I think the coolest thing about the current state of modeling is how reactive they can all be to individual player’s touch sensitivity, which really presents itself when using other people’s presets. There are only a couple guys whose presets I can use and I have to assume we have a similar pick attack, ie- I downloaded Leon’s Days of Gifts or whatever it’s called presets, I could have recorded with those without touching a thing. Or Austin Buddy’s presets I use, I’ll tweak the B/M/T to suit the guitar I’m using but that’s really it. Rarely am I touching drive and I never venture into the deeper parameters.
But I’ll have my buddy over my place, he’s a chronic bitchpicker and he’s been asking me this for 20 years without really making the dots connect, “Why does it sound like you have so much more distortion playing than when I do?” Because he hits the strings like he’s scared of them. The way I set my distortion, you really need the right hand to make it work for you.
And others, like some Floyd presets I downloaded from a guy from YouTube who does an amazing job at nailing Gilmour tones, we’re using the same guitars/pickups and I have to drop the distortion WAY down on them all. Eventually I just used all the effects he programmed and got my own amp/pedal tones because there was that much of a difference. His YouTube demos of them sound great, but the way we attack the strings is so different it didn’t translate from him to me.