Who Makes The Best Amp Simulator? | Chairmen of the Boards, Episode 2

[Music] all right so here we are this is uh episode 2 of chairman of the boards today we're going to focus on basically everything to do with amp and cab sim and is it i guess in my mind is it really worth the hassle so firstly i guess uh here today i am grant from goodwood audio we have next up i'm brian from a million audio sorry i i guess i had a delay sorry about that and avoiding i guess um should we start that over again sorry i'll go now this is brian from mammalian audio and i'm mason from vertex effects so we have we have grants we have brian from a million we have another brian from a million and then we have mason right yeah exactly so obviously practicing his ventriloquist um i guess today we're just gonna yeah chat about amp and cab sim i know i have some opinions on it myself which i will hold off until later but brian let's start with you man what are your general thoughts someone comes up to you for a rig and said should i get an ampsim for my pedal board what goes through your mind uh it typically comes down to like the environment of what you're playing you know if they're allowed you know stage volume 90 of the time they're like no no stage volume and i'll get some of those guys are like oh yeah i can run a stereo amp on stage full blown i'm like okay then you know an amp sim might not be for you but if they're like no i'm playing at my church you know it has to be silent i'd be like all right well we got you know acs one iridium simplifier simplifier deluxe camper like there's so many options it kind of depends on your budget your space oh and how you want if you want it on a board or if you want like a rack or whatever so there's kind of just it kind of depends on their situation really um and sometimes it's like oh i just want convenience so that you know ends up being a huge factor and for me i have best of both worlds where i can do an amp sim or turn the amp stem off and just go straight into an amp so like there's different options that you can be like if all else fails i have a backup so yeah what about you mason any uh any thoughts on amper capsule in general before we get into some some specifics well as you guys probably know i'm a kind of a two-band pervert and oh my god what a title on it perv yeah and uh you know i got all the old stuff you know i've got old 60s voxes and 60s marshalls and 60s fenders so i'm very rooted in in that however there have been some amp simulations that i've been very impressed with getting to really compare it you know because a lot of us when we do a comparison or or so or we say or exclaim to our fellow gear collector it sounds just like x but we've never played x and so you know sometimes those recommendations can be somewhat hollow and that they don't actually exemplify experience with the original unit and as somebody who's really experienced the original units i can say that there's a few that i've used that i thought wow like maybe this isn't the same thing but i also don't need to buy a kemper in order to get the sound of my twin reverb clean or i don't need to buy you know an axe effects to get the sound of a marshall plexi or i don't need to buy fill in the blank digital modeling amp to get the sound of my vox ac30 and so i think what will be really cool about this conversation is we we get to maybe see a a a good lateral view from sort of small pedalboard-based systems uh for amps that are not that expensive all the way up to the toasters yeah love it and i i have to admit right at the outset here i do not have the experience or the gear collection that you'd have of the vintage stuff so i have more uh for lack of a better term modern stuff just picture me uh picture me in a big room with a mesa triple wreck and a seven string guitar i mean that's my playground you know totally kidding for anyone that doesn't uh doesn't actually know i have no idea but i like face tattoos if you're not watching this three inch spacers in my ears yeah i've got it all man but i i'm like a 1 by 12 combo and like the less controls on the amp the better and that's what i that's what i absolutely love and so that's where i guess the bias if you want to say that i take into listening to an amp and cab sim i'm trying to find that sound that i'm comfortable with and the sound i've come to enjoy but i think the the thing i have to remember and one of the things that people even myself i always find myself doing this i compare an amp and cab sim and how good it sounds with air quotes to me sitting in front of my favorite amp having a jam and i think i'd love to put it out there and get your guys thoughts on saying that is not a fair comparison because in amp and capsim is simulating a miced up amp and cab so if i wanted to do a fair comparison i should really record my amp listen to it through headphones and then listen to an amp and cab sim with headphones and see what the uh similarities or differences are in that respect because you're never going to get that feeling of moving air in front of your face for an amp that is way too loud and you should be wearing earplugs like it's just not gonna you're not gonna get that same feel and kind of tactile approach to sitting in front of a real amp so i don't know like there's always that part of the conversation of it's just not quite the same as my like you were saying mason my amp at home or it's just not quite the same as this awesome plexi i played three years ago i've never been able to replicate it like is that a fair comparison how should people compare it and how should they approach it with an amp and cab sim versus the amp that they're trying to emulate [Music] this is a good question it's a long-winded question but i'm done but i know that brian i know that brian has an answer um see approaching because i've played at some different church mega churches in the dfw area where a lot of them have amp rooms and they sound great they really do but