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Maybe I am easy to please. 😂 I will try the Cali.
cheers, I appreciate your input
Coincidentally, the "distanced" band I'm with just started working on a medley of cover song snippets for an online event happening next month so I've been auditioning all of the Nembrini amps looking for two or three cleanish tones that'll work in this project. Like @JoyceRoadStudios, the DC30 and BST100 are number one and two for me but playing through them all again reminded me how great each one of them can be with a little bit of tweaking.
Does Nembrini have a Mesa Boogie Mark II emulation?
Just bought the DC30. Pretty cool so far. Do you think it will sound even better with an external IR, for example Ownhammer DC30?
Have been so tempted to get the Cali Reverb (also considered DC30 but I'm not a massive fan of the Vox sound really) for clean fingerpicking electric guitar tones, but I just can't say that I have enough issues with the sound I'm getting from PSA1000Jr into Thafknar to make the investment. Will stick with that I think.
The Voice is the one Nembrini amp I have where I feel it has an IR (one of the Blue speaker ones) I like as much as the Ownhammer IRs.
PSA1000jr is totally suitable for guitar, it’s just a matter of understanding its real world application compared to a traditional amp.
When you are using a traditional guitar amp sim along with a speaker cabinet sim or IR, you are essentially recreating the process of having a guitar amp and putting a microphone next to it and recording that for your project. A real guitar amp has a preamp, a power amp, which then feeds the cabinet and outputs the sound, and you capture it with a mic or several. So with an amp sim you are recreating this hardware process but in the digital or software realm.
Using PSA1000jr is like being in the studio and plugging your guitar direct into a rack mount preamp or mixing board for processing, and it’s really common and no less viable. Setting up a real guitar amp can be a hassle, it’s loud, you have to consider the acoustics of the studio or room, it’s the classic traditional way but it’s not the only way. You plug your guitar or bass direct into a sans amp (PSA1000jr), and you circumvent this process. In fact, many musicians in the studio prefer to go direct and then apply processing, such as adding convolution reverb (IR) to create the environment of a room or a cabinet without having to blast it in the room. So in conclusion the PSA1000jr is a preamp without a cabinet stage, and you use it to go direct to your DAW and apply processing, and you get the same or similar great results.
I tend to prefer the more open sounding, slightly more “realistic” sound of an amp or amp sim, but the preampy sound of going direct with something like Sans amp is just as useful and effective, sometimes even more so.
I love using PSA1000 for bass, drums, vocals, synths, pretty much everything. It’s a great preamp.
Thanks very much for the deep discussion on this topic -- it's very insightful and has been useful to read. I guess the PSA1000 -> Thafknar signal path is pretty much what you describe there, just with the preamp stage moved into software along with the IR cab.
Makes sense to me too -- as a session bassist I pretty much always go direct with a Sansamp BDDI box (live too) and prefer that sound for the most part over an amp, unless the studio has a really spectacular set up and the producer insists on it (I did an album through the Ampeg stack in the closet at Parr St. Studio One that sounded amazing).
Nembrini does not, for Mark II you would use the TH-U Markus II clean/lead (which I like) or the Choptones MarkV rig (which I absolutely love). It’s “40 years of Mesa Boogie in one amp”, including the ii.
I’ve been saving up cash for a few years to buy the Mesa Boogie Mark Five 25/10 head, I want it so bad. But if Nembrini were to come out with the sim and it actually had the multi band eq sliders on the amp face, I would be all about it.
Are there a few good Mark II clean rigs in there? (totally clean, no amp breakup or effects pedals added)?
There's probably a better place for this, but:
I went a little nuts bought the BST 100, the Cali Reverb and the MRH810, which is a Marshall something or other. (Forgive me the nomenclature; I'm a bass player by trade.)
I love the BST and the Cali Reverb. Love them. Superversatile. The Marshall, however, I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. The volume seems WAY lower than the other two when I load all three in an AUM channel and A/B/C them. Is that by design?
