All the air in the room
Guitarists have used amps since the dawn of rock and roll, and for one main reason: to get louder. Originally, their purpose was to boost the volume of a guitar, simply to help people in the audience hear it.
As guitarists experimented, they pushed the loudness to its limits, eventually leading to distortion, which became a characteristic of both guitar sounds and of the amps built to make them sing. For recording, amps were miked up in the studio, and the characteristic of the room became part of the sound. With this added to the built-in spring reverbs, the sense of space and depth became part of the sonic signature of the guitar amplifier. Effects pedals and stompboxes then came along, giving guitarists even more versatility to their sonic palettes.
All of these functions and features are emulated in the virtual amps of today, and with so much potential sound-shaping onboard, you can actually start to look at amp sims in a different light: as comprehensive multieffects units. Whether you’re after saturation, distortion, reverb, chorus, modulation, delay or practically anything else, there’s an amp simulator waiting to make it happen, and crucially, it’s done in a creative, musical-sounding way rather than through a chain of faceless studio hardware boxes.
So amp simulator plugins can be, in many ways, entire collections of effects, built around creativity and experimentation – modular playgrounds that electronic producers may be used to playing with in software packages like Reaktor or Reason.
You can look at an amplifier setup as two parts: the actual ‘amp’ head itself, used to drive and colour the sound; and the speaker ‘cabinet’ through which the sound is output. Needless to say, each one of these stages adds its own specific tonal influence to the signal. An amp that brings the two together in one unit is known as a combo amp.
It’s not uncommon to make use of only one of the amp and cab processes during production, with either a ‘DI’ signal output from the amp, tapped off before anything hits the cabinet, or by piping an effected signal from a mixer into only the cabinet, for recording back once again with some added flavour.
Virtual amp software options, as you’d imagine, come in different shapes and sizes, suiting various philosophies for guitarists and for producers. When you’re selecting your amp of choice, don’t let appearances fool you – in studio recording setups, smaller amps are often chosen by top engineers and guitarists to provide the right tone for the situation, and in production, just because there’s a huge Marshall stack available to you, it doesn’t mean it’ll win out over a 15-watt Orange tube amp.
Whatever your poison, we’re about to take you on a quick ride through the options available in the world of software amps.