someone can be like man that you know that ac30 and that fender deluxe sounds so great live what are you doing and you know sometimes it's mic'd up open in a room with lots of room lots of you know ventilation and it's not in a box when you start putting an amp in the box or you put say like you run like a head into an iso cabinet an iso cabinet even changes the whole sound of it so where i have like the most simple of my of the jackson amps the new castle like as simple as you possibly can get like putting plugging that in into a box like an iso cabinet it's it's dark and muffled and it doesn't sound like what it would in front of me because clearly you know there's a reason why cabinets were not built to be put into a box or cut our caps um so i've had a lot of people that are like man i can't get you know that same tone out of my amp because i have to put it in a box or i have to put it in a bathroom and it just it has all these weird like high ends it's like well because it depends on your environment that's a huge part of it is the environment of your amp and where it's going to be if it's going to be sitting right next to you and you have all the stage volume and everything to do it you'll get it to that sweet spot but if you you know if you have to compromise with putting it in a closet where it's not ventilated and you have to put foam speaker foam padding around it to muffle it because the lady in the in the front row or whatever is going to be mad that she can hear i don't know whatever um that it kind of you know it'll muffle your overall perception of how you want it to sound so that's where the direct and amp cab you know can kind of help you know alleviate some of that like i use a directin option because it sounds better in my ears i would love to use my amp but it's just not an option it's just i would compromise too much of my tone and hearing if i went with that option so yeah air compressor turns on no no it's actually off right i turned it off what are you doing so i mean i guess going back to the question of of comparing right like what what is the fair comparison i think i think how you summarized it i think was the most appropriate in that you can't compare well first of all you you wouldn't really be able to compare compare them in the room unless i guess you had a wedge or something like that and you put it next to your amp and you were you were doing it that way um because there really isn't any simple way at least that i'm coming up with right now where you could put an a you know a iridium or an acs-1 side-by-side an amplifier and be like oh here's the amp here's the acs-1 i think invariably you're recording it and i think putting it through that particular avenue i would say sonically um listening back to the recording i would say is actually where there's probably the least amount of difference when you're listening back i think where there's the most amount of difference is maybe in the palpable feel that you get by using a tube amp and maybe how you interact with it in in that room um in the way that it feels and maybe inspires your plane or or alters your note choice based on sort of the type of feedback that you're getting from it you know you can't point your guitar at your cab simulator and get feedback you know i've tried yeah it didn't work i've seen yes yeah um so so there so there's there's that thing but when they but if you're looking back at them and you're listening back to let's say two tracks let's say you split your signal and you have one side going directly into your amp and the other side going into your radium or acs one and you have two identical guitar tracks that you're listening to and then you're just isolating one from the other i think that you can get them to be pretty similar uh and so i don't think that that's where probably the the real differences i think the differences is in how it feels as a player and i think to greater or lesser degrees some people are uncompromised and they're like i can only have this analog you know moving a lot of air feel where i have a 412 cabinet that's hitting me right in the chest and i need that or you know if you're in in-ears you know it's going to be it's going to be a tough call it's going to be a tough call to really say you know like we should i in fact this could be we could pepsi challenge some people you know blindfold them feed them something in their in ears and see if they can tell you know this would be like a you know a good game of tones um you know you just you know you see what that you see what they can do you know if they can really tell because i think that that's that's a hard differentiation you know if you're not in the room with it i watched a um a video it was an anderton's uh a b test basically what you said but it was a it was a few years ago so i i don't remember too many specifics of it but essentially a kemper into a powered like a powered kemper so it was moving air into a cab versus the guy's actual amp so the camper modeled his actual amp so they were getting it as close as they could all the details as close as possible and he knew this amp like the back of his hand a beat it blindfolded and he could not tell the difference so the one variation there he was actually using speakers for both a b options but in my experience i have tried live i'll say this live i've tried live when i am the player to use an amp and cab sim only rather than doing a real amp for dry and amp and cab sim for what i've tried to just commit to one and audibly in front of house when you're listening back i can't tell the difference but when i'm playing and i i hope you guys can help me put words to this or some awesome term that i can now use i've never found a great term but it just doesn't feel right like it just i'm losing this thing like as you can tell i can't put words around it but like i just i'm not as inspired like you were saying but it's a feel thing even when the amp is mic'd and i'm listening it