There are 31 Mark II rigs in there, none of them are clean, all are low to mid to high gain. However, only a few of them have baked in overdrive pedals. Many of the rigs are just amp and cab with the gain turned up on the rig player to 6.0 or 7.0. I’m not sure but in theory you would just turn the gain down on the rig player to 1.0 and have yourself a clean Mark II rig, but I’m not certain it was intended to be used that way. Meaning, if they wanted to include a totally clean Mark II rig they would have. All the clean rigs from this MarkV come from the tweed channel.
use the amp output knob to adjust the output level. It is post-processing. So it only changes level without affecting the character.
Thanks, @espiegel123
Not sure why it would be so dramatically lower, but that makes me feel better. I'm a true pretender when it comes to guitar tone. And then I went last night for some reason and listened to "Loveless" and now I feel like I'm lost at sea.
Are you using presets or building a tone from scratch? Nembrini amps don’t have a one size fits all input output setting, they will all be different. But you will notice the “input” knob in the rack section next to the IR window will sometimes be preset below noon, or the output knob on the amp will be set really high. A lowered input knob can cause an anemic sound, but yes you want to set your preferred tone at any volume and then raise the amp output to make that same sound louder. What you don’t want is a tone that’s already harsh and fizzy because then raising the output knob will just magnify the already harsh tone.
I will assume your instrument has low output pickups. For my setup the bst and Cali are actually too hot and I have to tame them down a bit, both the input and output. The MRH is better for me in that way but it can also break and get fizzy a little early, so I like to set the tone just below break and simply raise the output volume.
Make sure your input knob in the rack section is at noon for all three when you a/b/c, then you can tweak the output level to match them all. When you say the first two are great and the third is much quieter, for me the first two are way too harsh and loud before I tweak them. So my input knob for bst and Cali tends to stay below 11 o’clock as a result.
With Nembrini you can be clipping the input stage (which is why you adjust the input knob), and then you could end up clipping the software output if the output volume knob is too high (which is why you adjust the output knob), so two part problem and solution. The BST is also more complex because the amp has an input boost knob, master boost knob, and master volume knob (and input knob in the rack section). The MRH has output knob and volume knob, and input knob. They’re all different in how the deal with input and output, but they can all be equally as loud or quiet.
Worth noting: as with a real amp, the input level of the amps affects the tone...as do the knobs labeled gain and volume....as those are part of the modeled circuit. Output, on the other hand, is just a level control.
@ExAsperis99 : as to why the knobs are calibrated as they are, I don't know...and ultimately doesn't matter. The output volume is so dependent on the interplay of all the knobs that it may just have to do with the particular settings you have set up.
Also, I find that it is worth tweaking the knobs and not using their presets. I think the Cali Reverb's Crystal Clean might be the only one of their presets I have found helpful. I love the BST100 but only because I tweaked it a lot to get to know how to set it up from scratch...after not loving the presets at all...but others telling me that it was a great amp...with which I concur.
Nembrini amps take some getting used to. I find that the controls have far more influence on the character than the stuff I used to use (Amplitube, Bias, etc.). And even more importantly, they react far more to nuance in the input. It always bugged me how little turning down my guitar's output level affected the tone of other amps and how little playing dynamics came through. But I got used to it. In fact, I got sloppy as hell because it didn't matter all that much how I played, it all came out pretty much the same.
All that to say ... presets do almost more harm than good with these amps. The first thing one does when they get a new app is to flip through presets. But those presets were created with a guitar and playing style that's almost guaranteed to be different than yours. With the old squishy sims that didn't make as much difference. With these it totally does. I experienced that with the Sound Master. Did not like it much at all at first. It was only after I started dialing in tone, messing with the knobs on my guitar, and remembering how to play that I truly appreciated it.
I noticed with the DC-30 that Nembrini tried making presets labeled with the types of guitar they're aimed at. That's a good move ... but the presets still sucked (to me). Fortunately it doesn't take a huge amount of hunting around to find good tone! It took about 10 minutes to know that DC-30 is a keeper.
One evening of focusing on setting up two or three presets you're really happy with is so totally worth the effort. I don't even play the first chord or note any more before switching to one of them. The "default" preset they load with just kills the vibe every time for me.
I agree. I find most of the presets to be way too hot. If you’re gonna try a new amp you don’t switch on the gain channel straight away!. Even on the “clean” settings input is too high and the tone breaks up too easily.
