fdodds wrote:It's a tricky sort of area when you're running an 'emulation' vs. a chain of effects. i have a yamaha guitar amp, a thr10. it includes yamaha's "VCM" or virtual circuit modelling, they claim they program in a schematic of a real amp's circuitry to model the sound of vintage or famous amp set-ups.
But I have to question if they actually do that, or if they just run a dry signal through a real amp, and then record the resulting wet sound that has all the 'sonic characteristics' of the gear, then make an effects chain that achieves the same 'sonic characteristics'. The resulting effects chain (if executed well enough) would be exactly the same as using the original gear, so even though it's been achieved with a chain of digital effects, if those effects have been tuned correctly it should be exactly the same.
Personally I figure that the different sounds of musical gear like this is such a subtle difference that it's the wrong feature to hype. gear heads and users of musical equipment get all sorts of weird ideas in their heads about the 'sound' of gear, much of which is probably psychosomatic. I work in a guitar shop, and one guitar sounds like junk to some people who come in, the same guitar sounds too good to be true to other customers. heaps of this stuff is just to do with marketing and psychological effects.
to finish off my rant, i'll mention that i like to use the MPC3000 setting, which seems to be a master limiter/compressor with a bit of bass boost. I make noisy **** beats where i max the volume and i like the sound of a hard limit - i find it to be a useful setting to smash a rough beat together just before you bounce it
I think the difference between that and virtual analog emulation is that only sources one input to one output, it being a guitar amp. If you had a mix of say 20+ channels, each channel would need to have its own unique saturation in order to have the same effect.
It's like taking an 8 channel mix and dumping it down to an 8 channel reel to reel.
You could either record those 8 channels individually to the tape, or you could create a stereo mix and record only to two channels of the tape. The difference between a stereo mix hitting the tape and each channel hitting the tape is that the latter would be much clearer and translate much better with the mix than the stereo mixdown.
I'm probably not explaining it well enough, but I'm sure you get where I'm going with that. The point is that if each channel got saturated rather than the whole mix itself, it would sound much more practical.
Also, I'd have to disagree with you on your point about the sound of gear. To some degree, I think a lot of it is just hype. But there are only certain sounds you can get from certain pieces of gear. But I think with some good EQ, compression, distortion, bitrate reduction, some reverb, and some added noise, you can get really close.
