Rob Chapman recently release a video discussing the downsizing trend of guitar amplification. From 100 watt Marshall heads sitting mightily upon two thunderous 4×12 cabinets, to lunchbox size heads powering 2×12 (or even 1×12) cabs, to the current, soon-to-be industry standard of digital amp modelers like the Quad Cortex taking over stages all over the world.
Is this trend towards smaller, more portable, and mixing-engineer friendly rigs a good thing? And has the digital world of amp modelers finally caught up to the sound and feel of tube amps? Let’s discuss.
How Good Do Amp Modelers Sound?
Amp modeling (and digital amplification in general) has come a long way since the early days Rockman’s, the Roland VG-8 and Line 6 amps. It was impressive that those companies were breaking ground, attempting to move guitar amplification into the future, but the sound that those amp modelers produced didn’t come close to replicating the sound or more importantly the “feel” of a real amplifier.
Many guitarists dismissed the idea of using amp modelers for decades, (myself included), concluding that “amp modelers could never replicate the sound and feel of tubes pushing real air”.
But lately things have been changing. Many guitarists in studios now use amp plugins to record their parts, preferring the ease of dialing up sounds via the plugins over the cumbersomeness of micing up real amplifiers.
Plugins have several advantages when it comes to recording. First of all, they have the ability to recall settings from session to session. With a plugin you can dial in your tone, save it as a preset, load it up into any session and know that your amp tone will be exactly the same from song to song (as long as your guitar doesn’t change). Plugins also mitigate the complications of having to mic speakers. You just need to load an IR (“impulse response”, which is a term that means to capture the sonic measurement of a speaker, room and/or mic), so you can have studio quality mic’d speakers at your finger tips. It reduces the cost of having to purchase different microphones, reduces the cost of needing to treat your room, and reduces the cost of having to buy multiple cabinets to choose the one that works best for your recording. And with the prevalence of iOS devices, you can even use apps that function as amp modelers right in your phone using an iRig interface.
At this point in history amp plugins definitively have their place in the studio, making capturing and recording guitar tones easier than it ever has been in musical history.
But what about on stage?
Do Amp Modelers Sound Good Live and On Stage?
Amp modeling has been used extensively by many bands for years now. They have several benefits over traditional amps:
- Portability – amp modelers (like the Quad Cortex) can be packed in a bag and carried easily onto a plane, bus or car. They can be used in hotel rooms or your home with headphones for quiet practicing. They can be used in studios making it easy to carry your tone with you when recording sessions.
- Flexibility – Amp modelers aren’t just one-trick ponies that only server to mimic the sound of amplifiers. Most amp modelers now come with a suite of effects that you can program into a patch which can easily be triggered with the provided foot switches. This makes for an arbitrary task to not only shape your guitar tone but to also sculpt sonic soundscapes without have to carry cases full of foot pedals.
- Recallability – Unlike traditional amps and effects pedals, you can save your sounds as patches in the amp modeling unit, and recall those settings anytime with the click of a button. You won’t ever forget how you set a particular knob because it’s stored in memory. And you can easily switch tones from song to song without having to fiddle with knobs on stage.
- Ease of mixing – Every live sound mixing engineer I’ve talked to has said that they vastly prefer it when guitarists use amp modelers on stage over using traditional amps. It makes their job easier because they don’t have to deal with competing frequencies between the guitar amps and the microphones.
Even large bands like Megadeth have switched to using amp modelers (though they’re still using power amps to push the cabs), which seems to be a sign that the industry is moving in that direction.
But How Do Amp Modelers Compare to Using a Traditional Tube Amp Live in a Band Setting?
From my experience the amp modelers get you about 80-90% of the way to feeling like a real amp. They still don’t quite have the same feel, sound a bit sterile and lack the dynamics that a true tube amp has. Recently I went to see a local metal band play live, one guitarist had a Kemper, the other had a Marshall and the Kemper really struggled to keep up with the Marshall DSL100. It seemed to get buried on stage. Maybe it was the way the guitarist had the Kemper set up, it’s possible that he had the mids scooped too much and was losing stage volume due to that. But I also recently saw a band open for John Petrucci, and this band used amp modelers and it didn’t keep up with Petrucci’s actual rig.
What’s the Conclusion?
The caveat here for me is that amp modeling DOES get you 80-90% of the way towards using a real amp. And for that reason I would consider using one. The ability to recall sounds, easily carry your rig in a bag, and help the sound engineer dial in a better mix on stage makes using an amp modeler worth exploring. Not to mention not having to deal with tube replacement, amp repair, speaker repair, etc., etc., etc.
I also think (as Rob Chapman does) that we’re just in the infancy of this technology. I do believe that in the next few years that amp modelers will get as good as tube amps in terms of tone, feel, dynamics and the ability to cut through a mix. Rob Chapman thinks that amp modelers will be built right into guitars, so you’ll only need to bring your guitar to a gig, and I see that as a very real possibility.
Whether amp modelers get as good as tube amps, or our ears as listeners and players get more accustomed to hearing amp modelers vs tube amps the industry will eventually become more digital when it comes to guitar amplification.