It’s been said over and over in Nembrini threads, set the input gain close to 1 to get a clean sound. My personal taste is I prefer cleanish and add a fuzz or something rather than distorsion from the amp. So to get a clean sound one needs to tweak the presets, that input gain knob is not even accessible from the main page, which doesn’t really make sense to me. IMO the first, default preset should be clean.
With the older generation of amp sims (GarageBand, bias, amplitube, deplike, Vstomp, Tonestack, etc...) I experience what I call “digital correction”, and I think it’s what you’re talking about. Basically the applied processing tends to homogenize the playing response, dynamics, feel, or whatever you want to call it. There’s compression added by default without the player asking for it. The tones themselves can be good or tweaked to be great, but the feel of it ain’t fooling nobody. All kinds of different guitars with slight tuning variations would end up sounding almost identical when processed through the same sim. I noticed it even when tuning the guitar, some sims would slightly correct the tuning or force the “diode clipping” emulation to still flow a certain specific way. So it becomes a rather forcefully homogenized digital processing that kind of takes your particular guitar and fingers out of the equation. Then with Nembrini I noticed that amps sounded amazing of course, but suddenly some of my guitars sounded horrible, and it was actually responsive to my playing style and dynamics. So I’ve had to make sure my guitars are tuned really well and set up properly with the right pickups heights and adjustments, because with Nembrini it makes a difference. This is also true with th-u, and to some extent also with 20th anniv. It’s not just about the new age processing and IR implementation, it’s also about how the newer apps take the pure dry signal fidelity, it just translates better. Closer and closer to the feel and sound of a real amp...
I love it, my new favorite. Even the mark 5 cleans get that nice trebly but not harsh Mesa sound with sharp attacks.
I know my rigs! I have too many. It’s one of the best captures in the collection. I instantly earmark all the rig purchases that have overall clarity, richness, and smooth presence, and the ones that sound muddy thin, distant or fizzy, I never use again. The MarkV covers all the bases, from scooped funk to hot metal to tweed clean. The last 20 or so rig profiles in there are the tweed clean channel and that’s what I mostly use for my clean tracking. As you said, it has that tweedy attack and presence but without the harshness.
Everyone nuts about the flagship dual rectifier amps that came in the 90s blah blah blah. I owned a 2x12 trem-o-verb 20 years ago. The trem and reverb circuit was fantastic, but the amp was a loud metallic kind of ugly wool. I loved it, then I hated it and sold it. Got a MusicMan head instead. In retrospect I really prefer the sound of the Mark series, it even does jazz.
Has anybody ever tried to feed a Nembrini amp or FX with the cleanest possible GeoShred guitar sound ?
I would be interested to know if a better sound could be achived, or a least, to what extent the sound could be different from what GeoShred offers per se. Sometimes, I feel like GeoShred presets always sound a bit the same and would like to open my horizon. Thanks !
I tried this a bit to see what kind of sounds I could get. My guess is more knowledge and tweaking of the “model” itself is needed. Have you dug into the model parameters? They are quite numerous.
Yes, I think I could write a thesis on how Geoshred works !
I’d read it!
I'm recording a bunch of guitar parts for a video medley that will be aired during a fundraiser next month. For various reasons I'm using Logic Pro rather than the iPad but I have all the Nembrini amps on the Mac, too, and I set out to track every electric part through a Nembrini. So far, I've used the BST100, DC-30, Cali Reverb, and SoundMaster, each with a different OwnHammer cab IR. None of the parts are "heavy" and it's been instructive dialing in clean to slightly broken up sounds that work well for the songs.
Me too, I’ve explored it quite a lot but don’t feel like I’m getting anywhere near what it’s capable of
+1
With the crazy sales now im wondering if i should jump on the Nembrini amp bandwagon, $14.99 🤔
Softube Marshall jubilee rules, you can find them for $5
The solo i played with the softube marshall jubilee here has a very dark un matchable tone
Neural dsp covers Soldano, hands down
Neural dsp also has a great Cali , untouchable cleans
Stl tones Howard Benson covers the crunchiest Marshall
Pa bx_yellow drive is the best sd1 sim
I have the MHR and tried their demos 6 months ago, i love their interface…so what should i get?