS running much more smoothly and I've bookmarked several informational pages on tuning for latency and dropouts. Then I can add things in one at a time and adjust accordingly--the sheer number of Amplitube plug-ins is encouraging. That said, after the reinstall, I used some of the Reaper included plug-ins, and I was up in the wee hours happily recording with headphones, the missus none the wiser.

Now with that all said, my recording laptop is a 6MB Windows 7 machine (Dell XPS product line) that just may have way too much clutter to operate smoothly when pushed a bit, but I'm seeing reports of some mixed results on new Windows 10 machines as well. I'm likely going to get another new laptop for either just recording, or move my documents to the new machine and do a fresh Win 7 install on the older one to see if a clean OS helps the cause. I'll get there.

Either way, I can assure you that your "doubt [about] the earnestness of anyone who tries it and can't find acceptable tones for noodling" is unfounded, that despite being a newb but a few weeks into this, I have put in a lot of time trying to get things to work smoothly, and given the substandard results, need to find root cause, fix the problem, and get back into it.

I was about to ask what your HW setup looked like, but checked out your webpage and see you do this professionally, so I'm assuming it's top end gear all the way. If you have thoughts on a Windows machine I'm all ears but I see several resources that apparently describe what to consider. I can always call the Reaper folks up as well. I just like figuring things out if I can first...

Thanks for chiming in.
 
I mentioned the amp sim pedals before. Might be worth considering, especially if the plug-ins are slowing down your computer. If you can't get decent low-latency with the plugs AND you need to play while others are sleeping, the pedals are great. However, you gotta take the time to dial in a decent tone as the presets on any of them pretty much suck.

Reaper dropping out when you have the plugs running means the computer may not be up for the task. To use an amp sim plug, you want low latency for near realtime feel. But low latency puts a strain on the computer; plus the ASIO driver may not be able to support low latency. Although I would think the presonus stuff is pretty good stuff. Pedals eliminate all that fuss. Get the tone you want going into the interface and use direct monitor. Just like you would micing a real amp. But I think you understand all this already and I'm just babbling. :D

There might be options for an attenuator that you use with your amp in place of the speaker. I don't know anything about them other than they exist.
 
Ya, I've got two cheap Weber kits that give me a line signal. Most all my amps are small and can go through its 15-watt capacity circuit. So, I could use the ToneLab ST as a pedal into my Cub 10 and snag a line fron the Weber box. The ToneLab and the Vip-1 over USB work great right into the track, though. I just need an old Communication Breakdown crunch, however
 
There are a few different folks who have built amp simulators as JS plugins for Reaper, including myself. If you check the Stash, you might find something you like. I also uploaded sets of presets for ReaEQ that simulate the frequency response of a number of the amps and cabs that I use most often in PodFarm. Most of the time, one instance of ReaEQ with an amp curve into a simple saturation curve and a ReaEQ "cab sim" after works surprisingly well and uses almost no CPU. Even pretty complex filter curves in ReaEQ use almost no resources. There are a couple different JS saturators built in which are pretty efficient. I use one I built. If you really need super-efficient, though, you could use ReaComp set to infinite ratio with all time constants at 0. Mess with the threshold and/or gain going into it for more or less distortion, and maybe mess with the knee parameter to see if it helps.

A lot of the commercial amp sims are pretty heavy on the processor. Not as bad as some things, but it will add up. I like PodFarm because you can load just an amp or just a pedal instead of the whole bloated pedal, amp, post FX, routing and mixing and automation mess that you get from most of them. But even that uses more than I really like for my live rig, so I use the more efficient "hack" with ReaEQs and saturators for live playing and sometimes swap that out for PodFarm when I get to mixing. The difference in actual sound and feel is minimal, but the EQ curves are kind of like snapshots of the amps with specific settings, and if it needs to be adjusted, it's not quite as easy as turning the knob on the amp itself.
 
boss281 said:
I downloaded the amplitube custom shop application (which comes with a couple of minimal free amps/stomps) and was pretty impressed with just that, so I am going to "try before buy" on a few things and just purchase what works for me. Guitar Rig 5 demo is ok, but I prefer the sims that come in the $299 Pro package. Might do that another day... Thanks for the input.

Garww, just saw a used Bassman at the local shop Saturday, and I was REAL tempted...
Click to expand...