listening to it through my in-ears the only word i can say is feel it's just not quite there everything else though i listen to other people using kempers or iridium's acs-1 whatever it is i listen to it through front of house i'm like i have no idea are they using an amp and cap sim or are they micking up an amp i will never know until i ask them but when i'm playing the one differentiation is is the feel so i don't know if you guys have an awesome term for me or if you can relate or if i should just get over myself and commit to an amp and cab sim no i i agree with you completely have you come up with a fix or have you like what do you do about it because i want to be inspired when i play yeah it's i don't know it it's it's a whole different thing when you know you got all that stage volume and you're feeling every you know you're feeling the drums and the environment i mean i've been playing with in-ear monitors for over 10 10 or more years that like i've unfortunately come accustomed to it i used to be in a band that we all had loud amps and 412s and stuff and it was awesome and it sounded great and the energy and everything was there and even when we do concerts like here at the sanctuary on this other side of my wall um you can feel the the energy of the band is different when there's stage volume and air pushing and you know all that craziness where then you get people that do direct an option which we've had and it just is like it's like does that feel weird it's like yeah it does like in general it does but i have yet to find a fix for it i blare my my ears as if i have stage volume that's the only unfortunate thing and my ears are gonna suffer eventually um but that's the only thing i've ever really been able to get for environment like un unfortunately i mean besides using the heck out of the room knob on my iridium that's about it yeah so instant room literally like i remember i first played with it i i never had it on and i started turning it up and it felt like it was like i tell people it felt like it was next to me i was like okay well this this helps add some room like it feels like it's it's more in the room so now i play with that like one or two depending on if i go anywhere past two then it just feels weird but yeah that's a big deal the room knob even on the even on the acs one has a room knob and it makes a big difference any fixes for feel mason i think for feel no i i i i don't know that i've never i don't think i've ever gotten any of them to maybe feel exactly the same but i think that may just be precipitated by you know cabinets have that feel you know as i said you can't point your guitar at an acs one and get feedback but you know i mean i think that you have to i think you sort of have to meet it where it where it is you know it's it's it's replacing you know four speakers a preamp a power amp a microphone you know chiropractor visits you're right yeah yeah so it's it's doing all it's doing a lot of these things for you and so i think you know you have to acknowledge that there's going to be some amount of compromise and that you're getting you know all these all these things that you know you're getting three amplifiers and three or more cabinets available to you or whatever impulse responses you want to load in and that that makes it easy you know and i think with with what we're experiencing right now with the the possibility of you know tubes becoming scarce and there potentially not being as many options for the near future available to people something like this could be a really good viable option if you if you need to preserve you know the the tubes that you have perhaps you don't have spares and you don't have any prospects to be able to get spares and you're playing you know multiple times a week and this may be one way to kind of you know keep the proverbial wolves at bay until you know they're there you have a better um you know line on getting some replacement tubes for your amplifier that you know sometimes maybe you'll need to use for really specific stuff and you need to kind of save it for those opportunities and use something like this in the meantime you just like a little bit i guess down that vein you just put out a video on kind of uh addressing the tube shortage and kind of some hacks i have to be totally honest i haven't watched it yet um but basically that's what i was gathering is there anything you want to kind of summarize in kind of in this area if people are going back and forth between amp cap sim versus tubes and and giving them a couple yeah i i think i don't i didn't mention any cap sims as an alternate uh in that i kind of kept it more tube specific but i think to kind of summarize it for somebody who has no idea what this is really quickly is is um and by the way i'm repping my um electro harmonics because they they issued a statement uh i think about two weeks ago saying that due to the war in ukraine between russia that the exportation of russian tubes was now going to be something that wasn't going to be able to happen for the rest of the calendar year and the the consequence of that was that people sort of panic bought tubes the sim the same way that people sort of panic bought toilet paper when the pandemic first started and you know as a consequence of that there are you know the prices of tubes uh you know and reverb and places like that have increased like 400 percent so there's a lot of price gouging there's a lot of um people that are you know attempting to take advantage of the scarcity in tubes or or what is what was predicted to be the scarcity of tubes a week later last friday electro harmonix issued a secondary statement saying actually we think they will be more available than originally thought and we're going to be able to import them um however it's still there still aren't any tubes because everybody sort of took took everything you know out of the marketplace because they were concerned about sort of the long-term prospects of