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Thanks for telling me... hearing this is making me feel inspired to put something together that can be released on an earlier timeline. I’ll work on it.
One of the key problems seems to be that in gain stage both the preamp and the power amp are class AB amplifiers (meaning that they use two tubes, one for the positive valued signal and the other for negative). No guitar amp that I am aware of does it that way. They all use a single tube (class A) preamp and then most use class AB for the power amp. The fender champ is class A power amp too.
So... to make it sound like the real thing, the preamps have to be class A. And I am working on doing that switch, but it means a lot of extra work.
But the class AB preamp has a distinctive sound that is nice at lower gain. Perhaps the thing to do is release it with the AB preamp but make it more clear to customers that this isn’t a realistic model of any existing amplifiers.
Basically this is the question you have to be clear for yourself about. Real sim or original crafted own amps
And then... take it from there.
BTW I don’t really understand all that, but I really admire that there are people who do and can deliver such beautiful and inspiring plugins 🙌🏼 👊🏼😎
Going back to what you said earlier about offering lots of different models: personally I would be much happier with an app that did a small number of sounds really well, than one which offers a hundred different presets and amp types.
In my experience most normal guitar players (by normal I mean those who are not professional studio players) eventually settle on ‘their’ sound after having tried a variety of guitars and amps over the years, and once there, rarely have the need or desire to use all sorts of other guitar sounds.
I would be in heaven if you could nail a Tweed Deluxe, Blackface Super Reverb, an AC15/30, a Marshall Super Lead, a Mk1 Boogie and maybe a Roland Jazz Chorus or Polytone Mini-Brute.
Toss in a couple of more modern, high gain amps for the metal crowd and every electric guitar player who records in iOS will be your happy customer!
Id also like to let you know that I've been very happy with a lot of the tones in gainstage.
I've just spent £19.99 on the Nembrini BST and it's very good but testing it out side by side with gainstage , both on the American clean pre-sets and to my ears there's very little difference, both good useable tones.
American clean, AC 30, slow dancing and the kid c tones are all great . I thought the EVH one was very good too.
If you could get a pre-set tone sounding reasonably close to SRV on Lenny/Riviera Paradise , Hendrix on Little wing/castles made of sand then I could ask nothing more of you.
Please don't be discouraged I think your really onto something here.
Thanks. I’ll consider that.
We did the stevie ray tone before, but I didn’t release it as a preset because I lost the settings, so its just a matter of recreating something we did before. Hendrix... I tried but felt we needed to design a more authentic class A preamp to get that Little wing sound.
Ok I just have to figure out what's in there that’s good and solid and how to make a package product that can be explained and marketed in a way that is easy for the customers to understand what to expect (and what not to expect) when they buy it. I guess there’s a common thread among the amp models that sound good and that’s a sort of blues vibe. Where the rock and metal sounds need more work. So maybe we could throw a stevie ray tone in there with the other clean and blues amps and call it “gainstage blues”, with the intention that something like a “gainstage metal” and “gainstage rock” would come along later on.
Thanks Tim. I will consider these suggestions.
I won’t be part of the beta, but if it comes with a built-in guitar and bass tuner, it will be a instabuy for me. Auria has THM, which is really great, but having to resort to an app just to tune the guitars is not cool.
I would LOVE to make an AU3 tuner. We don’t plan to include it in the amp though. To my mind, AUM is the perfect tool to tie a collection of plugins together and unite them into a guitar rig. So my vision for iOS guitar rigs is to move away from monolithic standalone apps tuat have amps, pedals, tuners, all in one app to a modular enviournment where every piece of gear is a separate plugin. This won’t please everyone, I know, but it will have a unique set of strengths.
The main thing I dislike about theone-app-does-all guitar rig is that its nearly impossible for one company to make a good model of every effect. I buy one app that has good amps but there’s no reverb that suits me. I buy another that has a good tube screamer emulation but the amps sound bad. You get the picture.
