Has anybody started using modelling amps

ecc83

digitalscream said:

ecc83 said:

"...and companies are still making the same mistakes, in that they don't properly listen to their customers. If they did, then there wouldn't be so many of us wishing that our amp rigs had the same flexibility as our modellers "

Well, they could DS but as I said, the switching is tricky in valve circuits. You can be "quiet" with FETs but then the cork sniffers won't buy it. I guess you could use triodes to mute signal lines instead of transistors but that gets very exoensive, very quickly.

Even for processor controlled FET switching the "dwell" time is critical. Take too long to flip and peeps "hear" the delay. Switch too fast and they percieve a click. (there ain't one but fast switching gives that illusion but much depends on how loud the signal is at the switch time)

You can't PAOTPAOTT.

Dave.

True enough, but I actually surprised myself by getting the switching time on the X88R preamp down to 4ms - which should have made a "pop", but didn't at all!

Well done! That is with relays as well?

Dave.

ecc83

digitalscream said:

ecc83 said:

"...and companies are still making the same mistakes, in that they don't properly listen to their customers. If they did, then there wouldn't be so many of us wishing that our amp rigs had the same flexibility as our modellers "

Well, they could DS but as I said, the switching is tricky in valve circuits. You can be "quiet" with FETs but then the cork sniffers won't buy it. I guess you could use triodes to mute signal lines instead of transistors but that gets very exoensive, very quickly.

Even for processor controlled FET switching the "dwell" time is critical. Take too long to flip and peeps "hear" the delay. Switch too fast and they percieve a click. (there ain't one but fast switching gives that illusion but much depends on how loud the signal is at the switch time)

You can't PAOTPAOTT.

Dave.

True enough, but I actually surprised myself by getting the switching time on the X88R preamp down to 4ms - which should have made a "pop", but didn't at all!

Well done! That is with relays as well?

Dave.

digitalscream

PolarityMan said:

Pablocrackers said:

Used HX stomp Friedman patch last night through pa instead of lugging my Friedman head & cab through the snow 1 guitar on shoulder with hx stomp in pouch cant beat that. Sound wise - sounded really good nice and full sounding needs dialling in more at very loud volume bit spikey on top end even with 8k roll off but can easily be tweaked used the Fender twin model for clean sounded really nice. Fx are top draw on the Helix & the ease of use is the best out there imo.  Does it sound like the Friedman - no but it sounds great - does it have the same punch as a real amp - no but it fills the room and pa with a really full sounding professional guitar recorded sound which i really liked - brilliant piece of gear highly recommended - i do think modellers can become a bit ott or a waste of money if you find yourself using one amp for what it costs to buy a kemper - remote- bag - frfr speaker - profiles & endless tweaking you can get a really nice hand wired amp, cab & pedals for maybe less & ive never been able to replicate the punch you get from a real amp behind me on stage which impacts the way you play including the drummer who usually gets blasted by the cab lol! So for now its still a proper valve amp for live for me but i wanna try a helix live one day Id love to get a Kemper for the studio as well

I would say that even running just the pre/power amp models into the FX return of a valve amp doesnt have the same punch either.  The first practice with my helix we A/B'd the placator model into the FX return of my jca50h with jsut using the jca50h gain and the jca felt way better..its a tough thing to put your finger on and maybe if you're not actually playing the guitar you wouldnt notice it at all but for me it was good but still not as good as a real amp.

Recorded tones though..id go modelling all day long unless I had a good engineer (better than me), good room, good mics etc.

To be fair, you weren't running into the power amp of the JCA50H - you were running into the preamp, just skipping the main gain stages.

Thanks, Mr Soldano :P

PolarityMan

Ahh interesting...didnt know that...maybe if the Diezel isnt back on monday I will try the same experiment with the JVM

ICBM

I honestly think that more work to replicate the power, responsiveness and dynamics of valve amps with digital, rather than trying to emulate the flexibility of digital with valves, is more likely to be the successful way forward. Even the switching digitalscream has done with the valve preamp is only with a preamp - switching valve power stages and power supplies (which is necessary to really replicate the sound of different amps) is an order of magnitude harder at least.

There is one company which I think has been really successful at getting the valve-like response from a digital preamp and Class D output stage - and also coupled with, as far as I know so far, absolutely bombproof reliability... Blackstar. The ID series (60 upwards especially) is genuinely nearly there. I A/B'd an ID60 with a 50W valve Marshall at full rehearsal-room level and there was very little in it in terms of volume and dynamics.