Just in case that Bassman is still there;
The Greatest Guitar Amp of all time - Original Fender 1959 Bassman - YouTube
 
Well, the bad part of being a newb is not only the general learning curve, but choosing an approach (mic'd amp, line out from amp, or plug-ins). Again, for my "quiet" recording zone, it's mostly noodle or drafting parts, and I'll record from mic'd amps in my new studio upstairs for the real deal. I just need decent sounding plug ins, and I've been frustrated by not only the technical troubles of the DAW which I'm troubleshooting (drop outs, odd tone shifting on some tracks until I reboot to clean up memory), but also what appears to be lousy sound quality coming out of what I'm being told are "high quality" plug ins (I'm using Sony MDR-7506 headphones, and Mackie CR Series CR3 - 3" Creative Reference Multimedia Monitors for the noodle laptop. Since my mic'd amp sounds are great, I think it's something that my inexperience is overlooking. As someone says above, hundreds if not thousands of successful sound productions have come from these plug ins, so it has to be something on my side. As always, I appreciate the careful explanations and constructive feedback on this forum. It's refreshing from some of the internet vitriol elsewhere...
 
boss281 said:
I was about to ask what your HW setup looked like, but checked out your webpage and see you do this professionally, so I'm assuming it's top end gear all the way. If you have thoughts on a Windows machine I'm all ears but I see several resources that apparently describe what to consider. I can always call the Reaper folks up as well. I just like figuring things out if I can first...
Click to expand...

There's definitely no functional need to move to Windows 10 (yet). If you can't get it working smoothly in Windows 7, it's unlikely 10 will yield better results.

I'm a network engineer/project manager by trade. I'm flattered my self made website and samples impressed you enough to think I do this 'professionally'. Far from it. I'm a home recorder that's been crawling up the ladder, sometimes with slips along the way. I did recently 'graduate' and turned down some significant mixing work for the first time, I just couldn't see putting my name to the music.

Quality gear can be had for a relatively meager sum of money now. I've chosen exactly what I need and nothing more/less. Looking at my setup it wouldn't be at all impressive, and yet I turn out good mixes and feel I don't have anything holding me back at the moment.

As far as computing power, my i7 4770 is getting old but still crunches numbers quite well (even compared to newer mid level i5 and i7 solutions, when comparing benchmarks). Your XPS might be fine, a fresh Win7 install is not a bad idea and if not already using one, getting a SSD drive breathes significant new life into aging computers. You'll want at least 4GB of system memory, but you can easily load that up with a few virtual instruments so 8GB seems to be the new home recording minimum.
 
Memory is always a good investment to a point. The 8 gigs Pinky recommended would be about right. (If you ever decide to do video, you'll want more). The SSD is also a great recommendation.

For the quality of the mix, the room you're mixing in has a lot to do with that. Well, the room and the speakers. (Hint: Those 3" speakers aren't helping.)

Yup, that damned learning curve. I think I'm past the steep part but still climbing upwards.
 
.."hundreds if not thousands of successful sound productions have come from these plug ins"

I've never thought that. Not saying it sucks as a utility, or, anything, but I think one is more likely to hear the BIG hardware modelers. Ya, it is on the radio, for sure : )

Now, heard that Revalver is a pig, also. But, the $150 Intel q6600 core 2 QUAD refurb box I bought for the Music Room seems to be running it OK. My jump to 64 Win 7 with 2gb. hahah
 
ashcat_lt said:
There are a few different folks who have built amp simulators as JS plugins for Reaper, including myself. If you check the Stash, you might find something you like. I also uploaded sets of presets for ReaEQ that simulate the frequency response of a number of the amps and cabs that I use most often in PodFarm. Most of the time, one instance of ReaEQ with an amp curve into a simple saturation curve and a ReaEQ "cab sim" after works surprisingly well and uses almost no CPU. Even pretty complex filter curves in ReaEQ use almost no resources. There are a couple different JS saturators built in which are pretty efficient. I use one I built. If you really need super-efficient, though, you could use ReaComp set to infinite ratio with all time constants at 0. Mess with the threshold and/or gain going into it for more or less distortion, and maybe mess with the knee parameter to see if it helps.

A lot of the commercial amp sims are pretty heavy on the processor. Not as bad as some things, but it will add up. I like PodFarm because you can load just an amp or just a pedal instead of the whole bloated pedal, amp, post FX, routing and mixing and automation mess that you get from most of them. But even that uses more than I really like for my live rig, so I use the more efficient "hack" with ReaEQs and saturators for live playing and sometimes swap that out for PodFarm when I get to mixing. The difference in actual sound and feel is minimal, but the EQ curves are kind of like snapshots of the amps with specific settings, and if it needs to be adjusted, it's not quite as easy as turning the knob on the amp itself.
Click to expand...

Wow, you're prolific, and thanks for the tip on the Stash, I completely overlooked it!
 
"For the quality of the mix, the room you're mixing in has a lot to do with that. Well, the room and the speakers. (Hint: Those 3" speakers aren't helping" .)

He is using the computer SIM to stay quiet. Up late, probably the Sonys
 
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