Jim Soloway
Newbie
- Messages
- 14
When I first posted this I started with "Welcome to my first post". Well it's not longer my first post and I'll try to do a better job of explaining myself and my motivations.
I've been playing for over 60 years. After all of that I am essentially a one trick pony, but it's a pretty good trick. I play solo, fingerstyle, sort of jazz in a manner that's vaguely piano like. My tone is exclusively squeaky clean. I play with a stupidly light touch with the volume cranked. So everything is essentially on a hair trigger and it's up to me to keep it under control by touch. I don't use any distortion and I try to find a very small sweet spot where clean and warm intersect. The only effects I use are reverb and sometimes tremolo. Of the dozens of amplifiers I've owned over the decades my favorite has always been a good Princeton Reverb at low volume with no breakup.
My attitude towards gear is very simple. I view everything as a tool. Either it helps me make music or it doesn't. I don't care how powerful it is since I only need one sound and I don't care what it looks like. I'm not interested in mastering software or interfaces. I just want to get to my tonal comfort zone and I want to get there quickly. Even with guitars, I ended up playing a lot of guitars that don't look at all typical for my genre but I play them because they work for me. I have tried an enormous number of alternatives and rejected most as "not for me".
I got into modeling in 2010 when the Pod HD series came out. With some effort I was able to develop some useful patches. I went through the entire series and ended up with a pair of the desktop bean units. They made recording much easier and playing at home I could make them sound pretty good but I hated dealing with them when I was playing out. So I eventually went back to amplifiers but that left me with no really easy way to record.
After an endless process of experimenting I went back to modeling for recording. I checked out a lot of plugins and ended up with Scuffham's S-Gear around in 2020. It wasn't perfect but I was able to learn the interface fairy quickly and I was able to come up with a base level patch that worked without too much fuss that I was able to use as my starting point for any additional mods. That became my basic recording software setup for almost 5 years. During that time I tried most of the amp-in-a-box pedals (like Iridium and Dream 65) but was never able to get as good a recorded sound from them as I did with S-Gear so they all came and went (some of them more than once). I also tried about 5 different single purpose amp-only plug ins, both freeware and paid, and I found all of them wanting to one degree or another, some of them by a lot.
Then a couple of months ago I was on the Jazz Guitar Forum and a developer from Sonatura Audio showed up looking for some beta testers for a new amp sim. The sim is called Noir Tones and it was based on three vintage amps in the collection at the Rocky Mountain Music Museum. All three were aimed at the clean tones with out breakup that were typical in the pre-rock era of amplification. That appealed to me and since I'm already using an amp sim plugin, it seems like a good fit.
I'm not famous but I am sufficiently welly known that they were happy to have me as a tester. They sent me a link to the software and I was up and running in a few minutes. The interface (which has been the source of a lot of criticism in this thread) was incredibly easy to use. The vintage amps that it's based on had very simple controls and the developer added a fairly comprehensive set of mic options with mixing console-style controls to manage the mic suite. Those gave me a surprising level of additional tonal control. You can also mute the mics and direct the output to a third party IR Loader.
I was able to fine tune a patch well enough to be happy with the recorded output within 30 minutes of installing the software. That's really important to me. A/B'ing with S-Gear, I preferred the tones I was getting from Noir Tones, enough so that I migrated an entire album of new material that I've been working on to Noir Tones.
Which bring me to the video. (It is not the video that someone else has posted later in the thread. That was produced by Sonatura from my files). I do a lot of product videos. I do them because they're fun to do. I don't get paid for them and usually I have no contact before or after with the vendor. I really have no vested interest in this product (other than as a user). It's not spam and I am not a shill.
For this video, I recorded a single 34 second piece of playing. I did two versions with two different guitars, picked the one that I liked best (done with a cheapo Jet JJ-350 with upgraded electronics and pickup) and ran the recording through each of the three amp models using patches that I had already created. I also ran it through my favorite of the three amps (The Durango) with the mics muted and used Lancaster Audio's Pulse IR loader in stereo for the speaker output. (IR's are another rabbit hole that I have learned to hate over the years as a horrible time waster but I have a handful of IR's that I adopted during the exploration). That pairing with the IR loader running in stereo is actually my favorite of the four examples but I do like three of the four (I was surprised to find that I didn't really like the Saturn much since it's the closest to the amp that I grew up with in that era).