What I don't like about the ID series is the actual voicing of the amp - typically Blackstar, and as Dave knows I don't like their valve amps either! - and most of the onboard effects, not the responsiveness and power delivery. And I certainly don't have any complaints about the build quality or reliability - I know several rehearsal studios who have bought them and to the best of my knowledge not a single one has failed.

One of the reasons for this is that, alone of any amp company I know of, they understood why solid-state amps "don't sound as loud as valve ones" - at its most basic, it's just that valve amps can put out up to twice their rated power when overdriven - but a solid-state amp can't, because you can't overdrive the power stage without it sounding bad even if it doesn't die. So Blackstar made the power section twice as powerful as claimed. Cheating? No... simply understanding the problem.

It's no use repeating that valve watts and solid-state watts are exactly the same (they are), or that a music programme signal's peak power can exceed the input power to the amp because its average is lower (it is), because if you don't understand that guitar amps are *intentionally* driven into continuous distortion, you're going to end up with a digital amp that simply doesn't perform remotely like a valve amp of the same rated power in the real world.

digitalscream

ICBM said:

One of the reasons for this is that, alone of any amp company I know of, they understood why solid-state amps "don't sound as loud as valve ones" - at its most basic, it's just that valve amps can put out up to twice their rated power when overdriven - but a solid-state amp can't, because you can't overdrive the power stage without it sounding bad even if it doesn't die. So Blackstar made the power section twice as powerful as claimed. Cheating? No... simply understanding the problem.

It's no use repeating that valve watts and solid-state watts are exactly the same (they are), or that a music programme signal's peak power can exceed the input power to the amp because its average is lower (it is), because if you don't understand that guitar amps are *intentionally* driven into continuous distortion, you're going to end up with a digital amp that simply doesn't perform remotely like a valve amp of the same rated power in the real world.

This is the crux of it - and there's the perception problem. Most valve amps appear to hit their rated power between 5 and 6 on the dial, whereas solid state amps will do it pretty close to 10. Interestingly, most valve power amps aren't designed that way - at least, not the ones I've used - and so they appear to be quieter than "normal" valve amps.

It occurs to me that there are actually two solutions to the problem of designing solid state vs valve power amps - either double the power so they remain clean as far as possible, or make them break up nicely like valve power amps.

While I'm not even remotely interested in owning such a thing, I'm definitely curious as to whether it's possible without losing the advantages of solid state amps (size and weight, apart from anything).

ICBM

digitalscream said:

It occurs to me that there are actually two solutions to the problem of designing solid state vs valve power amps - either double the power so they remain clean as far as possible, or make them break up nicely like valve power amps.

While I'm not even remotely interested in owning such a thing, I'm definitely curious as to whether it's possible without losing the advantages of solid state amps (size and weight, apart from anything).

Given how easy it now is to make really high-powered Class D amps which weigh almost nothing, I think it's easier to simply keep the power stage clean and limit the input to it - and also likely to be better for reliability.

If you deliberately clip - and filter, to make it sound good - the input signal to the power amp at below the level where the power amp distorts, the power amp can never be pushed into distortion and so will not fail - assuming it's not run into a too-low impedance, and even that can be prevented fairly easily. OK, it does mean that you then need an amp which is twice as powerful as necessary.

Believe it or not, I've actually thought exactly that for about thirty years ever since I started wondering about this sort of thing, but until the Blackstar IDs I'd never seen it actually implemented.

PolarityMan

I'm not sure that's a factor. As far as I know the idea with models is to emulate (or more like model the performance of every component) digitally and then use something FRFR to reproduce that emulation as perfectly as possible, hence why you want clean amplification with a modeller. 

Im guessing what we are seeing is simply a shortfall in the fidelity of the model (and arguable both the preamp and power amp components of that model as my experiments show).

the other possibility is that the interaction of the guitar itself with the reproduced sound is somehow different, even at roughly the same volume.

digitalscream

PolarityMan said:

I'm not sure that's a factor. As far as I know the idea with models is to emulate (or more like model the performance of every component) digitally and then use something FRFR to reproduce that emulation as perfectly as possible, hence why you want clean amplification with a modeller. 

Im guessing what we are seeing is simply a shortfall in the fidelity of the model (and arguable both the preamp and power amp components of that model as my experiments show).

the other possibility is that the interaction of the guitar itself with the reproduced sound is somehow different, even at roughly the same volume.