what that could mean and so i offered some some insight as to you know other ways that you might be able to get tubes and i think one of the things that that is a probably the most overlooked way that i've been doing for years is that in in craigslist there's often free church organs that are listed for sale or for free you just have to move them out of the church because a lot of the churches have moved away from those organs for a decade or two and often these are replete with 6l6's el el34s or sorry not el34s 6l6s 12ax7s uh almost never british tubes because almost all of these are american organs but you can really get great vintage rca ge tubes out of these wow and for the most part you know they were used once a week and the quality of those old american tubes is really superior to what's coming out now and so even if they've been in in use for 20 or 30 years often they still have some life left in them and you're getting not only a vintage tube but in a lot of cases a free vintage tube and usually i just tell them like what i'm going to do with it i said hey you know i have a bunch of tube amps and you know this this organ has complementary tubes that i could harvest from it i will i will pay you for the tubes um or pay to have the organ hauled away if it's just something that's taking up space um and it's a great way to get vintage tubes i just take a tube tester and even if 50 of them work you know to get a matched pair of 6l6s or a dozen 12x7s that are from that generation that could be 600 to a thousand dollars just right there so that's one sort of hack if you um if if you're so inclined where you can go and get some nice vintage tubes for little to no money and be able to use those in your amplifiers and the second hack i talked about was that most of the el-34 tube amps that are vintage let's say old marshalls stuff like that those actually didn't come with el-34s originally when they exported them because the el-34 wasn't really available in america until the later part of the 70s and 80s and so they would ship them to the u.s without tubes and then they would be tubed either with 6l6s or 5881s or 6550s which are all you know kind of in that 6l6 vein and you know sometimes it was a replacement of a screen resistor or sometimes just a bias thing and you could use those american tubes in a british amplifier and that's typically how they were because you couldn't you couldn't get el-34s here back then and so a lot of people have forgotten about that that you know maybe you harvest some amps or some tubes from organs and you can still change out your marshall tubes at least in a temporary sense to work off of 6l6s or 5881s or you know several different tube types that are kind of in that american style tube so if you're harvesting organs it sounds like you know we're talking about like orchid donors yeah if you're harvesting organs you have a lot of options where you can actually use those tubes into similar amps the the voxes are trickier you don't have many options for el 84s but el34s you definitely have options 6l6s 6v6s you definitely have options for for alternates that's awesome to me that sounds like a very clever hack but also a lot of effort i'm just going to be totally honest because i uh i'm now thinking well now an amp and cap sim actually sounds pretty good uh because currently my tubes are great and uh you know and so the amp and cab sim thing in this current scenario let's say tubes are going to be hard to come by for the next while amphicam said might be a great short term solution so but what are the best ones because as as i had told you earlier i probably use one cab sim for every 10 that you guys use so i have i have i i've i've used a few of them but um and i have one that i seem to like the best at least of those i've tried but i want to hear from the guys that are really using them all the time which are the ones that have the goodwood and a million stamp of approval what's on the mount rushmore it's a little it's a literal stamp that we stamp all of our cab sims with yup all right now rushmore let's do it i'm gonna say if are we picking two one or this i mean i mean i mean we could we could give a couple maybe in no particular order you know i mean they all have their they all have their assets yeah well i would say uh the strymon iridium and the walrus acs-1 um though the iridium is currently on my board um mainly because it's it's gonna sound funny it's simple for me like you pick the cab you pick the amp you i i have it on my board i just don't want to it's lifted up right now we believe it but it just has basic you know there's not a lot of controls which i like i don't want all this craziness i just literally want to pull it out of the case make sure it's adjusted properly and leave it i don't want to have to do all the dip switches where like if you really want to get into customizing each side like the acs-1 you can pick the abc or cab you can pick left and right for each cab you can pick the amp for each side and like that's awesome it really is cool and i've had it on my board a couple of times but i just found that i was doing too much of going left side tweaking this going the right side tweaking this when me the iridium is that cabinet that amp i can you know buy irs and put them for each cabinet side but i'm not that fancy so those are my two favorite um the other things like the simplifier and the the simplifier deluxe or whatever there's just a lot of options so that's where i get down the road of i don't need all those options simple is is best for me i would say i would say something similar i recently did a test with a buddy here in vancouver and we basically went uh put the iridium in the acs-1 hx stump and a helix all through front of house so we weren't listening to ears we were listening through like front of house speakers and going back and forth and um i don't know if i'm allowed to say this on the podcast but i wanted i wanted the iridium to continue