Hopefully that all makes this make a little more sense for some of you. (And maybe we can even get the focus of the thread away from fellating dogs. After all, dogs can do that by themselves)
I've been playing for over 60 years. After all of that I am essentially a one trick pony, but it's a pretty good trick. I play solo, fingerstyle, sort of jazz in a manner that's vaguely piano like. My tone is exclusively squeaky clean. I play with a stupidly light touch with the volume cranked. So everything is essentially on a hair trigger and it's up to me to keep it under control by touch. I don't use any distortion and I try to find a very small sweet spot where clean and warm intersect. The only effects I use are reverb and sometimes tremolo. Of the dozens of amplifiers I've owned over the decades my favorite has always been a good Princeton Reverb at low volume with no breakup.
My attitude towards gear is very simple. I view everything as a tool. Either it helps me make music or it doesn't. I don't care how powerful it is since I only need one sound and I don't care what it looks like. I'm not interested in mastering software or interfaces. I just want to get to my tonal comfort zone and I want to get there quickly. Even with guitars, I ended up playing a lot of guitars that don't look at all typical for my genre but I play them because they work for me. I have tried an enormous number of alternatives and rejected most as "not for me".
I got into modeling in 2010 when the Pod HD series came out. With some effort I was able to develop some useful patches. I went through the entire series and ended up with a pair of the desktop bean units. They made recording much easier and playing at home I could make them sound pretty good but I hated dealing with them when I was playing out. So I eventually went back to amplifiers but that left me with no really easy way to record.
After an endless process of experimenting I went back to modeling for recording. I checked out a lot of plugins and ended up with Scuffham's S-Gear around in 2020. It wasn't perfect but I was able to learn the interface fairy quickly and I was able to come up with a base level patch that worked without too much fuss that I was able to use as my starting point for any additional mods. That became my basic recording software setup for almost 5 years. During that time I tried most of the amp-in-a-box pedals (like Iridium and Dream 65) but was never able to get as good a recorded sound from them as I did with S-Gear so they all came and went (some of them more than once). I also tried about 5 different single purpose amp-only plug ins, both freeware and paid, and I found all of them wanting to one degree or another, some of them by a lot.
Then a couple of months ago I was on the Jazz Guitar Forum and a developer from Sonatura Audio showed up looking for some beta testers for a new amp sim. The sim is called Noir Tones and it was based on three vintage amps in the collection at the Rocky Mountain Music Museum. All three were aimed at the clean tones with out breakup that were typical in the pre-rock era of amplification. That appealed to me and since I'm already using an amp sim plugin, it seems like a good fit.
I'm not famous but I am sufficiently welly known that they were happy to have me as a tester. They sent me a link to the software and I was up and running in a few minutes. The interface (which has been the source of a lot of criticism in this thread) was incredibly easy to use. The vintage amps that it's based on had very simple controls and the developer added a fairly comprehensive set of mic options with mixing console-style controls to manage the mic suite. Those gave me a surprising level of additional tonal control. You can also mute the mics and direct the output to a third party IR Loader.
I was able to fine tune a patch well enough to be happy with the recorded output within 30 minutes of installing the software. That's really important to me. A/B'ing with S-Gear, I preferred the tones I was getting from Noir Tones, enough so that I migrated an entire album of new material that I've been working on to Noir Tones.
Which bring me to the video. (It is not the video that someone else has posted later in the thread. That was produced by Sonatura from my files). I do a lot of product videos. I do them because they're fun to do. I don't get paid for them and usually I have no contact before or after with the vendor. I really have no vested interest in this product (other than as a user). It's not spam and I am not a shill.
For this video, I recorded a single 34 second piece of playing. I did two versions with two different guitars, picked the one that I liked best (done with a cheapo Jet JJ-350 with upgraded electronics and pickup) and ran the recording through each of the three amp models using patches that I had already created. I also ran it through my favorite of the three amps (The Durango) with the mics muted and used Lancaster Audio's Pulse IR loader in stereo for the speaker output. (IR's are another rabbit hole that I have learned to hate over the years as a horrible time waster but I have a handful of IR's that I adopted during the exploration). That pairing with the IR loader running in stereo is actually my favorite of the four examples but I do like three of the four (I was surprised to find that I didn't really like the Saturn much since it's the closest to the amp that I grew up with in that era).
Hopefully that all makes this make a little more sense for some of you. (And maybe we can even get the focus of the thread away from fellating dogs. After all, dogs can do that by themselves)
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