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Nembrini app sale
Just picked up Nembrini Blackice Beta Gamma Bass Amplifier for half off for $10. So far so good with the guitar amp sims I've gotten and used in AUM.
Comments
Is Blackice really better than MixBox CS as a bass amp?
Damn - thanks for the heads up. Grabbed BGExtasy for $9.99 despite being without a guitar... 🥺
I'll just set that aside for when I see my instruments again.
Honestly, I think an app like MixBox CS should be seen as a shot across the bow for any company which is only offering a single amp or effect. They need to start making suites of amps and effects to offer something more competitive. Maybe Nembrini already realizes this?
Dunno. Since getting back into the iOS musician world a few months ago, I've been trying new amps and re-trying guitar amps. Nembrini and THU got the most raves around here. TBH, Bias 2 still sounds pretty darn good, but it doesn't play as nice with AUM. Nembrini is great, other than they need to get a better icon than just "N" for their AUM nodes.
As a side note, also impressed with how MIDI Guitar 2 upgraded and plays nice with AUM.
Anyway, I do recommend Nembrini in general, though I can't compare it to MixBox.
Don’t sleep on Fabfilters Saturn 2. It’s pretty great.
Yes. Blackice is the best bass amp on iOS. The tone I can get with Blackice and my Fender P-Bass is honestly hard to believe. Phenomenal analog feel/character, audio quality/fidelity. Extremely realistic growl thump and clank, and it retains the natural tone of your bass. You can really hear the acoustic nature of the bass and fretboard. It sounds like a real amp. Blackice can do the cleanest of cleans and jazz tones, to classic rock Ampeg tones, all the way to crazy metal which makes owning an app like Mammoth redundant. I know it’s called Blackice but it should be called the gold standard, as far as iOS bass amps are concerned.
Many people will say that bass amp sims don’t really matter. You can just record a bass track completely dry and direct and EQ it without any sims. This makes sense in a way, because a bass track should just be unfussy and mono and sit right in the center of your mix. A dry bass track with some eq shape will often sound good enough. With guitars being double tracked and stereo tracked, with how they sit in a mix, and with their more polyphonic nature, guitar amp sims and IRs and the sound and space of a room are all much more important. This is why most bass amp sims, whether MixBox or amplitube or even GarageBand, can get the job done. If the MixBox bass module sounds good to you then it’s good enough for you. I wouldn’t compare it to Blackice though. MixBox uses cabinet emulation but Blackice uses real IRs. To me the MixBox bass module sounds very good, but it has a preampy kind of sound, whereas Blackice sounds more like a bass amp on stage. I’d compare the MixBox module more to the Nembrini PSA1000, and I prefer the PSA1000 more and it’s more versatile for use with other instruments. But I wouldn’t think twice before processing a bass track with MixBox, it’s great, I just think it’s a different application, more of a mixing/mastering/processing tool than a guitar/bass amp.
For bass amps the other contenders are Overloud’s Bass Rigs Volume 1, which also uses IRs and sounds comparable to Blackice, but it’s a collection of 40 rig profiles of different bass amps, like Kemper profiles, whereas Blackice is one amp you sculpt from scratch.
The bass amp sims in Overloud are also good, but so are the ones in Amplitube, and many of the other guitar suite apps. I use OwnHammer Ampeg IRs with all of these, and it sounds good.
There’s nothing Mammoth does that Blackice can’t IMO, and Blackice sounds better doing it.
Then there’s Nembrini PSA1000 senior and junior, both amazing preamps for a bass track.
I don’t think this is the point of MixBox. They’re not trying to wipe out amp sims with the few modules they have. The MixBox amps sound closer to the iFX Rack amps, basically modules that sound preampy and use cab emulations rather than IRs. They can work with processing in a mix, but would never gig with a MixBox module as my amp sim.
MixBox is for mixing and mastering tools, for using on busses, glueing a multi track drum bus, or for the master strip. They are modules for mixing, I don’t think of them as amps or sims at all even if they come with a few. MixBox shines with effects, EQ modules, preamp modules, etc… I don’t think they anyone’s favorite guitar/bass amps. But yes there’s a big advantage with having modules with multi route options for all uses available as a suite. It just screams production tool to me, not an amp to play. Nembrini however has to be chained in a DAW or AUM with other effects, there’s no Nembrini rig host yet on iOS, so Nembrini standalone is just one component at a time. That’s why standalone apps like Overloud, Amplitube etc, are liked by those who don’t want just one single amp and want everything in the box. I like both, there’s something very satisfying and visceral about using just one single amp that you love.
Nembrini must-haves:
Delay3000
PSA1000
Blackice
Shimmer Delay Ambient Machine (underrated)
Analog rack Fuzz
The Boss
Minotaur
DC Voice
Cali Reverb
BG Extasy
BST100
Actually… basically just EVERYTHING, both paid and free (except maybe the Cali Dual and Quinta IMO).
Are Nembrini amps capable of IR loading? And what is the best model for clean pedal platform amp?
Yes was very underwhelmed by Quinta.
The Nembrini amps included some IRs optimized for performance. You cant load your own inside the amp. I use THAFKNAR placed after the amp to load my preferred IRs (and turn off the builtin IR). The included IRs aren't bad...I just prefer a few from OwnHammer.
Thank you! Will check Thafknar then.
