Digital Harshness
Modelers, captures, and the rest of the signal chain.
Notes on modelers, captures, pickups, and the rest of the chain — written for people who care how guitar tone actually gets made.
Latest
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I’ve been getting the same kind of note lately. A guy owns a Kemper. Owns a Stadium. He buys a Flex Prime for $499 and writes to ask if he’s crazy for thinking about selling both. Talk him off the ledge. I’m not going to. Not all the way. Those two names keep showing up. Kemper. Stadium. People who were happy — sometimes for years — put a $499, $699, or $999 box on the board and the gig still works. A $999 unit bumping something off is not a shock. A Quad Cortex Mini at $1,399 can bump almost anything. What’s new…
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I’ve been thinking a lot about that question. Which modeler should you buy. It still gets asked like it’s 2019. People want one winner. A ranking. Something you can drop in a comment and be done. That made sense when you could still hear a real gap between platforms. It doesn’t make as much sense now. The better question is… which lane are you in? If you…
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I’ve been thinking a lot about NAM A2 lately, and something finally clicked. Steve Atkinson created Neural Amp Modeler. Tone 3000 is the company behind the massive public library of NAM captures — and the team that sat down with Steve and built NAM A2. The version number is not the story. What they did with it is. They took a competitive advantage —…
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For a long time the honest complaint about modelers wasn’t tone. It was feel. You could get a recording that fooled people. You could get a live sound that worked. Then you’d dig in on the edge of breakup, roll the volume back, or try to play soft and loud in the same phrase, and the thing would go flat. That was the gap. Tubes forgave you. A lot of digital…