Kazrog said:
That Waves amp simulation sounds horrible. I am open minded and willing to blame the guitarist and the mix engineer, but it sounds paper thin and very fake/digital.
I'll try their demo later and post my thoughts.
I hope you have an i-lok dongle, because the demo won't run without it. Waves must already have enough customers, because clearly they're not looking for any new ones.
So far, I've heard that Waves' GTR can't really be pushed into super-duper-high-gain stuff, but it also never sounds too fake, which is interesting. A common property of Amplitube, NI's GR, and all the other soft amp sims is that the harder you push them, the faker the sound. Get some real gain going, and suddenly it sounds like a swarm of bees has found its way between your cab and your mic. Apparently, GTR never attracts bees, but as I've said, word on the street is that it can't be driven
that hard. However, what "driven
that hard" actually means remains unclear to me; the four or five people whom I've talked to about it also claim to "not like high gain tones anyway", so I don't know if they're certain about what type of sound they're trying to get. If anyone here knows a thing or two about metal tones and also has an i-lok dongle, please share your findings!
And about Native Instruments' Guitar Rig; I like it, despite the aforementioned "bees" phenomenon. The main problem with it is that you really have to forget about real amplifiers while you're using it; even though the thing on the screen looks like a Mesa, and there's a TS in front of it, dialing in your favorite settings from the real thing just won't give you a similar sound. It's better to just start messing around, and becoming familiar with what does what, and what knob affects the sound in what way. It's an extremely open system, and there's a lot of options, and it takes a long time to really get a handle on what's going on with the tone. With proper listening, and some real experimentation in the "cabs & mics" section (especially with the mic positons and phase settings, which can help eliminate the BEES), you can indeed get a fairly usable tone.
Also, Amplitube 2 is on the way, sometime in the next few months. I hated Amplitube 1, and I think NI's GR smokes it, but ever since IK started development on 2, they've been stressing how hard they're working to get the high-gain stuff right. Every now and again a developer will drop in on their forums and describe what they've been doing to ensure natural sounding "breakup", avoiding that "brittle" sound that soft amps have... things like that. It could be marketing hype, but it seems to me that a developer out there finally realized that people want freakin' metal, and that nobody is catering to them. I at least think they're on the right track with their philosophy of not so much trying to make a product that sounds exactly like a specific amp, but rather try to make a product that just sounds good. I guess we'll have to wait and see...
