Sascha Franck
Rock Star
- Messages
- 4,302
It's like that since milleniums and that's just the way things go. And while that might come across as somewhat cynical, it's not, it's just realistic.
When someone invited the wheel (and yes, I am aware that it likely wasn't a singular event, but you get the idea), other people wanted wheels as well. You couldn't come across and sell them a rectangular thing instead. And once cars were invented, it made little sense to breed horses for transportation duties any longer.
Every bit the same is obviously as well true in guitar amp land. Once someone comes up with a popular thing, you'll have to follow suit, especially in case you're doing stuff for the masses.
If you're building modelers, you gotta deliver as authentic as possible versions of at least some amount of amps. Without, say, a Fender, a Marshall, a Vox and a modern highgain amp you wouldn't selll anything. And by now, this is not where people stop, you also have to add all sorts of other amps. If you don't, you're out. Fwiw, this perfectly explains the rather little popularity of Boss' GT units. They're most excellent in pretty much all other aspects, absolutely on par with everything else, but people want moooaar toaaannz, something Boss doesn't deliver. Might as well be the less than shiny IR support, but basically, that's absolutely the same thing - people expect proper IR support, so you likely also wouldn't sell a modeler without IR support anymore (interestingly enough, I see that to possibly chance at least a bit as long as companies offer their own "masked IR" cabsims, such aswhat we've gotten with the HX 3.5 upate).
There's a whole bunch of other "celebrity" gear that people seem to want rather urgently. Just to name a Digitech Drop or FreqOut alike pedal. Or shimmer reverbs. Don't add them and you're not going to survive among the top end players.
And the very same now seems to be true for cloning. It's just market demand.
Now, there's obviously the moral and legal aspects. The latter only exist because humans care very little about the former. And once the latter can be navigated around (or when a patent expires), you gotta deliver. And in case you don't want (or can't), you'd rather have a bunch of other USPs, could be it affordability or some other things (such as the amount of well modeled amps in FAS products).
Having said that, I expect some sort of cloning to be a part of pretty much each and every modeler, maybe just as in being able to load NAM patches (which, btw, is fantastic as it seems to be quite like an open format). They could become sort of the new IRs. People might not want this functionality as urgently as other things, but in case you're given the choice between a modeler offering cloning (or loading NAM files) and an otherwise comparable one without that functionality, it's pretty obvious what you'll go for.
Fwiw, personally, I don't care much, I'd rather see improvements in terms of usability (this is where each and every modeler is still WAY behind what would easily be possible) and some more "experimentational" things (such as, say, modulators, great filters and wicked pitchbased things). And as far as amps go, instead of more "authentic" models, I'd really love to see some "playground" amps. Let me just roll my own and decide between certain baseline sounds combined with variuos amp topologies, tonestack placements and what not. Doesn't have to be on component level, just something to fool around with more freely. Btw, this is also why I would like to see cloning. I'd rather use it to create some not so common things in software land and then clone it to be able to also load it into my hardware.
