T
thebigredhotdog
Banned
wanga danga ling long.
that traviusinoklahoma kid managed to finagle a few usable sounds out of some amp sims, but that doesn't change the big picture, which is: amp sims suck dirty ass. ask him, and i'm sure he will agree.
so now that we all agree about amps sims being teh suck, what to do? don't spend your money on something that sucks, that's what. why you gonna do that? if you have extra money to throw away, buy me a pepsi and a pack of smokes. wah? you got more to spend? don't you have an old lady?
ok, some of you are hatin on me now either because i'm the bigredhotdog or because you don't want to believe that amp sims suck. i can feel it. go cry to your old lady, then buy me a pepsi and a pack of smokes. if you can just chill out with the hatin for a minute, i'll explain why amp sims tongue on dog nards. really, i've spent many a sleepless night thinking about crap like this.
first question: why do you play music? maybe you think it's cool, you thought it would get you chicks (how did that work out?), or MAYBE it's because music makes you feel something. see where i'm going with this? playing music makes you feel something. if it doesn't then you're probably a sociopath and related to george bush or you're jewish. ok, most of you feel something when you play music. there's something in the sound vibrations that works like feedback. you pick up your guitar, plug it in, and try to play something that sounds good to your ears. if your playing and sound are jiving with how you feel at the moment, you get a sort of positive response from yourself. if something is off, you will very likely get a negative response from yourself. you might even be talking to yourself internally, saying things like "i'm a smoove mofo. hendrix wishes he...." or "that sucks, i suck, something or somebody in this room sucks". if the responses are positive in some way, you feel motivated, inspired, you want to play more. if you're getting the negative heebie jeebies, you might stop playing for the time being, play something else, or start twisting knobs. now everything isn't black and white. a positive response could influence you in other ways, like changing the chord progression or doing something different with your technique. same goes if you get a negative response. you might try to work your way around a shit sound or bad technique by playing something different, in an attempt to get a positive response from yourself. see how that feedback thing works?
you play > sound comes out > you're influenced by your sound > you make adjustments > you play.....
i know this might sound like some new age hippy bullshit, but keep your mind open. besides, you're the one banging on a plank of wood that moves air molecules, hoping that it will invoke emotions in the people who hear it. who's crazy now suckah? so we know that the sound coming out of our guitar amp (or amp sim) has an influence on our playing. now let's look a little closer at the above mentioned scenarios and how they can turn:
good tone 1 - makes you feel good, you pat yourself on the back, you go straight from point a to point b. nothing to do with the tone is in your way. you like these positive vibes and you want more of it. no one can touch your mean riffage.
bad tone 1 - negative creeps are complaining in your head, you twist knobs, try playing something else. something sucks. is it your playing? maybe the progression is no good? do you need a pedal? chatter, chatter, long road from point a to point b. you take a break, drink a few beers, take a nap, and wake up with a fat bitchy wife and three kids. damnit!
good tone 2 - all of good tone 1 + you're playing so much that you start stretching out a bit for some variety, you're stumbling onto new things. you're a genius and no one can touch your riffage. you're the man and hendrix wishes...
bad tone 2 - you know what's going on, the sound sucks. funky resonances, weird phasing hiding in the background, unpleasant distortions. you already spent your money on magic boxes and chinese microphones. you're stuck here for now, but you're desperate. if you don't pound the wood, people won't feel your molecules.
you start changing things, anything, everything, stringing weird things together, playing different, points a and b have vanished into the mist. now it's just you against this molecule moving machine. you're determined to win. you take a few pills, have a nap, and when you wake up you've found yourself gone weird, playing weird music, craving weird music. you're the man, klaus naomi can't touch this paint sniffing madness.
good tone 3 - your tone is great, you went straight to point b, you've stretched out a bit, you wrote some songs that sound just like your favorite bands. you feel like you've arrived. you eventually get bored with guitar and start hanging out at an amp forum, talking about oil and paper capacitors, output transformer metals, and wood species.
bad tone 3 - you've accepted that your sound sucks and you've tweaked it until it's good enough. it really is a decent enough sound for this type of music. it will do, sort of generic, but yea, it will do. you don't know it yet, but you're bound for either bad tone 1 or 2.