My impression after listening to the demos is a big fat ... bleh. It ain't often that I dislike virtually every demo track for any product. There was only maybe one out of the bunch that didn't just completely turn me off and that one didn't impress me.
Perhaps that only speaks for the demos themselves, but if not, then this one just really isn't for me.
Thx for the reminder, I finally got my sound master
Just got this and seems to have some nice tones with synth bass going through it. Worth a chance I’d say.
As an aside I think the delay 3000 is really useful (ducking function especially) and the PSA1000 is handy but will stop there as a non guitar user in iOS.
There's a vogue for a clanky, aggressive tone that this amp does really well, and which I hate. There are a ton of presets I'll never use. But the Blackice is really versatile, and I can easily dial in an Ampeg B15 or SVT sound, and that's where I live almost exclusively, and it's by far the best bass amp sim I've found. (It's also capable of reproducing the nearly fried tone of every Gallien-Krueger 400 that was part of every backline at every 600-800 capacity club in the Northeast in the late 90s if you really want to get nostalgic....)
Interesting about the product demos, I haven’t heard any of them. I rarely make a decision on a product based on the sound in a demo, since all gear is different. Demos for me are more about looking at the UI, specs, and general assets of a product. If I went by Nembrini demos I wouldn’t have bought a single one of their guitar amps, since melodic heavy metal ballad shredding is not my genre. It seems to be the genre for all guitar and bass sims though.
@ExAsperis99 totally agree, I use Blackice for pristine cleans to Ampeg SVT classic/hard rock tones, and it does that the best, but also it’s versatile enough to cover the industrial metal genre as well. To my ears the traditional classic or modern rock bass tone sounds and feels quintessential with Blackice.
@wim I do own most if not all of the bass amp sims on iOS. All of them can get the job done in some way, but Blackice and th-u Bass Rigs Vol. 1 stand above the rest, sound and feel the best, and just generally come off like super realistic bass rigs. Neither of the demos would have convinced me. Still, a completely dry bass track with no sims whatsoever is often good enough for most. The trouble with bass tracks is with apps like GarageBand or AUM default to stereo. That makes bass tracks flubby and pitch undefined. It’s gotta be mono and smacking you in the face right down the middle.
Thanks @Zerozerozero @ExAsperis99 and @JoyceRoadStudios - what I mainly wanted to hear is that it's useful for more than just the kind of tones in those demos. I can get that kinda crap tone by just throwing my bass through a couple distortions.
If y'all say its good for less aggressive stuff then I'm in while it's on sale. Nembrini has almost never let me down and I don't have a software bass amp that I'm very fond of right now.
Do you have an equipped Mac/PC? You could demo it there…
Hey, I don't understand what the PSA1000 is or would do for my bass or guitar. Is the idea that the PSA1000 and an IR is all I'd need for a recording?
Also... what is different about the "junior" version.
It's just a good preamp that you can get some decent bass tones out of. Kinda like playing through one of those old SansAmp bass DI's straight into the board. Plenty of great recordings were done that way.
You don't even especially need a cabinet IR for bass (I'll get piled on for saying that. 😂), but yeh, if you want a cabinet then that's all you might need. It all comes down to personal taste.
Junior is mono. Which is better for bass anyway.
Nah, just gonna go for it. It's worth risking $10 just to avoid polluting my Mac with iLock. I still have an unreasoning hatred of that system.
Thanks for the idea though.
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Thanks!
@joegrant413 it’s a magic sauce preamp, one of the best things Nembrini has ever released. It’s not just for bass, just like the SansAmp hardware it’s based on, it’s great on drums, synths, guitar, and vocals (if you want a saturated type vocal). It’s not quite a guitar/bass amp, more like a preamp you use when going direct to console. You can use it on bass/guitar with or without an IR, it has a different flavor compared to a traditional amp sim format. PSA is really for adding harmonic color, saturation, distortion, punch, and ripeness to your track, and you can run the AUv3 as many times as you want in a project. Read up on the hardware it’s based on and it will give you a better sense of what it’s for.
PSA senior is stereo and Jr is mono only. They’re basically the same thing, but owning both is probably redundant, especially because Senior can be switched to mono, and Jr can be run twice for stereo. I still recommend PSA Senior because it does what the JR does, but that’s not the case the other way necessarily. The Senior also has a nifty “mid-side” feature for stereo image.
Try them on everything, they sound killer.
The “loop vitalizer” preset in PSA Senior is one of my absolute favorites on bass. It’s bright and very grindy, and satisfying. And the PSA Junior does have a lot of bass specific presets.
Yeppers, Nembrini comes through. Totally off-putting demo tracks aside, I’m super happy with Blackice.
Thanks for the recommendations in this thread. I'm not a guitar person but I process a lot of guitar type timbres and hadn't realised that the psa1000 was a SansAmp simulation. This is exactly the sort of guitar processor I crave - processors that are good for far more than guitars.
I also like processing bass synths through amps and will have a tinker with the Blackice demo on the desktop. From the sounds of things, this will also be a solid iOS purchase.
Based on my last post, which Nembrini apps do people think are great for non-guitar source material?
Delay3000 is one of the best. Worth it even if you have lots of other delay apps.
Which Nembrini amp sim is a good all-rounder? I use Fender amps IRL—Tweed champ and a Princeton Reverb. Something that can get dirty, but not high gain.