The obvious solution is the one we have all been doing for years in hardware: I buy each piece of gear individually and connect it all up any way I like. This can only happen when the all amps and pedals are individual, separate audio units.
@Blue_Mangoo : I like gain stage quite a bit. There are a couple of things that I think need a bit more attention. I feel like here is something missing (in the high-mids maybe) . Maybe this is a matter of adjusting the behavior of the tone controls or needing a fourth knob/band? I am not sure. It sounds good but sometimes a little muddy.
The other is that I find that (like most iOS amp sims) it is less sensitive to nuances of input volume in terms of how that effects the amount of saturation. With GainStage I find that I have to play exaggeratedly softly if I want to set it up so that I can have just a hint of distortion with soft playing and healthy amount when playing hard. It is the sort of thing one can't tell by comparing recordings but is apparent if I play through my actual amp (a Katana which is actually a modeled amp but has responsiveness similar to my neighbor's tube amp). The real amp acts almost as if there is expansion and compression happening (probably not what is actually going on). So, with my actual amp you can get a larger range of distortion for a given input dynamic range.
I think the gainstage Clean/blues with classic rock and metal versions separately is a great idea.
This modular approach is exactly why I think your on to a good thing, traditionally that's exactly how a guitarist would build their sound, guitarists have often used pedalboards with lots of individual pedals. Quite a few also use multiple amps to get the tones they like.
Trying to please players of differing styles is next to impossible within one app.
I agree. That’s just an EQ problem. But I want to fix it in the amp presets; it shouldn’t be left for the user to correct by turning knobs.
Hm... well all the higher gain stuff in gainstage needs to be redesigned. That is clear. But the bluesy ones seem great to me in terms of being able to clean up when I play quietly. Do you usually play humbuckers or single coils?
Sometimes I wonder if this complaint has something to do with the audio interface rather than the software, since people say it about almost every amp sim.
I don't think the issue is audio interfaces. I suspect that the reason the desktop and iOS sims (as opposed to modeling amps) is that they haven't worked out or spent much time perfecting this aspect of things. And it is something a developer could only fine tune if they actually have an amp there to a/b with. I was really happy with GainStage's responsiveness for the first few days with it ... but I hadn't played through my amp in a while. When I went back to my amp, I immediately noticed that I needed less extreme differences in dynamics to get the range I was looking for. It may be that a lot of people on computer s don't really care about this so devs haven't given it that much attention?
The early hardware simulations like the Pod were also weaker in this aspect than their later amps.
I don't have way of testing this theory, but I wonder if some expansion of the signal range in front of the saturation with compensating compression after would impact this.
I suspect you could ship it as a "Saturator App" and avoid the feature to feature comparisons with all the $10-100 Amp Library +Pedals +Cab products and describe it as an IOS Tone Shaper that models Saturation, Distortion, Reverbs and EQ Models. It's an underserved market but works for the AUM, DAW style.
I think calling it "Gain Stage" was clever... as in "What is it used for"? In the "GAIN" stage of any channel pipeline or anywhere you want to place it.
Turning towards the clearly understood Amp Sim market placed you in direct comparison with the 2+ years of development and $20+ competitors. Your development model can't compete with that sunk cost.
Ship it with these great presets and let people find their preferred tones and underprice the big boys. If it has payback... make free upgraded presets to get another round of buyers or consider the IAP model.
That fact that you had to work on other products that had faster playback just means the effort to date carries interest charges.
Amp Sim's have audiences of buyers and smaller audiences that complain about them. I'm cold on Amplitube for example and didn't enjoy the $20 Brian May upgrade product compared to your "beta" app for my tastes in tone. I like clean with presence. Can't really play much power rock. I like the Jazz tones of a Gibson into a Clean Fender with the bass up the midi flat and the highs rolled back.
I always wonder how many sales you need to make to cover 60 engineering man days of development. It probably depends on wages, cost of living, etc. But you guys seem so data driven I'd expect you'd model that too.