ok, do you see the kinds of things that your guitar tone can do to you? back to the question. why do amp sims suck? let's look at what an amp sim is doing. it's trying to imitate the physics of sound to the degree of fooling not only the listeners of the final recording, but the player as well. that's a pretty HUGE challenge. what is there to an amp's sound? there's the amp itself, which is made up of electronic components like capacitors, resistors, transformers, and tubes. then there's the speakers, cabinet, room, and microphones. now i don't know about you, but i've never heard a convincing speaker simulation by itself, which is probably the least complex piece of the entire chain, much less a convincing amp sim. are there any bells going off here for you? i mean, give me a break! if not even the simplest piece of the signal chain can be mimicked to a very convincing degree, how can the entire chain be simulated? keep this in mind when you're reading the marketing bologne on some of these amp sims. now i don't doubt that these software guys are trying very had to do what they claim to already be doing, but it's not there, not even close. i'm not saying that some of the sims can't pass for a real amp in a recording. some of them do, and i don't doubt that amp sims are beginning to influence amp designers in some ways. now, if some of these sims can pass the listening test, where do they fall short?
1. well how does an amp sim make you feel while playing through it? if you've ever plugged into a well put together amp, you know what it can feel like. i'm not just talking about the final recorded tone. consider things like the pressures that the amp is creating in the room, sag of a power transformer, immediacy of picking attack, controlled response of the tubes and speakers, feedback, moving your head and body to different angles of the amp. will an amp sim make you feel and play the same way? you know the answer. quit kidding yourself.
2. the sound. the illusion of amp sims progressively falls apart as the gain is decreased. when they get to medium gain to clean, that di sound is VERY apparent in the sound. that di sound can be masked to some degree, as travisinoklahoma demonstrated using a string of free plugins. the illusion of amp sims progressively falls apart as the effects are widdled away. try this. play your guitar dry through your di. do you hear that very sterile, clean, kind of hard sound? now fire up your most convincing amp sim patch and start turning off the effects one by one. then begin decreasing the gain while bumping up the volume to keep the same overall sound level. same goes for the room/cab/mic simulation. start turning the gain back up, fiddle with the room simulation, and then turn the effects back on one by one. at what point on the way back up did the di component of the sound begin to fade away?
3. dynamics. this won't matter to you gain bangers, and if you don't have a real amp to compare with, or at least vivd memories of lost ones, you won't hear it either. play some dynamic stuff, like slow blues licks through your amp and sim, recording both. strum some chords soft to heavy. compare the dynamics and notice the funky artifacts and distortions of the sim. it's not very nice, is it?
the point of this rant isn't to make you stop using your amp sims, but rather to get you to consider how amp sims might influence your playing and shred some of the marketing bullshit. your music, your situation, your call. if you use amp sims, one thing to keep in mind is that di guitar needs quite a bit of headroom. don't let your guitar signal get any where near clipping. a/d converter clipping sounds like ass, unless you've gone weird. don't buy an amp sim from a company that doesn't offer a trial for comparing directly with the freeware stuff that's available. depending on the sound that you're shooting for, you might be surprised with the freeware stuff. although, i'll tell you from experience, most of the freeware sounds like dirty ass from the get go, along with much of the paid for stuff. compare amp sims against each other for yourself. set aside some time for doing this when you're not trying to get something done, like writing or recording. if you're curious about the freeware stuff, read on.
just remember that you'll have to tweak things for yourself, and chain other plugs with them for different distortion characteristics and ambience simulation. it's a full day's work at least. if you're a guitar player, forget the impulse stuff. there's too much latency involved, and when it gets down to it, the cab impulses don't sound any better than the freeware amp sims. definitely DO NOT depend on any presets to sound good. also, if you're going to try the freeware stuff, get it over with in one swoop so that you're not left wondering about that other amp sim and end up wasting a bunch of time searching and comparing over a long stretch. get it over with.
