Tonex " Official Joe Satriani " Amp Pack .... just released

To go back to another theme here- I do get excited about trying a rig I know one of our heroes has used. It’s not just informative about tone but also about how they play. I learned a lot about lightening my touch after recreating some famous signal chains.
 
The Marshall captures starting at 2:12 are the closest to the “Satch” lead tone that I’ve heard from any digital device, including the JS JVM’s on the FAS platform.
Nothing against the Tonex here, I do think they sound good, very adequate, but I also feel like HX does a pretty great job too for Satch-esque tones. The PV Panama model can definitely get it there, especially for some of the Extremist, Time Machine, Crystal Planet eras. But you know as well as I do, the key to Satch tone is more in the approach, touch, and certain melodic voicing.

I love JNC but that dude is always changing the game on us.
Yeah I kid, he's a fantastic player. That click-bait term has been beaten to death though! :poop:
 
Been a while since I fired up ToneX so I thought I'd check these out. This version seems to be REALLY buggy for me which hasn't been an issue with ToneX before. After instantiating the plugin it took a good 30s to actually see the plugin. Then once browsing the Satriani pack, the names looked suspect - I could see Satriani's logo next to the models but the names had things like "Overloud" "Bogren" and "Jeff" which didn't seem right. Bypassed the plugin, reopened it, view was back to the default view and this time the presets loaded correctly.

There are no direct models in this pack unfortunately. I can't say I really like the way the cabs are mic'd for my taste - it all felt a bit honky and narrow bandwidth to me, changing cabs would have worked wonders. The Mesa pack was much better for me in this regard.

No idea with input levels, feels like they need a good bit of juicing up if you are at 12dBu or so. I was hoping it might feel straightforward or intuitive but I was unsure and guessing the whole time. Hard to tell because on amps like the Friedman Small Box Clean channel, I could set the gain at -15 or +15 and it would still sound clean. Likewise with the Super Leads, they sound gainy and crunchy across a lot of settings so no idea what the amp is supposed to sound like. Some cool amps in there (lots of stuff I personally dig), and very cool for a Satraini fan although I feel like I would get WAY more mileage out of the Amplitube pack (which I believe modelled his own personal FX/amps/cabs already?). Would have been awesome to be able to combine his own cab's from Amplitube with the tone models in ToneX.

I do like that you can demo models in ToneX, and I think this gives some leeway with paying a higher price for models you do want (prices should be lower if there is some element of risk/gamble to whether you'll like the tones).

Its OK, but I feel like his AT pack is more "valuable" and this would have made for a nice supplement to that. I really feel for paid packs, if they are going to include mic'd tones, they should just tap an amp DI at the same time and include those. Takes no more time on the creation stage to record 2 signals rather than one, and I'm sure IK can handle the extra training times involved. Once that capture session is over, its so much effort to go through with it again, better to capture as much as possible there and then.
 
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The Marshall captures starting at 2:12 are the closest to the “Satch” lead tone that I’ve heard from any digital device, including the JS JVM’s on the FAS platform.

Perhaps it’s because John was playing a JS model with the infamous FRED, or because Joe helped dial his amps in during the capture process.

If I didn’t despise the TONEX platform, I’d be all over this.

Sounds great but also could be any generic lead tone thats been dialled in well
 
Just checked this and unless I'm wrong there's not a single DI capture in the entire pack. Dragon included.

:(
The Princess Bride Boo GIF by filmeditor


Didn't even think of that. Bummer.
 
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