Cab Sim Features

[laxu]

Right. I think this is where you need to decide who your audience is. I am somewhat in agreement with mirrors profiles that the target is not somebody that doesn't know (or care) what a 421 is. Seems to me it's going to be a broad cross-section of folks that consider themselves to be at least slightly "more" than just guitarist and see themselves at knowing at least a little about "production" -- one end of the spectrum being those that are on lower part of the assent up Mt. Stupid, and on the other to very experienced actual producers.

My feeling is the LESS experienced the user the more important actual graphical representation is -- I call these folks (and count myself one of them) RPG producers. The more they feel like they are doing the work of music production the better, even if there are some sonic discrepancies that they PROBABLY don't even realize exist creep in because of it.

Yeah you see this sort of thing even in a lot of other plugins. I have a pile of UA plugins that replicate a bunch of famous vintage gear, yet I have never used the real things so I'm having to learn how to use those by e.g watching videos on how they used the gear back in the day. There's a cool factor to "just like the real famous thing!" but it's also kinda stupid to have it painstakingly replicate all the bad things about the design of a piece of gear, if you don't know or care about those quirks.

On the opposite side you have more abstract designs like say FabFilter where it's practical, good sounding, but harder to approach because it lacks any familiarity to other stuff you might have used. Using it doesn't really evoke any feelings in you in the same way as seeing a digital replica of some classic rack unit, amp, pedal etc.

In that sense to me a cab sim designed for everyone might need to detach itself from existing paradigms and try to figure out how to bring it around as something that interests both the pro(sumer) who knows how to work with real mics, and the newbie who has never miced anything in their life and just wants to sound like insert favorite band/song.

That's not an easy task for sure.

 

[MirrorProfiles]

kinda stupid to have it painstakingly replicate all the bad things about the design of a piece of gear, if you don't know or care about those quirks.

I think more often than not this works in favour of analog modelled plugins rather than against them. The ones where it doesn't work are things like HW reverbs, where the hardware has a dreadful UI and the plugin ports it over 1:1. Arturia kind of got it right with their 224 where it has a modern UI option that makes it way more suitable for using with a mouse.

For things like a distressor or 1176 or LA2A, the HW has already made them extremely simple to use - often just a handful of knobs that are well laid out. A lot of hardware design forces you to make important decisions about how the user uses the device that don't always exist in software, and so often software just overlooks that side of things as a result.

 

[Orvillain]

Lots of good stuff in these last few posts to digest, thanks!

I might hit some of you up in private if that is okay??

 

[DLC86]

Devil's avocado

 

[Jarick]

I'm with Jimmy. There's so many virtual cab simulators that we don't need any more. I'd much rather have something that's like a handful of curated IR's from a well known producer like Brendan O'Brien and then really good EQ options to adjust.

 

[Frankencat]

If it's an IR loader, It would be neat to have a 'frequency analyser' feature, which then would sort through a batch of selected local IRs and give it some order from lets say 'bright to dark'.

The Ownhammer IRs have this. I like darker captures in general so it’s cool for that but otherwise, picking through 20 different versions of a cab IR is a bit of a pain.

 

[ejecta]

I think what is missing in this space is not a new cab sim, but a plugin that can actually leverage the huge library of IRs that so many folks have. OH and other file naming system is sufficiently regimented it shouldn’t be TOO tedious to do the leg work to make an app that can import those packs into a better UI than just “scroll through a bunch of files”.

I’ve always called it IR dumpster diving. I hate it with a passion but is what it is at this point. Hopefully in the future someone will come up with something better. I still say IR’s IMHO are the weakest link in the digital modeling world