Ship the beta and take it away. You'll get sales to gauge the market. I know there will be complaints about A/B channels and the lack of knobs. A/B for me comes with MIDI control of 2 instances in AUM and I accept that I can't really spend the time tweaking knobs so much.
Just pick a preset and play damn it. That's a benefit and a feature to me in a Saturator... anything you leave out can be added via AUM like your excellent Parametric EQ to shape the
tone further (like visual knobs... Duh). Has anyone tested how many instances will run in parallel? A lot I'll bet... that's a benefit.
I like the idea of selling the current app as "Gainstage Blues". It's also good for lo-fi indie rock vibes. I agree with @espiegel123 about the mid/high range needing to be a bit less low-passed. That was my only criticism as well.
Run it into a Visual EQ and adjust the "knobs" to taste. So, easy with AUv3 apps.
This whole project started with a video of amp emulation with an EQ and a saturator in AUM.
There's a video that explains the basics... now adding the additional details for great Amp simulation is what we'll pay for. How much should we pay? Intro? Long term? Black Friday?
The more time spent getting the app boxed the more we probably have to pay. Returns mess up the whole economic model so setting expectations is key... how transparent is an Open Free Beta? Still call it an amp sim and the iTunes scores will drop by 2 stars and lots of complaining that my Crate Amp sound better... any hardware amp will sound better than headphones or the cheap sound systems we use for our iDevices in the large. I know the ABF users are smarter, more careful purchasing and have better audio gear but an App lives and Dies by the reviews and ratings if it's a guitar product. That's why I would not call it a guitar product and be held to have a standalone instance to meet expectation. Call it a Saturator Effect and let the smart buyers choose it for tone shaping like a great pedal or "pod".
I’m not an electrical engineer so this theory could be totally wrong, but here is why I suspect the audio interface might be involved:
There are good software models and bad ones, but I see no reason why the best desktop software modellers would be any less skilful than the people making hardware digital amps. I also don’t think they spend less effort on it. If it were one or two software products that have this complaint then it would definitely make sense to accuse the software but when its 100%, then looking to the audio interface is not totally unwarranted.
About the audio interface: Suppose the impedance at the input jack isn’t the same as the input jack on most guitar amplifiers. Or suppose that it is the same when the input volume is above half way, but due to the fact that the digital interfaces have terrible-sounding clipping, all of us are turning the volume down low, which puts the impedance at the input far above what it would be on an amp and causes the guitar pickups to interact with the preamp in the interface in a much more linear fashion than it would if you plugged into an amp. And further suppose that the hardware amp models realised this and designed the hardware part of their audio interface to match the impedance of a guitar amp while still keeping enough headroom to avoid digital clipping at the A to D converter.
In fact, if you were designing the audio interface for something like the Boss Katana, and you knew that people were gonna put pedals in front of it that could clip the D to A converter, you would necessarily have to design some kind of soft clipping stage into the hardware preamp to guarantee that no matter how high the output of the pedals out in front, they still won’t get digital clipping. When you think of it this way, that’s the only way you could design a digital amp that takes pedals at the input. They really have no choice on that matter, so the audio interface of the Katana, Kemper, and any other digital amp that takes pedals has to feature some analog soft clipping in the preamp circuit, this is something the digital interfaces we buy off the shelf will never do unless they are purpose-built for use with guitar amp modelling software.
That’s just a theory. We need a real electrical engineer to confirm it, but it seems quite compelling to me.
But, perhaps your idea of using an expander is spot-on: that might be able to recover some of the dynamics of the original by forcing the clipping at the software model of the preamp to respond more dynamically.
It might not be an expander in the typical sense of the word where there is an attack and release time but more like a kind of waveshaper, with the curve inverted to expand the peaks rather than clip them.