here's what you do. grab every amp sim you can find, be it free or trial version. also, grab as many distortion plugs as you can find (there are shit loads of them) from stomp box sims to tape saturation sims. you're going to chain together different distortion plugins before amp sims to simulate the distortion characteristics of amps, even clean ones. yes, clean amp sounds have some distortion. you will get an education in distortion characteristics, frequency resonances, and the general characteristics of guitar sounds by doing this little exercise in no time flat. so you have like 50 bagillion amp and distortion plugins. unpack all this stuff to a folder and move the folder to your vst directory or point your app to the folder. don't go mixing all this crap with your regular plugs because you'll be throwing stuff out left and right. i highly recommend that you use reaper for this because it allows you to run unlimited plugins per track and you can quickly change the order of plugins by pulling them up and down with the mouse. fast and easy, and you definitely want that for this exercise. you're going to need to record a handful of riffs to do some comparing with. put together a a small variety of stuff from clean to as dirty as you get. use some of your own riffs, which have already been developed, as well as some cover song riffs that you know. you're looking for amp sims, not writing or learning new songs here. so just take a guess at which amp sim might be best, and use it for recording your handful of riffs. don't use any guitar effects. you're looking for amp sims, not 80's space sounds. do that another time. remember, if the basic tone is dog ass, effects won't fix it. resonances which aren't rediculous can be tamed with eq, and eq or compression can help to pull up characteristics of a guitar sound that you like as well as push down slightly crappy stuff a bit. don't get drastic with eq and compression, expecting a crap sound to be fixed. record your riffs, playing them as well as you can and in time. you don't want those negative creeps coming in unless they're talking about the amp sim sound. if you can, record some drums and bass for each riff. if you can't play and record drums and bass half ass decent, forget it < negative creeps, you're better off going solo in that case. record each riff to it's own project, because you'll be running ass loads of plugins per riff, and your computer might not like that.
so you have your plugins gathered, unpacked, and installed. you have your riffs recorded. it's time for some comparing. open up one of your projects and slap on as many amp sims as your computer will allow, bypassing all but one. remember, no effects, including any bundled distortion plugins. check that other stuff out later. set your riff to loop while playing and start tweaking the amp sim that's on. make sure that your track is nowhere near clipping the master. if you're weird and like that, be weird later. some bad things to listen for are retarded resonances, funky phasing, weird artifacts, unpleasant distortions, and just bad general distortion character. if you've tweaked if for a minute and it's still crap, remove it from the track and move on. if it has a resonance that you don't like, try a -3db or so cut with a parametric eq. if that doesn't work, toss it and move on. you're looking for amp sims that aren't boomy, overly cutting, overly muddy, etc. a basic, good sound in other words. anything that can't be made to sound decent without external help is a waste of time. if you hear any of the other bad stuff mentioned above, toss it and move on. anything that glitches, doesn't work right, or has a stupid amount of latency, toss it. when you've weeded out the obvious crap, it's time for comparing the rest. if one or two were noticeably better than the rest, use them as a basis for comparison. flip through the amp sims one by one, leveling the volumes and eq. you can't compare one sim to another if one of them is louder and/or brighter. your brain will give the louder, brighter one the high five. the high five is and always was ghey. by this point, hopefully you've found at least one or two amp sims that you can live with. i know, those probably still suck but not as bad as the rest. there, there... play through them a bit to check for high latency. if you didn't find any keepers, you should start playing synthesizers. so save your project and move onto the next riff/project. if any of the amp sims from the last project were particularly shitty, you can skip them this time around.
after you've went through all your riffs, move on to the distortion plugs, using them in conjunction with your keeper amp sims. many of the saturation plugs are on the cleanish side and can act as a volume boost, so watch out if you're monitoring loudly. the distortion plugs thing is part ears, part madness, but i did it and i'm still alive. you'll live if you do it, and your ears will learn some stuff about distortions in the process. generally, the saturation plugs sound best for adding character to an amp when used before an overdrive, to my ears. some of the overdrive plugs sound good when doubled up, one running at low gain. a good amp sim for this madness is the guitarsuite rednef twin, which is completely a clean amp. remember, try adding a little grit to the clean riffs for some character. if you've actually went through this exercise in amp sims, you will know first hand about amp sim marketing bullshit, and you will have learned some valuable stuff about distortions.
after you've found some amp sims and gain plugs to characterize the amps with, look to add some ambience to liven things up. kjaerhus classic reverb does decent enough room ambience for this on the free side. think about the room size that you're virtual amp is sitting in and adjust accordingly. the point of this isn't to add an effect reverb, like the spring reverb on an amp. you're not looking to add lush cathedrals here either, just some room ambience so that the sound isn't dead. optionally, you can add an effect reverb in like glaceverb, which does the huge, lush thing. just remember the chain of things in a real amp rig. here are some hints:
stomp boxes - generally, you'll put your saturators/overdrives here.
preamp - amp sim, optionally additional overdrive
loop - time effects like delay/reverb
power amp - compression and saturationcan be used here for bonus points
speaker cab - if an amp sim has it's own, don't double up a cab sim (ass)
room - ambience simulation, adjust for room size
deeply with love,
the bigredhotdog
BANNED
that traviusinoklahoma kid managed to finagle a few usable sounds out of some amp sims, but that doesn't change the big picture, which is: amp sims suck dirty ass. ask him, and i'm sure he will agree.
