Free Guitar Amp Sim Plugins You Should Try in 2021

in this video i'm going to be giving you my top five free guitar amp sim plugins you should try in 2021 [Music] hi folks i'm mike and i hope you will there's actually quite a few free guitar amps and plugins out there but some of them are not that great in my opinion so i've narrowed it down to my top five so that you don't have to wade through them all i think all of these are definitely worth checking out now don't skip through this video because along the way i'm going to be giving you some really useful tips for recording guitar using virtual amps in your daw now we're going to be doing this in reverse order starting off with number five and then working up to my very favorite number one let's get started five so number five i have blue cat audios free amp now this is actually three amps in one those being the classic clean the classic drive and the modern drive apps and all three amps have the same seven knobs on them for settings and those settings stay the same as you switch between the amps and those are for gain drive bass mid treble tone and volume so very very straightforward indeed so let's start off by having a listen to the guitar part which we're going to apply these two without the amp sim switched on this is a guitar part as it sounded when i plugged it straight into my audio interface [Music] so let's have a listen now with the classic clean amp switched on [Music] and we'll turn up the drive a little [Music] so i think it's worth understanding at this point that this is purely a guitar amp simulator there's no speaker cabinet simulation involved at all so it's as if you've taken an amplifier plugged it straight in from a line out into a desk without having a speaker cabinet mic up so it doesn't sound quite authentic and it can sound a little bit sort of dry and aggressive so what you really need to do is use this in conjunction with a guitar cabinet simulator and i'm going to show you one now for free this is called nad ir in actual fact it comes free with one of the other amplifier simulators that i'm going to be showing you in this top five now this uses impulse response files to do its simulation i'm not going to go into detail about how all of that works now but all you really need to know is there's quite a few free downloadable impulse response files on the internet i'll give you some links to those and you can emulate many many very famous guitar cabinets so i've got this set up with a couple here for the left and right channels and i'm going to be having you listen first of all to that guitar amp as it was without the cabinet simulation switched on it sounds like this now let's switch on that cabinet simulation [Music] so you get a much much sort of smoother tone something just a little bit more realistic again so it's important to keep this in mind because there's quite a number of guitar amp simulators and that you can listen to them and think they sound kind of awful actually and that's because they're not going through a cabinet simulator so there's tip number one now let's switch over to the classic drive version of our amplifier and i'm also going to a different guitar performance something with some some power chords and things in it which is going to be a little bit more suitable for this guitar amp let's have a listen and we've also got the modern drive amp which is a little bit more metal [Music] sounding now if you're new to recording electric guitars here's tip number two this is going to be very very important for you and it involves duplicating the tracks now when we duplicate the guitar tracks we're going to add a little bit of sort of depth and thickness to them as well as some width as well so we actually start off by recording our first guitar track just like so and then we go ahead and record it again now it's very very important that it is a different performance don't get tempted to copy and paste this over because it's the differences or the very slight differences in these performances which is going to work for us here so there will be differences in timing there'll be differences in volume here there there'll be differences in pitch as well don't get tempted to copy and paste them over because they'll sound exactly the same and if you just offset them or something like that then you'll have too much of a sort of a uniform difference between the two that won't work so once you've recorded the two different performances then you've got them in your mixer here let's have a listen to both of them together now it's going to sound a little bit weird okay because we haven't gone to the final step but we'll have a listen the final step is to pan them hard left and hard right so i'm going to take the first one here or go all the way over to the left all the way over to the right let's have a listen now now that may sound a little bit extreme to you you can bring them in a little so i'll go halfway to the left and halfway to the right let's have a listen again now often in the context of an actual song hard panning to the left and to the right actually sounds pretty good so i'm going to play this now in the context of the song starting off with this classic drive amp and we'll hear some bass and drums with this as well and then moving on to a demo where we'll be listening to the classic clean