Ok. I see your point. I think we will work on releasing a product called “gainstage clean” or perhaps with a more clever name, but its a guitar oriented saturator with a collection of clean amp models. It probably sells for $6 USD. And a blues version soon to follow, probably at the same price. And we will stop trying to market it as models of real amps. I might even change the names to be less suggestive of classic amp models, just to set a precedent that in the future we are going to mess around and have fun and release all kinds of different amp designs that may do things hardware guitar amps never do such as having class AB preamp sections or putting expanders and waveshapers before the preamp section.
You could be right about the interface. I have no idea. I am curious to see if the expander-like front end gets closer. You might call it "touch" or something. It seems like there are two coarse level aspects that might be important. The amount of dynamic range expansion and some sort of floor or gain. Kind of the way an attenuverter can have a control for multiplication and one for addition -- as one might need some gain or gain reduction to get the actual dynamic range into the sweet spot for the amp.
I am gonna try it.
@Blue_Mangoo I’m also not an electrical engineer but I’ve worked with electronics on and off since the 70s. The circuitry in a passive guitar is pretty simple and the capacitance of the cable and the impedance of the input will definitely change the sound of the guitar - but not by very much. Mostly it’s about the brightness of the sound and not everyone wants a bright guitar sound; a lower impedance input or a higher capacitance cable will cause a less bright sound but it’s still perfectly usable.
However, most guitar amp inputs are going to be at least 1M impedance and it won’t do any harm to seek that also in an audio interface.
The level you set the interface to shouldn’t change the impedance, however. The level is going to be adjusted after the first stage of the input (which is where the input impedance is set).
I can’t comment on your point about the soft clipping to prevent the A to D hard clipping. I’m not sure why someone would build that in - wouldn’t you just turn the input level down? Perhaps I’m missing what you’re saying.
I use Scuffham S-Gear which has an amazing response to different picking levels. For me, this just works like a ‘real’ amp and the A to D interface doesn’t present an issue. You set it appropriately and just play and it feels ‘natural’.
One more thing: Mike Scuffham started out as a valve amp designer (at Marshall) and shifted to software. So he actually does know all about amp hardware and how it works to get sounds.
He also doesn’t release clones of actual amps - instead they are his designs (and some of them are clearly inspired by real amps).
Interesting. Thank you.
Your point about turning the gain down rather than using soft clipping makes sense, but you never really know how much headroom you need because you don’t know what kinds of pedals people are going to use. I guess you could just turn the volume really far down. But how far down can you afford to go? You have to deal with noise and quantisation issues.
However, if you are right about the input impedance not making as much difference as people say then this doesn’t explain the problem. There must be something wrong with the software.
I haven’t tried the scuffham s gear yet. I think its time I took it for a spin. Thanks for the recommendation.
There’s a free trial, I believe...
Cool. I’ll check it out.
Just wanted to say, I'm really, really looking forward to that. Incredibly exciting. That's exactly what I need!
I like this. I don’t really care about nailing someone else’s “tone”, I just want something that sounds good and is responsive to touch.
I'm using the trial of Scuffham S-Gear now. I have to say that it's the best amp sim software I've heard so far. I haven't found the sound I really love yet, but it's definitely a step up from everything else I've tried.
I tried the scuffham s-gear and I think I now see what you mean about touch sensitivity and dynamic responsiveness. both gainstage and scuffham “respond” to dynamics but scuffham responds by distorting and gainstage responds by compressing. The gainstage response might be interesting and even quite musical but it isn’t realistic. I think gainstage would respond to dynamics with more variety of distortion tones if it had more stages in its preamp section, so I will work on that.
Thanks for the feedback.
Very interested to see where this goes. If you can nail this, it will be very special. Thanks for looking into this.
The GUI looks very nice. But - can I suggest the addition of nice big arrows to move through presets rather than having to enter the preset menu each time, which requires one click to open and one to choose. Also, for the actual menu, you could take a leaf out of Magellan 2’s book and have presets listed in columns, not just rows. This amp is sounding good though!