so now that we all agree about amps sims being teh suck, what to do? don't spend your money on something that sucks, that's what. why you gonna do that? if you have extra money to throw away, buy me a pepsi and a pack of smokes. wah? you got more to spend? don't you have an old lady?
ok, some of you are hatin on me now either because i'm the bigredhotdog or because you don't want to believe that amp sims suck. i can feel it. go cry to your old lady, then buy me a pepsi and a pack of smokes. if you can just chill out with the hatin for a minute, i'll explain why amp sims tongue on dog nards. really, i've spent many a sleepless night thinking about crap like this.
first question: why do you play music? maybe you think it's cool, you thought it would get you chicks (how did that work out?), or MAYBE it's because music makes you feel something. see where i'm going with this? playing music makes you feel something. if it doesn't then you're probably a sociopath and related to george bush or you're jewish. ok, most of you feel something when you play music. there's something in the sound vibrations that works like feedback. you pick up your guitar, plug it in, and try to play something that sounds good to your ears. if your playing and sound are jiving with how you feel at the moment, you get a sort of positive response from yourself. if something is off, you will very likely get a negative response from yourself. you might even be talking to yourself internally, saying things like "i'm a smoove mofo. hendrix wishes he...." or "that sucks, i suck, something or somebody in this room sucks". if the responses are positive in some way, you feel motivated, inspired, you want to play more. if you're getting the negative heebie jeebies, you might stop playing for the time being, play something else, or start twisting knobs. now everything isn't black and white. a positive response could influence you in other ways, like changing the chord progression or doing something different with your technique. same goes if you get a negative response. you might try to work your way around a shit sound or bad technique by playing something different, in an attempt to get a positive response from yourself. see how that feedback thing works?
you play > sound comes out > you're influenced by your sound > you make adjustments > you play.....
i know this might sound like some new age hippy bullshit, but keep your mind open. besides, you're the one banging on a plank of wood that moves air molecules, hoping that it will invoke emotions in the people who hear it. who's crazy now suckah? so we know that the sound coming out of our guitar amp (or amp sim) has an influence on our playing. now let's look a little closer at the above mentioned scenarios and how they can turn:
good tone 1 - makes you feel good, you pat yourself on the back, you go straight from point a to point b. nothing to do with the tone is in your way. you like these positive vibes and you want more of it. no one can touch your mean riffage.
bad tone 1 - negative creeps are complaining in your head, you twist knobs, try playing something else. something sucks. is it your playing? maybe the progression is no good? do you need a pedal? chatter, chatter, long road from point a to point b. you take a break, drink a few beers, take a nap, and wake up with a fat bitchy wife and three kids. damnit!
good tone 2 - all of good tone 1 + you're playing so much that you start stretching out a bit for some variety, you're stumbling onto new things. you're a genius and no one can touch your riffage. you're the man and hendrix wishes...
bad tone 2 - you know what's going on, the sound sucks. funky resonances, weird phasing hiding in the background, unpleasant distortions. you already spent your money on magic boxes and chinese microphones. you're stuck here for now, but you're desperate. if you don't pound the wood, people won't feel your molecules.
you start changing things, anything, everything, stringing weird things together, playing different, points a and b have vanished into the mist. now it's just you against this molecule moving machine. you're determined to win. you take a few pills, have a nap, and when you wake up you've found yourself gone weird, playing weird music, craving weird music. you're the man, klaus naomi can't touch this paint sniffing madness.good tone 3 - your tone is great, you went straight to point b, you've stretched out a bit, you wrote some songs that sound just like your favorite bands. you feel like you've arrived. you eventually get bored with guitar and start hanging out at an amp forum, talking about oil and paper capacitors, output transformer metals, and wood species.
bad tone 3 - you've accepted that your sound sucks and you've tweaked it until it's good enough. it really is a decent enough sound for this type of music. it will do, sort of generic, but yea, it will do. you don't know it yet, but you're bound for either bad tone 1 or 2.
ok, do you see the kinds of things that your guitar tone can do to you?