to be my favorite and i absolutely love the iridium but the acs-1 sounded really good i was i was like i wanted to be 100 faithful but i was like but it's a contender iridium and acs-1 are very much in my mind tonally through the front of house speakers in that specific context they sounded great and hx stomp i mean that's multi-effects it's camped cap sim it has you know and it sounds awesome as well but that's getting into a whole nother world of uh both cost and complexity and then the helix is another level on top of that um you know it just goes it just gets a bit crazy um so all that to say uh those are all great options ones you might hear of a little bit less but are by no means lower quality or you know something to consider any any less anything from two notes which is a french company they do some great work and they do correct me if i'm wrong on a bit of their gear they also put in some preamp tubes as well i guess to try and get a little bit of that feel back which lends me which leads me into one other thing i'm going to talk to about in a sec which is this preamp right behind me um but one other one to consider as well is uh uh i think it's called uh bloog do you guys know any much more yeah the thomas the the blue guitar it's a bigger one it's a it's a much bigger unit but uh we did a setup for chachi years ago who played for gang youths and he is a geared nut like he every time he does a setup he brings something in i've never heard of never seen but he swears by like he just loves his gear and that was one of them and brought it in like man this thing sounds awesome it is massive it's not cheap but it sounded great um so there's just so much out there if i had to put one on my personal board right now i would probably out of stubbornness still do the iridium but acs-1 is also great and then the only other hack i would have for you guys to consider is this is a kingsley squire it's a two preamp like this these guys they do a great job and just down the road actually from me here up in canada um but it's a two preamp and the best sound i've gotten out of my iridium is when i ran all of my dry effects so overdrives distortion compression all that then i put the two preamp in there in my signal chain always on then directly after my two preamp comes the iridium and then i go into all my modulation delay reverb out to front house and that uh just i probably would say if you if you're on a budget it's not worth it to invest in a preamp pedal but if you're trying to replace an amp get the best possible sound out of your amp and cap sim and that's what you want to commit to then for under a thousand bucks you can get an iridium and a two preamp and start experimenting and seeing what you can do and the best my only theory this is conjecture i have no idea if this is actually what's happening my theory with putting a preamp right before the iridium is that you can set your iridium sound to the preamp and the iridium and then everything feeding that preamp after the fact changing overdrives changing compression is a bit more tamed and evened out and more consistent and so you can get this sound that is a bit more predictable across all the changing dynamics of your board and so that's the best sound i've gotten is a tube preamp right before in iridium rc booster works like clean overdrives also work as a preamp but yeah i don't know if you guys have any kind of hacks tips or tricks for getting just that little bit more out of your amp and cab sim or where you might even run it in your signal chain because that's also a big thing me telling people i run it in the middle of my signal chain might be a blast for me to some uh who run it right at the end but i'd be curious what your guys's thoughts are on that as well i mean i'm gonna say off the bat it's threw me off when a co-worker came in it was like i wanted to put my i ripped my acs one before my delay and reverbs and i was like why i'm like like i have actually i've never had anyone really request it that way and i was like oh okay why and he kind of explained it to me and then literally the next day we all we all had a conversation about it i was like i'ma go and try it i'm gonna try it and as you guys can see from our text conversation yesterday i have left it that way so i am now doing it the same way that you do it grant and it's awesome there's more clarity out of it you know it just the overall board just responded differently for me and yeah if anything i run if i run out of preamp with it i run like the jackson prism in ant mode like that's that's it but yeah for me any thoughts mason yeah um i think the that running the any of the processing effects after your sim is is best and the reason that i say that is if you're thinking about it in a studio context let's say you would ordinarily have all of your processing after the microphone which is essentially what you're doing when you have the delays and reverbs and you know modulation running after the cab sim because it's basically what you're getting on the output is the mic to cab of whatever amplifier simulation you've done and the only drawbacks with it that that i just think that some people maybe don't address appropriately is that the outputs of most of the cab sims that i'm aware of are very low output impedance because they want you to be able to take an unbalanced line and drive it back to potentially even your mixing board you know if you got a 100 ohm output impedance from an iridium you could probably drive a hundred feet or more of regular guitar cable and really have no loss or anything like that occurring because it's such a low output impedance but when you're running other pedals after it you know pedals don't have any standards as far as how low the output impedances are so you know you could have you if you went out of the iridium you'd have 100 ohms you could go out of a boss pedal and have a thousand ohms which is you know 10 times worse than you know the iridium and so i