Do you think modelers will get there in the next 10 years?

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I have an Axe8 I bought with the intention of making it easier on my back when playing live. I just couldn’t get along with it. I still use it for quick recording and stuff but I just couldn’t “connect” with it. Back to tube amps live
 
Racerxrated said:
Dude. I’ve tried.
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Same here. The closest I ever got to making a modeler sound like an amp and cab
(and it makes perfect sense) was to plug into the 'return' jack of an amp into a guitar cab.
 
You aren't going to get an amp in the room sound with a modeller and FRFR. What you will get is a great mic'd cab sound. Once you realize that and are good with it, then it is much easier.

Honestly, I have a couple of Friedman ASC-10s and I installed fender tilt bag legs and they point up at me. It's 1000 watts in stereo. I can make my pants flap if I want to. It sounds amazing. I don't need a backline at all as we all go through the PA FOH. If I do, I can put these behind me tilted up and fill in perfectly.

Still....there is nothing like a great high gain tube head and 4x12 to make you smile.
 
PBGas said:
You aren't going to get an amp in the room sound with a modeller and FRFR. What you will get is a great mic'd cab sound. Once you realize that and are good with it, then it is much easier.
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I agree but the problem is that most of us do realize that and are not good with it lol, so it’s not any easier
 
Even using a FRFR, I just missed that 4x12 behind me.
More of a comfort thing.
I did switch over to 2x12 for most gigs.
 
Well, I’ve got 27 years of experience in bedroom jamming, garage jamming, basement jamming, recording, live gigs, etc, pretty much entirely with tube amps as I got my first one a year after I started playing (Fender Champ 25 with 2 6L6’s and a 12AX7) and went through several throughout the years. As far as I’m concerned, they’re already there. Granted, my experience with the current modelers on the market is only with the AxeFX III, so I can’t compare with a Helix or a Kemper.

After getting the Fractal, I’ve also come to realize that a lot of people buy this shit expecting it to sound like gold right out of the box. It’s interesting to me that people will spend YEARS tracking down the right amp and the right combination of speakers/cabs/pedals to get their sound, but spend an hour with an AxeFX and say “I can’t get my tone out of this thing, I’m going to sell it.”

I should also note, I don’t care how well it’s recreating a specific amp. The thing I love about is that I don’t have to stay within the confines of a Dual Rec or a JCM800. My ideal sound is something like a Marshall Boogie Dual Plexifier, or a Marshall Boogie MK800. Being able to fuck around with shit like impedance curves, or adding Mesa’s 5 band EQ to amps that didn’t come with it goes a LONG way in making that dream amp happen. At this point, every amp I’d like to own costs over $2K and it’s just not logical to me to blow that kind of money when I can get more of what I want for $2K and never run out of amps. Shit, I haven’t even played every amp in the damn thing yet and it’s been over a year.

(Included pic of old rig for reference of the amps I used to play through)
 

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[ Donnie B. ] said:
Funny how the top names have stopped doing double blind tests because they were all starting to fail them! :ROFLMAO:

And ya, knowing how to use the equipment correctly goes a long way.
Raise your hands if you've heard someone make a Mesa Boogie Mark amp sound terrible.
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Hell, raise your hand if you’ve ever personally made a Boogie sound terrible, I know I certainly have. First time I played a Dual Rec I was like, “WTF? Is this broken? It sounds like shit, not like Petrucci on Awake!” I had no clue about the active EQ and my usual, smiley face EQ settings definitely weren’t doing the trick. At least by the time I got to a MKIV I knew what to expect and it didn’t take quite as long to figure it out.
 
I’m curious about the AxeFx preamp and a Mesa Boogie Strategy 400 tube power amp. I’d have to think it would be the best of both worlds.
 
RevDrucifer said:
Hell, raise your hand if you’ve ever personally made a Boogie sound terrible, I know I certainly have. First time I played a Dual Rec I was like, “WTF? Is this broken? It sounds like shit, not like Petrucci on Awake!” I had no clue about the active EQ and my usual, smiley face EQ settings definitely weren’t doing the trick. At least by the time I got to a MKIV I knew what to expect and it didn’t take quite as long to figure it out.
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Funny, my first Mesa was an earlier Dual Rec and it sounded awesome right away. Maybe I got lucky because every other Mesa I've owned was work to find the sound.
 
Digital was limited by processing power and software engineering but that has been achieved a decade ago. A vacuum tube physics is perfectly explained by the same math in both the analogue and the digital world. The math doesn't change. Vacuum tubes were engineered with quantum computations just like semi-conductors. The idea computers can't replicate the same math is just magical thinking. We use computers to compute vacuum physics. The same physics used by engineering. Instead of using paper and pen we use a computer to model them. All you needed was the processing power to become available to professional sound engineers and some smart programmers and physics experts to model the physics of guitar amplifiers digitally and Kemper was the company that got there in terms of making that available to everyone. They came up with a way for their hardware and software to profile your rig. It's just frequencies.

