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 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 won’t pick a lane, you can’t answer the question. Take the same Deluxe, same mics, same room, and run it through ToneX V2, Quad Cortex V2, NAM A2, Kemper 2.0,…
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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…