just think that the thing that people need to be aware of if they're going to do post effects after their sim they either need to have a really good buffer at the end of it so that could be you know a goodwood audio interfacer that could be a diy buffer that we show how to do on you know our our youtube channel or that could even be just getting an sgi or a pinstripe or something like that that's basically just going to convert you know it to a low impedance or balanced signal from an unbalanced single-ended signal so that it can go you know where you know who some where our boards are the mixing board is relative to our pedalboards could be wildly different from stage to stage and so sometimes having something like that like again an sgi pinstripe whatever it is um this is something that could be valuable if you really need to go a really long distance and it's not something that the buffer is going to be able to cover effectively or if they just want to have an xlr going into the board and so they don't want that quarter inch you know unbalanced cable um but i just think that's something that people need to be aware of and i think as far as the sims are concerned i'm in agreement with grant that i think that the walrus is the best to my ear and i did notice speaking of tone pervs that some people were proven out on it because it didn't have analog dry through and i feel like this is a thing that people have gotten real wound up on that like for some reason it it if it doesn't have analog dry through it means that it's somehow like an inferior product um i've seen people say this about the h9 a lot of the eventtide stuff is not analog drive through some of the line 6 stuff especially like the dl4 or was an analog drive through it's not a true bypass well i think i think that they i think that they're looking at it all wrong i mean like i think a lot of the companies do it because you know if you're if you're talking about using multiple digital effects together and you're trying to prevent um [Music] i think that people think there's gonna be some sort of latency associated with it i think if you're really that concerned about it you could of course throw whatever the non-analog drive through product is into a mixer and you know like a parallel mixer now you got your dry signal back but i predict if you do this test you're not going to hear any difference in the latency whether you use it in a mixer or not like most of these companies are not dumb you know like they're not going to give you something that you really don't like or that it really is inferior um and if you do the test i think you'll be hard-pressed to detect any difference between the any latency that may be occurring in an acs-1 versus an iridium versus a simplifier versus a two notes i think that they're all great in that regard and they're just different approaches to get you to the same place and i think just because it has a word like analog in it doesn't mean that it's any more or less viable at the end of the day these are all digital models of of an amplifier and i think the cool thing about the acs one that i really like is that i don't always like having the same exact cabinet and amplifier on both sides of the stereo image it can be really cool to mix fender and vox or fender and marshall um and having the ability to do that is is to my knowledge is only uh capable on the acs one where you can mix your amplifiers and your cabs and have them different on the left and right which i think is a really cool feature if you want to be able to really sort of mix and match the tones that you're getting yeah i i'm gonna i'm gonna say too i don't hate the iridium the acs one i do love it i completely agree with you guys um i don't have time to do all that fine tuning so i will say the acs one does have that upper leg of being able to compare do those two sides uh an ac you know ac30 and a fender because if i can play an ac and ac30 and offender deluxe live somewhere heck yeah i'm going to do it because it sounds amazing i can do it on the re on the acs one if i have the time to sit down and do it but because of my normal work load in my home my home life with the kids and my wife and everything it just doesn't make sense for me particularly but i will i completely agree with you guys it is an amazing compact tool and the fact that you can do the usb in and do all the tweaking and firmware updates i mean it's it's insane what they and the midi i think is easier to access to on it too the 5 pin over doing the the the trs uh on the iridium stuff and you get the people i get it all the time oh can you make me this certain pin configuration for the for the iridium i'm like man just go buy a midi box for from disaster area like you can switch those dip switches on it and you know it's it's done where this it's five pin you don't have to set the through like all that kind of stuff is already you know good to go and the one thing i will say uh i know i'm trying to i'm trying to stay true to my strymon guys but uh iridium the midi port also needs to be isolated as well so you can't just do depending on your midi configuration you can't just do a converter cable it would be more it would be better to buy one of strymon's isolated cables so you don't get any ground loops in your midi chain as well there is one other downside i have to say to running your amp and capsule in the middle of your chain which is important to consider is you immediately lose the use of your headphone out on the amp and cab sim unless you're happy with just getting your dry effects which if you've got a great dry section maybe that's good enough for you but if you think about it logically you're going to run guitar into overdrives into iridium or acs-1 whatever it is and the amp and cap sim is only going to see what's come before and then your delays and reverbs modulation gets added on after the fact so your headphone out will not see delays reverbs and modulation so if that's important