amp let's have a listen [Music] do [Music] four so number four i have guitar rig six player edition this is a cut down version of the full guitar rig six but you do get one free amplifier with it called jump as you can see here you also get a cabinet with it called jump this is a matching cabinet now you don't have to use this you could use the cabinet simulator i showed you earlier but you do get one here included you also get some effects now i've got reverb chorus flanger screamer and limiter loaded up but you do get some other effects apart from that with it so that's why it's in there at number four because you do get quite a lot with it let's have a listen on our two demos again starting off with something which is sounding a little bit more sort of rocky and overdriven and then going to a cleaner amp sound let's have a listen [Music] [Music] [Music] three so in at number three i have emissary now this is an actual bundle this is the plug-in i was talking about earlier which comes with the speaker cabinet emulation plug-in that is nad ir as we looked at earlier now this amp is very very metal sounding or is inclined towards that if you don't particularly like the sound of it it's definitely worth downloading it just to get hold of that cabinet simulator anyway that's the bundle that you get with this now taking a look at the amp itself it's actually fairly simple it's a two channel amp as you can see on the right hand side on the left hand side here we've got a clean channel on the right hand side we've got a lead channel with their respective controls and we're going to be hearing both of those in a moment with our demo we can flick over to the back here and again we can see a few more controls here um some adjustments to the the tubes inside here and you can make some different adjustments to the tones just here with that so lots and lots of features in terms of setting up the tone let's just have a listen to the basic two tones though that's kind of overdriven distorted sound for the lead and the clean sound [Music] by the way are you finding this video useful if you are go ahead and hit the like button for me do it right away so that you don't forget and if you do like this kind of content make sure you subscribe and ring the bell on youtube so that you're notified about my other videos now back to this video two so let me explain what may seem on the face of a rather odd choice for number two this is amped root a very simple looking amp simulator a little bit inclined towards rock and metal well very inclined towards that now this has got a hidden feature on it which gives an enormous variation in sound i'm going to show that to you in a moment first of all i'm going to play to you the amp all by itself with no cabinet attached or anything like that i warn you you're going to wonder why i've picked this for number two to begin with but we'll have a listen anyway okay doesn't sound that great you really do need to switch on the cabinet uh simulation they've got down here now that's not the hidden feature i'm talking about but we'll switch it on anyway and now have a listen [Music] getting there sounds quite nice now and you can get some variations i'll just variations in tone by adjusting these knobs here and i'll just do that by just changing the preset up here i'll go to metalcore have a listen to this now that's just adjusting the knobs down here we'll go back to the one i like which is dad's rock but i'll show you the hidden feature where you can really get lots of variation in sound if we look down on where this cabinet switch is here it says ir there now if i click on that you won't see but it opens up a file selector just off screen that enables you to load some impulse response files those are the files i talked about earlier which you could load into the other cabinet simulator there's some free ones linked in the description there's probably hundreds of them available online for free and that gives you an enormous variation of free cabinets that you can load up with this amplifier so let's have a listen to a couple now first of all let's have a quick listen again to the built-in cabinet let's go to a 1960s marshall cabinet have a listen to the difference now a big big difference let's have a listen to a vox cabinet and that's just a couple of different variations so as i say lots of free ones available check the links in the description for that that's why i like this amp is because you do get that feature built into it's very very simply done which i really appreciate but i guess the main reason i like this amp is for sound because once it's there in the mix i happen to prefer the sound of this app you may not but this is my top five let's have a listen to our demo again again listening to a very overdriven sound and then going to a cleaner sound [Music] so before we move on to my number one pick i just want to make some honorable mentions these are plugins which didn't make it to the top five for various reasons but i think it's definitely worth you checking them out first of all we have th3 the cakewalk edition this comes for free with cakewalk by bandlab which in itself of course is a free door now if you already have cakewalk and you didn't realize you had this and you're rushing off to use it do keep in mind it's nice to have some variation so you still may