back to the question. why do amp sims suck? let's look at what an amp sim is doing. it's trying to imitate the physics of sound to the degree of fooling not only the listeners of the final recording, but the player as well. that's a pretty HUGE challenge. what is there to an amp's sound? there's the amp itself, which is made up of electronic components like capacitors, resistors, transformers, and tubes. then there's the speakers, cabinet, room, and microphones. now i don't know about you, but i've never heard a convincing speaker simulation by itself, which is probably the least complex piece of the entire chain, much less a convincing amp sim. are there any bells going off here for you? i mean, give me a break! if not even the simplest piece of the signal chain can be mimicked to a very convincing degree, how can the entire chain be simulated? keep this in mind when you're reading the marketing bologne on some of these amp sims. now i don't doubt that these software guys are trying very had to do what they claim to already be doing, but it's not there, not even close. i'm not saying that some of the sims can't pass for a real amp in a recording. some of them do, and i don't doubt that amp sims are beginning to influence amp designers in some ways. now, if some of these sims can pass the listening test, where do they fall short? 1. well how does an amp sim make you feel while playing through it? if you've ever plugged into a well put together amp, you know what it can feel like. i'm not just talking about the final recorded tone. consider things like the pressures that the amp is creating in the room, sag of a power transformer, immediacy of picking attack, controlled response of the tubes and speakers, feedback, moving your head and body to different angles of the amp. will an amp sim make you feel and play the same way? you know the answer. quit kidding yourself.
2. the sound. the illusion of amp sims progressively falls apart as the gain is decreased. when they get to medium gain to clean, that di sound is VERY apparent in the sound. that di sound can be masked to some degree, as travisinoklahoma demonstrated using a string of free plugins. the illusion of amp sims progressively falls apart as the effects are widdled away. try this. play your guitar dry through your di. do you hear that very sterile, clean, kind of hard sound? now fire up your most convincing amp sim patch and start turning off the effects one by one. then begin decreasing the gain while bumping up the volume to keep the same overall sound level. same goes for the room/cab/mic simulation. start turning the gain back up, fiddle with the room simulation, and then turn the effects back on one by one. at what point on the way back up did the di component of the sound begin to fade away?
3. dynamics. this won't matter to you gain bangers, and if you don't have a real amp to compare with, or at least vivd memories of lost ones, you won't hear it either. play some dynamic stuff, like slow blues licks through your amp and sim, recording both. strum some chords soft to heavy. compare the dynamics and notice the funky artifacts and distortions of the sim. it's not very nice, is it?
the point of this rant isn't to make you stop using your amp sims, but rather to get you to consider how amp sims might influence your playing and shred some of the marketing bullshit. your music, your situation, your call. if you use amp sims, one thing to keep in mind is that di guitar needs quite a bit of headroom. don't let your guitar signal get any where near clipping. a/d converter clipping sounds like ass, unless you've gone weird. don't buy an amp sim from a company that doesn't offer a trial for comparing directly with the freeware stuff that's available. depending on the sound that you're shooting for, you might be surprised with the freeware stuff. although, i'll tell you from experience, most of the freeware sounds like dirty ass from the get go, along with much of the paid for stuff. compare amp sims against each other for yourself. set aside some time for doing this when you're not trying to get something done, like writing or recording. if you're curious about the freeware stuff, read on.
just remember that you'll have to tweak things for yourself, and chain other plugs with them for different distortion characteristics and ambience simulation. it's a full day's work at least. if you're a guitar player, forget the impulse stuff. there's too much latency involved, and when it gets down to it, the cab impulses don't sound any better than the freeware amp sims. definitely DO NOT depend on any presets to sound good. also, if you're going to try the freeware stuff, get it over with in one swoop so that you're not left wondering about that other amp sim and end up wasting a bunch of time searching and comparing over a long stretch. get it over with.