What I was talking about was a bit of a digression from the main topic, I was talking more in terms of perhaps modelling the preamp and using an actual, break-up-able power section to perhaps do the job a bit better.

In any case...I've found that FRFR isn't the best way to use modellers. They sound much better with a big-ass power amp with way more headroom than you need, and a real speaker cab.

gearaddict

PolarityMan said:

I would say that even running just the pre/power amp models into the FX return of a valve amp doesnt have the same punch either.  The first practice with my helix we A/B'd the placator model into the FX return of my jca50h with jsut using the jca50h gain and the jca felt way better..its a tough thing to put your finger on and maybe if you're not actually playing the guitar you wouldnt notice it at all but for me it was good but still not as good as a real amp.

Recorded tones though..id go modelling all day long unless I had a good engineer (better than me), good room, good mics etc.

I don't think you need to be playing it to notice the difference - there is a noticeable difference in the openness and complexity of the sound. The trick is to not A/B your modelling pre-amp with a valve amp! That road leads to sadness.

John_A

digitalscream said:

In any case...I've found that FRFR isn't the best way to use modellers. They sound much better with a big-ass power amp with way more headroom than you need, and a real speaker cab.

I've found the opposite, certainly as far as making the whole band sound good rather than just keeping me happy, a small monitor in front of me is what works for me

gearaddict said:

I don't think you need to be playing it to notice the difference - there is a noticeable difference in the openness and complexity of the sound. The trick is to not A/B your modelling pre-amp with a valve amp! That road leads to sadness.

Haven't found that either and done more A-Bs than enough.  To my ears a well set up modeller sounds as good as a valve amp these days

PolarityMan

gearaddict said:

PolarityMan said:

I would say that even running just the pre/power amp models into the FX return of a valve amp doesnt have the same punch either.  The first practice with my helix we A/B'd the placator model into the FX return of my jca50h with jsut using the jca50h gain and the jca felt way better..its a tough thing to put your finger on and maybe if you're not actually playing the guitar you wouldnt notice it at all but for me it was good but still not as good as a real amp.

Recorded tones though..id go modelling all day long unless I had a good engineer (better than me), good room, good mics etc.

I don't think you need to be playing it to notice the difference - there is a noticeable difference in the openness and complexity of the sound. The trick is to not A/B your modelling pre-amp with a valve amp! That road leads to sadness.

Hard to tell because I was playing during the test, but the other guitarist was "that sounds totally badass" for the helix -> JCA power amp scenario, whereas I found it just t missing *something*.

Dont know if i would def be able to make the call if I wasnt playing, especially as in both cases I was trying to get a good sound rather than necesarily a matching sound if you see what I mean. 

PolarityMan

Oh also tried straight into PA then into in-ears.....that fucking sucked

Danny1969

I found the best sound I got with my Tonelab was when I ran it through a Marshall power amp into a 4 X 12 ..... you can't model a 4 x 12"  .... you can model the frequency response but you can't model the spread of sound coming from 4 different speakers

There's a nastiness that gets filtered out via the output transformer in a real valve amp .... that's why valve state stuff never really did it .... transformers are non linear at audio frequencies and add distortion but that kind of works for us. To the point most guys are happy with diode and op amp clipping for their drive sound as long as it goes into a valve power amp . 

I would say a basic speaker in a cab with a simple push pull valve power amp with no tone controls would be ideal for a modeller ... you could pick your amps but not bother with the speaker sims and mic positions etc. 

Musicwolf

Danny1969 said:

I would say a basic speaker in a cab with a simple push pull valve power amp with no tone controls would be ideal for a modeller ... you could pick your amps but not bother with the speaker sims and mic positions etc. 

I think that this was more or less the philosophy behind the Line 6 DT25 combo (although it contained the digital preamp as well).  I remember the original Marshall Valve State amps with a valve pre amp / solid state power amp.  They sounded like a wasp in a bottle.  Much better the other way around.

ICBM

Musicwolf said:

I think that this was more or less the philosophy behind the Line 6 DT25 combo (although it contained the digital preamp as well).  I remember the original Marshall Valve State amps with a valve pre amp / solid state power amp.  They sounded like a wasp in a bottle.  Much better the other way around.

I'd take a Valvestate over a DT25 any day. I can at least get a tolerable sound out of a Valvestate...

I agree that a valve power stage is where the dynamic response an 'presence' comes from though.