at home practice easily plugging in your headphone jack i would still say either put it in something where you can easily change the order of your signal chain like a pbc 6x or something like that or just put it at the end and it might be better for you for it to sound just a little bit maybe not as clear or whatever the word is an easy solution to that i've recommended some people that have have brought this up to us before is rolls r-o-l-l-s makes headphone amps that are inexpensive they're very linear so it's you know it would it would very much represent kind of just like listening through the amount of color that a wedge would have perfect you could also they also have a mixer that you could do this with where it's a stereo mixer where you can feed in a left and a right and you can pan them like you would on a mixing board and it also has a headphone output and i think it takes 12 volts it comes with its own power supply it's really small smaller than an acs-1 and you could use that as basically your headphone amp to receive things and it's and i think that they're like 60 or 80 bucks made in usa bulletproof you know and and that's a really good way if you want to have if you want to sort of represent what the board would look like if you want to hard pan those left and right signals you can do that in there um you know and it has it actually has three inputs too so if you did have a dry like you have brian you could throw the dry into one channel too um and so you know it's like it's like a three-channel stereo mixer so it's pretty cool in in in what it does and you could uh you could get those very inexpensively the headphone output is very good um so you could also maybe put a uh uh mp3 in as well and practice with the song is that what you're saying with the three channels you could do that too i mean i was just thinking if you had a dry you could you know you could leave that that mix control straight up because usually in a wet dry wet hard pan left and right dry straight up um you could do that on on the on the rolls um and they have a bunch of solutions for headphone amps that are really good and they're very reasonable i i i don't even think i could find a version of their mixer and headphone amps it's more than a hundred i'll just get them on amazon that's awesome yeah that's good for me because i don't pick up a guitar unless i'm playing wet dry wet personally yeah so uh you know for my for my needs very very high maintenance yeah grant's rider it's almond butter blue m m's wet dry wet that's great i mean i don't i personally don't have a whole lot more that i feel that i feel like i can add to the to the conversation on amp and captions but let's say let's say there's someone listening they just ran out of tubes they've purged their church organ nothing left there they're considering an amphicapsim what are like a couple of points just overview what would you say you're about to go and get an anti-capsule these are the main things you want to consider uh when when making a purchase what would you what would you guys say uh i'll i'll say uh don't go for like the cheap option like if you not i'm not saying go spend a thousand dollars or whatever that's not what i'm saying what i'm saying is don't be like oh i happen to say i needed you know an amp cab simulator and a company comes up with one for a hundred dollars don't buy it like don't buy like a hundred dollar you're gonna pay for what you get basically uh so do your research um don't make your determination off of a youtube video only you know if that's your only option because you live out in the middle of nowhere and you don't have a guitar shop nearby that has it then fine do that but go to your local guitar shop that has one borrow of friends you know call your neighbor whatever and like test it out and mess with it and also i've learned this the hard way don't buy the new pedal completely redo your board get it all perfect and you're like i hate this like i've done it so many times i'm like i love this this pedal that i got and it's massive like this all that and you reconfigure everything don't do any of that until you've actually tried it you know take it there that's functional and maybe looks messy i do it all the time i have rat net sports and people look at me like did you do this as your job i'm like don't talk to me don't don't ask i'm testing something out like last week the wet dryer was a mess but it worked so now it's all nice so that's what i would say personally love it [Music] yeah i i think i i think i agree with all that and and i think i would just say that you need to i think the vetting thing is important you know make sure that whatever you choose is cooperative with the gear that you have i think experimenting with the sort of amp simulation at the end of the chain versus after your drive section and then having the all the wet effects and processing i think that's worth experimenting with to see what you like because some people do just like you know running everything into the front of the amp and if you like the behavior of all your effects in that sense then running everything into your iridium or your acs one or fill in the blank is probably the best way to do it you know but if you wanted to kind of have more of like a studio sound running the wet effects after your simulated amp and cabinet sounds is beneficial i think considering um what you're going to do to get it back into the mixing board is important you know if you have high quality um pedals that have good quality buffers in them like the strymon pedals if you're using a big sky or a timeline or stuff like that those have pretty low output impedances that mirror exactly what the iridium would have if you were going straight out of that those are pretty good those could drive you know 100 foot cable no problem also might be a consideration to think about getting sgis um you know a pinstripe something of that nature so that you can convert it to a