I have recently aquired a few new amp sims lately and thought I would share some thoughts. I currently have GR5, TH2-Producer, Amplitube 3, and Peavey Revalver HP. I have had a few hardware amp sims over the years as well.
- First, I greatly prefer the rack-style interface of GR5 and Revalver HP over the stomp/amp/cab/rack style of Amplitube 3 and TH2.
a) It's nice to have everything on one page. Most patches consist of maybe one pedal in front of the amp and a reverb after. If I am doing something like balancing how much gain I want coming from my OD pedal vs how much comes from the amp, it's a lot easier to do without switching between multiple tabs.
b) Maybe I want to see how the chorus sounds after the amp instead of before it. In GR5 I can move anything anywhere in the chain. In A3 I can't.
- TH2 annoys me because the signal flow on the pedals goes from left to right. In the real world, the overwhelming majority of pedals are designed so the signal goes the opposite way.
- The pedals on A3 look and sound great, but I don't like how on some of them, it's hard to see the markings on the knobs.
- A lot of people say they like A3 for amps and GR5 for effects. I agree. It did not take me long to set up an A3->GR5 patch preset.
- I am surprised that A3 does not have a treble booster. Also surprised that the core version does not have a boost pedal (it comes with Slash)
- Orange amps must not be that hard to model.
- One of my favorite amp models is still the Crunch from the Boss GT series.
- I also really like the Peavey Classic 30 model on Revalver.
- Thanks to the A3 group buy, it will take me a really long time to fully appreciate all the options I have available to me.
- A lot of the time, my favorite sims are the house brands. For example, on the J-Station, my favorites were the J-Drive and J-Solo. Maybe there's something to the idea of making something that sounds what you want an amp to sound like as opposed to making it sound like a specific amp actually does sound like. Perhaps this implies that I need to check out S-Gear.