Wagner VST metal tones!

[schust]

not that you don't already know this, but.....those guitars are pretty frickin' fantastic. good job!

i got turned on to the wagner and guitarhack impulses a few days ago. i couldn't get anything i really liked with the wagner inline - but the guitarhack impulses are amazing. i've been playing with them ever since. they offer something so real - it's scary. i've been playing guitar for 20+years and recording for about the same. never heard anything this good that wasn't the real thing.

 

[stringy_]

Yeah, Guitarhack's impulses are amazing. Splatt uploaded some G12T75 impulses a long ways back and his are great too.

IMO, though, great impulses still don't bail out Line6. Even running my pod into the impulses I can still hear the plasticy Line6 mids that annoy the shit out of me. There's guys out there that can pull out decent tones from the pod, but I'm not one of them.

It blows my mind that you can get a great guitar tone using FREE software. Wagner, SIR, and the impulses...all free. I've owned Mesas, Marshalls, 5150s, VHTs, a Rivera, and an Engl preamp. I have gotten better recorded tones out of the Wagner then all those amps.

That probably means I have horrid mic'ing and engineering skills, hahahaha!, but I think it says more about how great some of this software is starting to sound.

 

[schust]

yea, i hear ya. i play through a podXT too - and completely understand that "electronic", non-warm sound. indeed irritating. no doubt, a speaker, room, air are all very, very hard (if not impossible) to 100% reproduce via simulation. however, like you pointed out - it's pretty damn amazing what's out there. i'm (happily) shocked weekly it seems these days.

the thing is - i too have owned most of the amps you mentioned - but for so many reasons (won't bore anyone with the details) having a big-ass amp around isn't feasible at the current time. these impulses really are the next best thing. and it isn't too bad of a "next thing"...

 

[J.DavisNJ]

Damnit, I reallllllllly wish he would release this in a Mac version! I might pick up Revalver for my software needs.

-Joe

 

[stringy_]

I too have constraints when it comes to having big amps around. My apartment building is surely pissed off at me for screaming my ass off in my living room, I'm sure I'd be evicted for pulling out my 412s. Ha!

Even though I'm getting some very usable tones out of the Wagner, there's still a part of me that wants to do it the old fashioned way. I don't know why, but there's just some inherent "coolness" factor microphones, preamps, and tube amps have that software doesn't. Even if software sounded EXACTLY like a recorded tube amp, I'd still probably want to do it with the real thing. I don't know why. Maybe nostalgia. I remember in high school trying to record tube amps in my parent's basement which was my first introduction to recording.

That being said, the Wagner + impulses, and a lot of the other amp sims, are very, VERY good substitutes. I find myself constantly being impressed and surprised. Some of the stuff that people on this forum can do with readily-available software....it's just wow...

 

[Deathlef]

Really nice sound!

As a side remark: When I am loading the Wagner in Nuendo as a plugin, only the left channel has the changed signal, but the right remains unaltered. Any idea what's going wrong here? Never happened with any other plugin before.

 

[stringy_]

Aye, Wagner seems to not route/pan properly in certain DAWs. I actually have this problem too.

My main DAW is Samplitude. When I recorded a mono DI guitar track and sent it through Wagner it came out as mono panned dead center (obviously)...but the panning knob seemed to have absolutely no effect. I could turn the pan knob hard left or hard right and it would still be dead center. Nobody likes mono guitars!

To remedy this I actually track my guitars in Tracktion 2 to a click with Wagner, then bounce them to a stereo file and import it into Samplitude for mixing. Wagner routes and pans fine in Tracktion...

Any software engineer will tell you that there are usually many different ways to accomplish the same task...so all DAW programs handle panning and routing differently. Wagner seems to not like certain DAWs, Samplitude being one of them and apparently Nuendo from what you're saying.

My only advice is to try using a different DAW program and see if the problem remains...? Not a very good suggestion, I know... Maybe the next version of Wagner will have this problem addressed. He's only on v0.6, right?

 

[smy1]

Deathlef: you should record to a mono channel, not a stereo channel.