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Comment by r2ob | Hacker News Reader

what's the point about an amp emulator that you can't change the drive param?

I can't understand the NAM hype...

How often do you fiddle with the drive parameter (if it's not just boosting the input directly, which works fine with NAM too) mid song? Pretty much never, right? So a lot of folks don't need that control and if the drive level isn't great and that parameter isn't just boosting the input, use a different capture .

It's no hype, but as long as we live in a "snapshot" world it is difficult to truly model some amp.

Even a very simple amp with 3 knobs that go from 0 to 10, would need like 11^3 = 1331 snapshots, if your parameter resolution is 1

For some amp like a JCM800, with the same resolution, you'd need 11^6 = almost 1.8 million snapshots, just for parameters like the front knobs. And then you have other things like tubes, bias, etc. Increase the resolution and number of parameters, and the number explodes.

Again, it is not a hype - but there are severe limitations if your goal is to make a digital twin of some amp. So just treat it as "snapshot of that exact tone", which you can then sculpt a bit with before the input and after the output.

NAM is groundbreaking and very useful. Unfortunately the people most annoyingly hyping it on gear forums are the usual crop of bedroom "tone hunters" who cosplay as musicians on the internet by pontificating about their pet gear preferences and suffering from degenerate GAS. They want a free Kemper because they're afraid of pressing buttons on a modeler and don't have the executive function to simply ignore the advanced parameters in an amp simulator ("I spend more time tweaking than I do playing!").

Regardless of the discourse around it I'd love a small, affordable NAM pedal that I could use as an emergency backup for my Fractal. I've entered my old man phase of playing and only use one amp setting because I roll back my volume for cleans; a profile of my SLO patch would be mint.

It’s the same with profiling generally. You get pregain, post eq and maybe some simulated stuff inside the amp. I’ve never spent time with a Kemper but my understanding is that the base tone is what it is.

Not a bad thing in my book. It’s an antidote to endless knob tweaking. But I suspect it leads to endless profile library grooming.

I have a Kemper. Yes, the base tone is what it is - you’ll usually download a profile like “Basket case” and it will sound roughly like the song if you have the right guitar. It’s heavily pre-styled and you can’t really make it sound that different - and why would you?

Nuno B said that he played EVH's guitar and rig, and he sounded like....nuno. Thanks to Rick Beato for the interview, and making music interesting again.

Might have misunderstood (not really a guitar guru), but long tapping/clicking on the drive block allows you to adjust drive, tone and level values.

https://github.com/dashersw/coyopedal#using-the-pedal

Interesting. I don't know enough about NAM as I haven't cared too much. I know of it from watching Glen Fricker, an online persona I enjoy but don't blindly follow by any means (I'm not even a metal musician, even though I played in a metal band for a few years).

I've never really moved on from the, uh, actual amplifier. What's the point of amplifying an extremely imperfect instrument if you aren't going to use an imperfect, defective, amplification device?

Obviously lots of people will disagree with me and will take my previous statement as some kind of law I'm trying to lay out. Do what you want. Pristine sounds can be converted in cold hard cash, I get it.

Uh, that's actually all I've got.

I don't disagree with you. I just have an equal wish to state my equally valid piece on the matter :

The majority of the world's guitar players - or hobbyists if you prefer - don't play in bands (yet, or maybe ever), and it's likely - given urban realities - that most don't have regular access to a space where amplifiers can be meaningfully used. After all, you don't buy an amplifier to run it at 2.

For a lot of those people, guitar playing has a different meaning than the rock-band meme of "Fender/Gibson/Ibanez/... & Marshall/Peavey/Mesa/Fender/..., jamming penta-blues on stage with the boys" that's persisted as the carbon-copy expected setup since before The Beatles and Hendrix. That's ok. Nothing wrong with either.

And the economics of real amplifiers aren't kind to guitar players. We all have a friend whose biggest lifetime purchases consist of a long line of Holy Grail Amplifiers, the amp to end all amps, sooooo much better than all the rest... once every 4 years for the past 40.

Let alone ones from poorer economies.

And both the reactivity and tone of modelers is so good now that even trained ears can have trouble distinguishing between them. In the vast majority of cases it's not a downgrade from a real amp.

Here in India we have a little explosion of youtube-trained bedroom guitarists with outstanding chops, playing live to small but dedicated audiences. Almost none of them would have been able to afford a "proper" gig amp and cab, let alone a place to practice with them.

I think you can have it both ways these days: have an actual amplifier and not bother with an oversized power amp which has to be saturated or attenuated. There are a lot of good preamp tube pedals, which can be then fed into headphones, mac/pc, speakers with cab simulation or a simpler solid-state poweramp into guitar cab. For me personally, this tech is much cooler than all the flawed modellers. I still have real knobs and a real amp reacting.

> There are a lot of good preamp tube pedals, which can be then fed into headphones, mac/pc, speakers with cab simulation or a simpler solid-state poweramp into guitar cab.

That hybrid setup can deliver very satisfactory sound but for some guitarists, they also want real tube power amps because they behave differently than solid-state power amps.

The tube preamps give the distortion fuzz but the tube power amps also provide the extra dynamics that makes the whole response under the fingers more spongy, velvety, etc. Connecting the preamp outputs of a Mesa Boogie or Soldano into a solid-state amp has a different feel than tube power amps. The solid-state amp is definitely usable... but it's different.

That said, I sold all my tube amps and just use the stock digital emulations of guitar amps in Logic Pro. I got rid of almost all the analog gear that was heavy and required maintenance (e.g. new replacement tubes cost $200) because I didn't want it weighing me down as I got older.

They do, but this interplay between preamp and saturated poweramp is basically unachievable in home setup due to how loud it is. Then next suggestion is then to use an attenuator or a power soak, but they also color the sound. And all this besides the cab speakers behaving differently on low volume levels anyway.

The premps I am talking about is something like Tone King Imperial preamp pedal - it is a real preamp, is compact and sounds good with any output source. Tubes in those are not expensive and hold for 10k hours, compared to tubes in poweramp sections, which also often have to be biased.

I have my small digital modeler for travel, but that is all of the use cases I have for them. They are "Ok" - that is most praise I can give to them. "Bland and uninspiring" would be a more realistic description. I have not tried expensive modellers on the level of QC, but I try to build more of my life away from screens and IT, so I am not really interested.

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