Anyone who thinks a guitar cab can something FRFR can't have never been to a music festival.
 
Racerxrated said:
Recording yes....running direct, yes...but standing next to it (frfr or power amp) negative ghostrider. My bud gets a fantastic tone recorded and live through the pa. But no amount of tweaking gets his Kemper to feel and react like a real tube amp when you are standing in front of it.
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I have to agree with Racer on this one... no modeler ever gave me the same feel as a player and I really wanted them to work, I always came away disappointed. The interaction is not the same with digital sound emulation versus analog, it just isn't. 1 and 0's and not the same a electrons leaping from anode to cathode depending on how hard you fret the note, bend it with swirling harmonic distortion with feedback and sustain.

While the sound may be very close or identical within the digitized sonic spectrum they just are not the same. The digitized version is an emulation trying to replicate the analog reality kind of like the shadows on Platos cave wall of reality.

Now I also have to agree the latest AxeFxII and III as well as Kemper get some great killer tones, (Victim 5150 and that Aussie guy doing VH1 was spectacular) going direct live and recorded but I would venture to say that almost any player standing in front of the actual speaker cabinets would have to admit it does not match the same level of intricacies between the player and the amplified signal and speaker interaction. Even Mosfet and transistor clipping circuits while still analog have their limitations to the discerning ear. That's probably why for audiophiles and musicians the vaccum tube is actually still around in 2021.

If something had actually came along and 100% met all the characteristics of analog tubes most would have happily adopted it but they always felt something was lacking didn't they.

Kind of like a real interaction with a beautiful woman versus a digital virtual woman... it might stimulate some of your 5 senses but it is not the real thing...........
 
1s and 0s is just a system called binary for computer engineering. Computers were valve systems in the early days. Electrons move in computers as well. They aren't running on magic. Can they model quantum computations? Absolutely. Same math. In fact amplifiers aren't that hard to replicate in comparison to say modelling atomic collisions in a particle generator. Amplifiers are definitely not as complex as a biological system either.
 
... and we haven't even touched upon the limits of human hearing either. No one can recognize the different quantum fluctuations produced by a vacuum tube at the quantum level. That's like claiming you can hear an electron.
 
BatmansRigTalk said:
1s and 0s is just a system called binary for computer engineering. Computers were valve systems in the early days. Electrons move in computers as well. They aren't running on magic. Can they model quantum computations? Absolutely. Same math. In fact amplifiers aren't that hard to replicate in comparison to say modelling atomic collisions in a particle generator. Amplifiers are definitely not as complex as a biological system either.
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Problem is, people have copied EXACTLY certain vintage circuits with the exact same values and they still can’t replicate the original circuit. You can have a copy that should sound the same based on the numbers but yet it’s still not equal.
Same with modelers. Digital does not equal analog.
 
BatmansRigTalk said:
A vacuum tube physics is perfectly explained by the same math in both the analogue and the digital world. The math doesn't change.
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Then why did the AxeFXII blow away the AxeFXI and it's multiple updates? Ditto for the AxeFXIII and the II?

There's dozens of folks on various forums right now who swear on their kids that the latest FX update (Cygnus?)
is the closest thing to real yet.
 
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Racerxrated said:
Problem is, people have copied EXACTLY certain vintage circuits with the exact same values and they still can’t replicate the original circuit. You can have a copy that should sound the same based on the numbers but yet it’s still not equal.
Same with modelers. Digital does not equal analog.
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Yes they can and have. It's called a Kemper profiler and people claiming Golden ears fail the blind tests which is why they won't do them anymore.

There is no mathematical or scientific reason why digital can't replicate analogue. The math behind analogue systems involves computations. That is what computers are. Computational devices. It's just a matter of engineering and software development.
 
[ Donnie B. ] said:
Then why did the AxeFXII blow away the AxeFXI and it's multiple updates? Ditto for the AxeFXIII and the II?

There's dozens of folks on various forums right now who swear on their kids that the latest FX update (Cygnus?)
is the closest thing to real yet.
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Kemper hasn't updated. It got it right.

Other systems had to catch up. Fractal audio caught up.

Some systems are still behind. Like in the real world some software and hardware is better than others but the point is we are well passed any processor or hardware limitations. All that is limiting us are good engineers behind this stuff.
 
The differences in tone people are hearing is not a difference with tubes but a difference in decades of circuit designs incorporating tubes. New designs not using them caught up by 2010. We have had ten years of profiling and sound capturing across the planet since then. All the amp sounds you could ever want or need.
 
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