want to download some of the five that i've mentioned in this video but this is a very fully featured plugin which you do get for free next i'd like to mention to my studio one pro users that you actually get um empire for free with studio one pro and that's a really nice sounding and again quite a fully featured amp sim with uh cabinet simulator and pedals all that good stuff as well now the two pure amp sims that i want to mention which are completely free and you don't need to download a door or anything to get them uh cyprus tt15 or 15. this is a really great basic straightforward amp i didn't put it in the top five because i didn't enjoy the sound compared to some of the others but you may like it for your music so definitely check that one out and the other one is called ace now this is a little bit different to the others because this is pretty much only a clean sounding app it really doesn't get that overdriven there's no distortion pedals or anything with it and it's based on an old fender amp and it's got that kind of vintage tone to it so very very nice check out those four as well one so number one we have an absolute no-brainer for me amplitube 5cs this free edition of amplitube actually comes with five different amplifiers now i've got a couple loaded up here in a stereo configuration more on that later you also get five matching cabinets again i've got a couple loaded up you can see them here so you won't need any kind of cabinet simulation at all you can just use the ones included here with amplitube as well as that you actually get 10 different stomp boxes now i've got three loaded up here at the moment but you do get a nice selection of 10. so let me talk about tip number three when you have a stereo configuration with your plug-in it's important to set up your door correctly so that you can hear it it's a very very easy mistake to make to not set it up correctly and you're only still hearing it in mono even though you think you're hearing it in stereo so let's have a look at the initial configuration we have here we had the original guitar track it was recorded in mono because a guitar is just a mono signal now most doors will automatically create a mono channel in your door and any effects that you apply even though they may appear to be in stereo will actually be in mono so that's the situation i've got here if i play this quickly you'll see by the meters that it's actually in mono so there's a number of different ways you can do this you may have a feature within your door just to convert this to a stereo track that may not be that convenient until you've finished completely recording your guitar so that's not always a great option what i actually prefer to do is to create a stereo buss so i've done that here a stereo bus right next to my guitar track here now in lots of doors when you create new bus it's automatically done in stereo but you may have to select whether it's a mono or a stereo bus now what i'm going to do is actually route this through but before i do that i'm just going to drag this amplitube effect which i've got in the inserts here i'm just going to drag that over to my stereo bus so it's now applied to the bus rather than to the guitar and now that's done i'm actually going to route that guitar through to the bus with its main output going through to that amp bus there okay so i've got my mono guitar going through to this stereo bus here and then the effects will be applied in stereo so let's have a quick listen first in mono again i can do that by switching this switch on the bus because buses will have our in this door studio one a switch to switch between mono and stereo so we'll listen to mono again and now in stereo with that switch to stereo a big big difference i'm sure you'll agree and if i hadn't done that all the fiddling in the world within the plug-in won't make the stereo effects occur so let's have a listen to amplitube 5cs first of all again on our rock demo and then of course moving on to our clean sounding amplifiers have a listen [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so which was your favorite out of these five let me know in the comments down below perhaps i missed one which you want to tell me about also let me know in the comments down below don't forget to check the description for the links to all of these plugins and while you're there check out my patreon page where for as little as one dollar per month you can help me help you by making more videos like this and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Creative Sauce

Views: 61,773

Rating: 4.9468751 out of 5

Keywords: Free Guitar Amp Sim Plugins You Should Try in 2021, Free Guitar Amp Sim Plugins, Top 5 Free Guitar Amp Sim Plugins You Should Try in 2021, Best Guitar Amp Sim Plugins, Best Guitar Amp Sim Plugins 2021, amp vst free, amp vst plugins free, amp vst plugin, best amp plugins 2020, best amp plugins, free plugins, best free plugins, cakewalk, studio one, fruity loops, guitar amp simulator, guitar amp vst, amp sim 2020, free guitar amp sim, amp simulator, amp sim, free guitar vst

Id: OPqeg9NVaB8

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CreativeSauce2B]

Hi folks! There are many free guitar amp sims, and some not so good. To save you some time, I've picked my top 5!

[u/SkWd15]

Blown away by overloud th3 at the moment.