Monkey23
Thanks smallstonefan and cclarry for your comments. Like i said, I'm talking strictly about overdriven guitars. I've gotten great clean sounds out of Amplitube (and even better out of Scuffham s-gear) but I am still in search of the holy grail of heavily distorted Marshall sounds (think first G'n'R album). Though I haven't tried the Slash version, I still hear the same thing from the demos I've heard.
I HAVE gotten good sounds out of Overloud THM but still not quite what I'm looking for.
I know, I know. Then buy a Marshall or a Blackstar or whatever, but my recordings are done late at night with a sleeping wife and four kids in adjoining rooms ;)
http://www.ratvalveamps.com/marshall-class-5-headI use a LiveWire ABY splitter and one side goes thru a Marshall Class 5 head and then comes out the headphone jack to a line in on my audio interface. I can record all night wearing cans and nobody knows but me. The head is not modified as suggested at the link, but its something I'm interested in, especially a Master Volume, so I pointed you there to give you more options.
The other side of the splitter feeds a Roland VGA-3 modeling amp, usually set to clean for recording via a line in, which makes re-amping later on easier. I have a Pod Pro to round out the hardware processing for guitar.
On the software side, having the real Marshall track and a clean track is the fastest way to hear a "re-amped" tone, without having to re-amp. Second fastest is running an instance of Amplitube on the clean track, and the first time I do this for a given piece, I'll usually print it to a third track to save cpu cycles, knowing it will probably never survive in a finished mix.
When it comes to blind A/B live tests, I believe its not hard to differentiate between most software and the real thing, but...
By the time you chop and slot the guitar tracks into a busy mix, I don't know that there's enough left to hear differences between the Roland, Line 6, Amplitube, and the Marshall.
Time will tell.