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Danny, that's a lot of options with options.. thank you for the feedback. Hearing your demo of Head Case I was very impressed with the guitar sounds. Your playing was ok too... ha What I am missing in my guitar tone is that really good overdrive, sustain and bite without having all the distortion. make sense? Your sound in that demo had exactly all those but still sounded very 'clean'. For $60 this might just be a worthwhile purchase. Dave
You're welcome...and thanks for the kind words, Dave. :) Yeah the good thing about Head Case is, we have an "input gain" adjustment that really makes a difference in how the sound within the plug is delivered to the tone stack. Basically what we do is, we do what real amps do before your signal hits the pre-amp in the amp. We buffer the signal so that you literally get sustain as well as sick drive. When you kick one of our amps into "Stupendous" mode...you'll have more drive and sustain than you'll ever need. LOL! This to me, is where the other amp plugins sort of fail unless you have their hardward rig to go with it...which does exactly what we do totally in software without an add-on. Ever notice most all plugs give you killer drive, but they die out and don't really give you sustain? Not the case with Head Case. It's definitely a worthwhile purchase, I promise you that.
There are a few small issues though with Sonar. It takes 11 seconds for the plug to load and the plugs don't seem to bitbridge well in Sonar 64 unless you do a little work-around that I came up with. But other than those two things, (which we're trying to fix but may not be successful with due to not getting a developer copy of X2) the plugs work fantastic. You'll get lost in the "Builder" we have. I wish I had the time to mess with that properly. Imagine creating your own head, picking your tone stack, what knobs, the text, the picture of the amp and then saving it as a picture .jpg. From there you can drag and drop it right into the head suite and it loads up what you created. Totally killer! :) We have a section built into the plug that also allows you to try user created amps for free. Click on a head, and it downloads and installs...pretty cool feature to have.
Another thing you can try with your other amp plugs is something I shared with Rain a few months ago. Try running some sort of outboard compressor first in line...or maybe even a Tube Screamer, Boss Overdrive or even a Boss Compressor/Sustainer pedal. What this does is similar to what our "input gain" offers. It gives you a little extra kick in the signal before it hits the plug so you can get more sustain. Try it with a pedal if you have one. Set the drive on the pedal all the way off and raise the output level on the pedal as loud as you can make it until it introduces noise. You may be able to gate out the noise if the amp sim you're using has a gate...but if not, just back the output volume on the pedal down and you'll be ok. You should notice an instant difference with any amp plugin you use. :)
Mike: I've never been too crazy about POD Farm for guitar sounds....but I have to admit, I've always liked the bass sound you get in your tunes bro. Definitely stick with that as it's a winner to me man. :) Bass tones ain't easy when you run a guitar processor...but you got something good going on. Whatever it is...make sure you back up those presets. LOL! :)
-Danny