here's what you do. grab every amp sim you can find, be it free or trial version. also, grab as many distortion plugs as you can find (there are shit loads of them) from stomp box sims to tape saturation sims. you're going to chain together different distortion plugins before amp sims to simulate the distortion characteristics of amps, even clean ones. yes, clean amp sounds have some distortion. you will get an education in distortion characteristics, frequency resonances, and the general characteristics of guitar sounds by doing this little exercise in no time flat. so you have like 50 bagillion amp and distortion plugins. unpack all this stuff to a folder and move the folder to your vst directory or point your app to the folder. don't go mixing all this crap with your regular plugs because you'll be throwing stuff out left and right. i highly recommend that you use reaper for this because it allows you to run unlimited plugins per track and you can quickly change the order of plugins by pulling them up and down with the mouse. fast and easy, and you definitely want that for this exercise. you're going to need to record a handful of riffs to do some comparing with. put together a a small variety of stuff from clean to as dirty as you get. use some of your own riffs, which have already been developed, as well as some cover song riffs that you know. you're looking for amp sims, not writing or learning new songs here. so just take a guess at which amp sim might be best, and use it for recording your handful of riffs. don't use any guitar effects. you're looking for amp sims, not 80's space sounds. do that another time. remember, if the basic tone is dog ass, effects won't fix it. resonances which aren't rediculous can be tamed with eq, and eq or compression can help to pull up characteristics of a guitar sound that you like as well as push down slightly crappy stuff a bit. don't get drastic with eq and compression, expecting a crap sound to be fixed. record your riffs, playing them as well as you can and in time. you don't want those negative creeps coming in unless they're talking about the amp sim sound. if you can, record some drums and bass for each riff. if you can't play and record drums and bass half ass decent, forget it < negative creeps, you're better off going solo in that case. record each riff to it's own project, because you'll be running ass loads of plugins per riff, and your computer might not like that.
so you have your plugins gathered, unpacked, and installed. you have your riffs recorded. it's time for some comparing. open up one of your projects and slap on as many amp sims as your computer will allow, bypassing all but one. remember, no effects, including any bundled distortion plugins. check that other stuff out later. set your riff to loop while playing and start tweaking the amp sim that's on. make sure that your track is nowhere near clipping the master. if you're weird and like that, be weird later. some bad things to listen for are retarded resonances, funky phasing, weird artifacts, unpleasant distortions, and just bad general distortion character. if you've tweaked if for a minute and it's still crap, remove it from the track and move on. if it has a resonance that you don't like, try a -3db or so cut with a parametric eq. if that doesn't work, toss it and move on. you're looking for amp sims that aren't boomy, overly cutting, overly muddy, etc. a basic, good sound in other words. anything that can't be made to sound decent without external help is a waste of time. if you hear any of the other bad stuff mentioned above, toss it and move on. anything that glitches, doesn't work right, or has a stupid amount of latency, toss it. when you've weeded out the obvious crap, it's time for comparing the rest. if one or two were noticeably better than the rest, use them as a basis for comparison. flip through the amp sims one by one, leveling the volumes and eq. you can't compare one sim to another if one of them is louder and/or brighter. your brain will give the louder, brighter one the high five. the high five is and always was ghey. by this point, hopefully you've found at least one or two amp sims that you can live with. i know, those probably still suck but not as bad as the rest. there, there... play through them a bit to check for high latency. if you didn't find any keepers, you should start playing synthesizers. so save your project and move onto the next riff/project. if any of the amp sims from the last project were particularly shitty, you can skip them this time around.
after you've went through all your riffs, move on to the distortion plugs, using them in conjunction with your keeper amp sims. many of the saturation plugs are on the cleanish side and can act as a volume boost, so watch out if you're monitoring loudly. the distortion plugs thing is part ears, part madness, but i did it and i'm still alive. you'll live if you do it, and your ears will learn some stuff about distortions in the process. generally, the saturation plugs sound best for adding character to an amp when used before an overdrive, to my ears. some of the overdrive plugs sound good when doubled up, one running at low gain. a good amp sim for this madness is the guitarsuite rednef twin, which is completely a clean amp. remember, try adding a little grit to the clean riffs for some character. if you've actually went through this exercise in amp sims, you will know first hand about amp sim marketing bullshit, and you will have learned some valuable stuff about distortions.
after you've found some amp sims and gain plugs to characterize the amps with, look to add some ambience to liven things up. kjaerhus classic reverb does decent enough room ambience for this on the free side. think about the room size that you're virtual amp is sitting in and adjust accordingly. the point of this isn't to add an effect reverb, like the spring reverb on an amp. you're not looking to add lush cathedrals here either, just some room ambience so that the sound isn't dead. optionally, you can add an effect reverb in like glaceverb, which does the huge, lush thing. just remember the chain of things in a real amp rig. here are some hints:
stomp boxes - generally, you'll put your saturators/overdrives here.
preamp - amp sim, optionally additional overdrive
loop - time effects like delay/reverb
power amp - compression and saturationcan be used here for bonus points
speaker cab - if an amp sim has it's own, don't double up a cab sim (ass)
room - ambience simulation, adjust for room size
deeply with love,
the bigredhotdog
BANNED