balanced signal and you can get an xlr feed into the board so these are just things to consider depending on how far away you are from the connections of the board and and if you need to convert it to a balanced signal um and you know i think overarching two which which we didn't really talk about but i think i think we we got there is that you don't necessarily need to buy a kemper or an axe effects i feel like you know those all have great options in them but i feel like if you are a person that's used to a pedal board into an amp this is a way more complementary direction to go because you can really repurpose everything about your rig as it was going into an amp pop this into the signal path and you're exactly where you were the interface of everything is exactly the same you've just substituted your fender amp for this acs-1 or for this iridium you don't have to learn the software language of an axe effects or of a kemper and program a foot switch controller for the whole thing this is like the path of least resistance if you're making that switch i would uh yeah i would definitely agree i think personally if i was going to play my last gig tomorrow i would be picking up an amp a real amp a tube amp with tubes that work um but right now exactly but having an amp and cab sim as something that is kind of like i was saying earlier something that's like a tool in your arsenal and something that's available to you man they are convenient and they can make a grab and go board so easy if you do fly dates if you do if you don't want to play that much or if you're just playing once a week and you don't have much room in your car or you got kids like what brian was saying in car seats and you got to choose child or amp pause for a second and just make the right choice [Laughter] but um but yeah i think for me i think the biggest thing i would say if you're looking at getting an amp and cab sim kind of mirroring what brian said is not all of them are created equal i have played a lot of them of which i will not name and i plug them in and they do not sound good uh there's a reason why people keep talking about the iridium versus the acs-1 like they're both awesome products and there's a bunch of other awesome products out there as well like we mentioned today but there are some out there that to save a hundred bucks versus being in you know a little bit more inspired or just it sounds a little bit more like what you're going for every single time you play it's probably worth it to save up a little bit more and get the one that that you you know you'll love rather than than a quick fix so that's all i would say is again try it out first if you can like what brian said test it out in your signal chain in multiple spots don't rush it don't just chuck it down and hope for the best take your time with it and uh and i think you'll be a lot more pleased with the results after you've done that um so yeah i i mean i've already learned a bunch even just that headphone mason that you mentioned the rolls that that sounds incredible and a great fix for one of these problems that i've always like losing the headphone jack for some people is not it's not worth it so get a headphone amp that's affordable and does a great job and now maybe you can kind of have the best of both worlds so yeah i think it's called i think the one that i use if if i needed to do that is called the roll stereo line mixer and it's and i think it's 60 on amazon it's made in the usa steel enclosure built like a tank you know it's it's the best 60 bucks you've ever spent awesome and if it doesn't work out you can use it as a paperweight which i'm always in need of right so when you're on that picnic you know it's your napkins aren't going to fly away love it love it so i mean i'm sure there's going to be a lot of questions uh after this because it's i mean we've we've gone in detail but there's it's still a broad topic uh mason you're kind of curating this whole this whole thing where should people reach out where's the best place to ask a question get in touch well i think if you're listening to this you'll have limited uh options to to do that unless like we have people asking questions in the apple reviews perfect um so i would say that the best place is actually to find it on youtube because it'll be on the vertex effects channel under the the playlist headline chairman of the boards and you could find this episode about amp and cap simulations episode two and uh we'll we'll be able to answer the questions there we'll we'll all have access to it um i think we all have youtube channels that have our branded logos on it so you'll know who's responding and uh i think that's probably the best way to have the the most interaction i guess they could also email us but uh you know whatever what i think probably the youtube is the most appropriate you know and that way other people too can benefit from your question and the answer because if people are find it there they can look at it they can reflect on it themselves they can ask a follow-up question whereas you know if it's through email that's that's that answer is just specific to that one person and that information exchange gets lost so let's let's let's make it as eagletarian as possible democratic answers everybody gets to view it go to youtube have a look leave a comment perfect [Music] you

Channel: Vertex Effects

Views: 16,368

Keywords: Mason Marangella, Vertex Effects, Rig Doctor, Pedalboard, Pedalboards, Brian Omilion, Omilion Audio, Goodwood Audio, Grant Klassen, Goodwood Pedalboards, Omilion Pedalboards, LA Sound Design, LA Sound Design Pedalboards, CAE Pedalboards, Bob Bradshaw, Friedman Pedalboards, Racksystems, DIY Pedalboards, Bradshaw Rack, Wet Dry Wet, Stereo pedalboard, 4 cable method, cioks, voodoo lab, truetone, strymon zuma, Custom Audio Electronics, Worship Pedalboard, Pedalboard podcast

Id: 2Oe42fK1hgM

Length: 53min 3sec (3183 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 11 2022