Dontgiveupyourdayjob

tunapuppy said:

I have a helix and it's brilliant! Being able to switch between using a fender tweed for the cleans and a mesa for the heavier tones, then completely changing your amps and effects for another song is awesome. I know a lot of people say the tone isn't as good as a proper tube amp, but with a bit of dialling in and patience you can get pretty damn close, certainly close enough so that when playing with a band you can't tell the difference. Plus the interface is nothing short of genius, extremely intuitive and very versatile. I've sold my amps and only use the helix, just waiting for a hughes and kettner patch to come out then I'll be super happy! 

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter too, after a few months of using an Atomic Amplifire and now an HX Stomp. I'm not expecting 100% accuracy and feel of a valve amp, but if it gets most of the way there and I can swap between Vox/Fender/Marshall/Mesa tones at the push of a button, plus do all effects etc in the one little box, I can't see me going back to 'real' amps any time soon!

Modellista

Dontgiveupyourdayjob said:

tunapuppy said:

I have a helix and it's brilliant! Being able to switch between using a fender tweed for the cleans and a mesa for the heavier tones, then completely changing your amps and effects for another song is awesome. I know a lot of people say the tone isn't as good as a proper tube amp, but with a bit of dialling in and patience you can get pretty damn close, certainly close enough so that when playing with a band you can't tell the difference. Plus the interface is nothing short of genius, extremely intuitive and very versatile. I've sold my amps and only use the helix, just waiting for a hughes and kettner patch to come out then I'll be super happy! 

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter too, after a few months of using an Atomic Amplifire and now an HX Stomp. I'm not expecting 100% accuracy and feel of a valve amp, but if it gets most of the way there and I can swap between Vox/Fender/Marshall/Mesa tones at the push of a button, plus do all effects etc in the one little box, I can't see me going back to 'real' amps any time soon!

^ interesting @Dontgiveupyourdayjob ;.  How are you finding the Stomp?  I'm feeling like I'm getting closer to buying one - it just looks so useful on so many different fronts - multieffects into a traditional amp, recording, acoustic gigs, the list is endless.  How are you using it live?  Through an FRFR?  How does that compare to the Blues Cube?

Dontgiveupyourdayjob

Modellista said:

Dontgiveupyourdayjob said:

tunapuppy said:

I have a helix and it's brilliant! Being able to switch between using a fender tweed for the cleans and a mesa for the heavier tones, then completely changing your amps and effects for another song is awesome. I know a lot of people say the tone isn't as good as a proper tube amp, but with a bit of dialling in and patience you can get pretty damn close, certainly close enough so that when playing with a band you can't tell the difference. Plus the interface is nothing short of genius, extremely intuitive and very versatile. I've sold my amps and only use the helix, just waiting for a hughes and kettner patch to come out then I'll be super happy! 

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter too, after a few months of using an Atomic Amplifire and now an HX Stomp. I'm not expecting 100% accuracy and feel of a valve amp, but if it gets most of the way there and I can swap between Vox/Fender/Marshall/Mesa tones at the push of a button, plus do all effects etc in the one little box, I can't see me going back to 'real' amps any time soon!

^ interesting @Dontgiveupyourdayjob ;.  How are you finding the Stomp?  I'm feeling like I'm getting closer to buying one - it just looks so useful on so many different fronts - multieffects into a traditional amp, recording, acoustic gigs, the list is endless.  How are you using it live?  Through an FRFR?  How does that compare to the Blues Cube?

Well it's v early days, only had it less than a week! In terms of the tones it's not noticeably better or worse than the Amplifire (which I thought sounded great), the revelation so far is in the user-friendliness. With the Atomic I found that any serious editing of the tones and setting up patches needed to be done on the laptop via USB. With the Stomp I've barely even bothered booking it up to the laptop so far, can do everything you need on the screen and it's super quick and easy!

The other revelation is the snapshot mode - ie the ability to have a variety of different pedals switched, and tweaks to any number of settings activated mid-song with a press of a button is genius. 

Haven't tried it live yet - that'll happen for the first time in a couple of weeks. Plan is to use a PA speaker on stage for monitoring and a bit of backline, and also to feed some to FOH and see how we get on. Gonna be a bit more of an experiment to begin with than just using an un-mic'd Blues Cube and nothing else, but looking forward to the challenge!

gearaddict

Plus there are any number of pros using Fractal, Kemper and Helix for live and recording, so if it's good enough for them...