The Ultimate VST Mesa Recto hearing test!

guitarjon

Member
May 16, 2010
45
18
8
Hi There!

For a while now I've wanted to do this. Please let me explain!

The Mesa Boogie Rectifier is an amp that I've always had interest in and the sound of the amps fascinated me to this day.
Many software (and hardware) companies have tried to replicate the sound of this modern High Gain amp.
I don't own a Rectifier but a friend of mine owns the Mesa Roadster and I've played a couple of Recto's over the years and ofcourse heard them on many records.
These amps have a quite distinctive sound as most of you probably know.

Anyway, so here's what I did.
I recorded a riff that I think suite these amps quite well.
Then I made a simple mix of the bass and drums.
After that I started reamping the guitars with all the VST amp simulator plugins that I own.
That came down to 11 different Rectifier simulations that I will list below.
Some of them are great, others.... well, not so great.
And I put them in random order for you to guess wich one is wich.
I'm just really curious if poeple are able to distinguish these different plugins and wich ones you think sound great and wich ones don't sound great.

For every different version of the riff I recorded 2 guitars hard left and hard right, so 2 guitars in total.
A good rectifier sim. should be able to make a wall of sound without many overdubs in my opinion anyway.
I used similar settings on every sim and I tried to use the cabinet simulators that were in the program.
Some of them needed external impulses so for those I used the Red Wirez Recto V30 with the R121 mic.
So most of them use the internal cabinet simulators.
I did most of the processing inside of the actual plugins but I also used some simple post EQ on them all, like HPF and LPF and some mid scoops.
No sergical EQ, I just kept it simple and quite pure.
I must note that with some of the simulations I used a guitar volume boost to give it some more juice.

What I used:
I used my Gibson Les Paul Classic tuned in drop D with 0.10 elixirs.
For bass I used my Ibanez ATK 5 string through Amplitube with one of the Ampeg bass amps.
For drums I used Steven Slate drums 4.
The bass and drum settings are the same in each song.
Every track was processed through Slate VCC and Slate VTM and also on the master buss.

The plugins are (in random order otherwise it would defeat the purpouse )


-Poulin's Lecto (with RW V30 Mesa R121 Impulse)
-Pod Farm's Dual Treadplate
-Pod Farm's Line6 Treadplate.
-Pod Farm's California triple Recto.
-Studio Devil's Rectified Crunch (with RW V30 Mesa R121 Impulse)
-Amplitube's Dual Recto
-Amplitube's Triple Recto
-Guitar Rig's Dual Recto
-Guitar Rig's Rammfire
-Th2's Modern High Gain Recto model
-Th2's Randall Lynchbox Treadplate model

I also made one with the revalver Recto but I forgot to put it in the track.
You can make some good sounds with that one but this one didn't sound so great anyways.

Now, can you recognize some of them or maybe all of them? And wich ones do you like most?
Check them here:

http://soundcloud.com/guitarjon/recto-tests
 
1, 3, and 6 sounded good. No idea which was which, though. Would it be possible to run them all through the same cab IR? That would make the test a little more scientific.

Well, I wanted to use the built in cabs as much as possible to showcase as much of the plugins them selves.
I also wanted people to hear the sounds inside of a mix to show the real potential for some of the sounds.
 
Yeah, running them through the same IR will give us a much better comparison.

I'm not going to do that, for now anyway.
A lot of times when I read about modelers people say that the cabinet emulation isn't nearly good enough as IR's.
I wanted to see how people make choices without knowing if an impulse response was used or not.
A lot of the cab sims here sound pretty good!
So it's about the entire modeler (except for some cases where I was forced to use IR's).
I think some of you will be surprised to see the actual list.
Anyway, there's just a lot of great options out there!
 
One and Six. The differences are huge between the sound clips. Thanks for taking the time to do it. It is precious.
 
I put notes from 1 to 10 to each one:

1. 7
2. 7,50
3. 8
4. 4
5. 6
6. 7
7. 6,50
8. 5
9. 8
10. 6,50
11. 7

So the best ones for me are nº 3 and 9 with nº 2 closer. The worst sounding was nº 4.

Thank you for the test.

PD: Which one is which one please?!
 
This is awesome, thanks a lot for taking the time to do this!

I liked 1,3,6 and 8, in no particular order.