IK MULTIMEDIA AMPLITUBE 2

Way back in 2007 I reviewed IK Multimedia’s Ampli­Tube Jimi Hen­drix pro­gram for Mix­down. This plu­gin exact­ingly mod­els all sorts of gad­gets and amps used by Jimi dur­ing his illus­tri­ous career, and includes care­fully tweaked pre­sets designed to emu­late spe­cific tones across his entire discog­ra­phy. I enjoyed the program’s inter­face and sound qual­ity enough to take the plunge and spring for Ampli­Tube 2, which fea­tures the same basic oper­a­tion but with its own set of amp, effect and cab­i­net mod­els. So I’ve lived with the pro­gram for quite a while now and used it for every­thing from sim­ply jam­ming in the liv­ing room, to song­writ­ing, to com­pleted recordings.

AMPLE CONTROL

Ampli­Tube 2’s inter­face is divided into five sep­a­rate mod­ules: Tuner, Stomp, Amp Head, Miked Cab­i­net, and Rack Effects. There are two series/parallel gui­tar rigs avail­able with all sorts of rout­ing options, so you can have a sin­gle amp through two cab­i­nets, two com­plete amps through dif­fer­ent cab­i­nets, and a whole stack of other pos­si­bil­i­ties includ­ing two amps and cabs through sep­a­rate effects racks; two amps and cabs through a sin­gle effect rack, or one ‘vir­tual ped­al­board’ feed­ing two totally dif­fer­ent setups. There are 14 Pre­amps and EQs, 7 Power Amps, 16 Cab­i­nets, 6 Micro­phones, 21 Stomp Effects, and 11 Rack Effects.

The stomp mod­els include emu­la­tions based on clas­sic ped­als such as the Arbiter Fuz­zFace, Ibanez Tube Screamer, MXR Dyna­comp, MXR Phase100, Elec­tro Har­monix Mem­ory Man, Boss CE-1 cho­rus, Fender Opto-Tremolo, plus some very cool pitch shifter, ana­log octave and har­mo­nizer effects. There’s also wah, vol­ume and fil­ter, con­trol­lable by pedal if you have the appro­pri­ate out­board gear. Depend­ing on the seris/parallel rig option you select you can use between 6 and 12 stomp mod­els per amp.

The amp mod­els are pretty com­pre­hen­sive, includ­ing dig­i­tal mod­els based on the Fender Super­Re­verb, Fender Bass­man, Mesa/Boogie Dual Rec­ti­fier, Supro, Vox AC30, Mar­shall JCM800 and JCM900, and an offi­cially licensed and approved THD BiValve. There’s also a bass amp and some IK Multimedia-designed mod­els includ­ing Mod­ern High Gain, Solid State Fuzz, Solid State Lead and Solid State Clean. You can mix and match the gain, pre­amp and power amp sec­tions of each model, so, for instance, you can have a Mar­shall JCM900 front end, the tone con­trols of a Vox AC30 and the THD’s sin­gle ended Class A power amp. You’re given the same flex­i­bil­ity with the speaker cab­i­nets: there are 16 includ­ing 1X6, 1X8, 1X12, 2X12, 4X10 (the last three in open and closed back ver­sions) and sev­eral 4X12 mod­els (both vin­tage and mod­ern), and three bass cabs (vin­tage 1X15, 4X10 plus tweeter, and 1X12).

Mic options include Con­denser 84, Con­denser 87, Con­denser 414, Dynamic 57, Dynamic 421 and Dynamic 441. There are switches for Off/On Axis as well as Far/Near, and an ambi­ence slider which adds increas­ing lev­els of room sound. Finally the com­pre­hen­sive effects rack includes a very ver­sa­tile Dig­i­tal Delay, studio-quality dig­i­tal cho­rus and reverbs, an ana­log cho­rus sim­u­la­tion, a natural-sounding Tube Com­pres­sor, har­mo­nizer, para­met­ric EQ, stereo enhancer, and a rotat­ing speaker sim­u­la­tor. Again you can use between 4 and 8 rack effects on an amp depend­ing on what rout­ing option you choose – for some options you can use 4 for each of two simul­ta­ne­ous mod­els or speaker cabinets.

There’s also a metronome for when you want to prac­tice your John Petrucci licks, and a phrase trainer which lets you import an audio file and slow it down (while main­tain­ing pitch) for easy tran­scrib­ing – or take a down­tuned track and play it back in stan­dard tun­ing – great for rock­ing along with those Van Halen and Hen­drix tracks that are tuned down a half step. Just tweak the record­ing back up to stan­dard tun­ing and off you go. As a dude who uses a lot of float­ing Floyd Rose-equipped gui­tars, this is a very very good thing for me. Any­one who’s ever tried to tune a Floyd-toting axe down a half step for an afternoon’s Yng­wie noodling will agree.

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN AMP

So after all that, how does Ampli­Tube 2 sound? Well first you need to mess around with your input level – if you hit the com­puter with too high a sig­nal you’ll get some audio weird­ness which will con­fuse the pro­gram. But once the sig­nal is in Ampli­Tube you can boost it with an input con­trol which you can use to achieve a flat sig­nal, turn it down to tame some of the heav­ier mod­els, or use it as a clean boost to get some authen­tic over­driven growl out of the THD and AC30 mod­els. Once you’ve got your level set, you may be tempted to crank the power amp all the way up to try and get that full overdriven-amp vibe. Don’t. There’s a magic spot some­where around two thirds of the way up where you get the per­fect blend of artic­u­la­tion and punch, and if you just turn up the mas­ter vol­ume con­trol from the start you’ll miss out on this very cool sound.

My favourite mod­els are British Tube Lead 2, Tube Vin­tage Combo (the Supro model), British Tube 30TB (the AC30) and the THD. The Rec­ti­fier model (Mod­ern Tube Lead) sounds quite authen­tic and is espe­cially great with active hum­buck­ers, and British Tube Lead 1 (the JCM800 model) has a growl and punch that are faith­ful to the orig­i­nal amp, allow­ing you to unleash your inner Zakk Wylde with the help of a lit­tle cho­rus. The stomp effects are very cool, espe­cially Fuzz Age (the Fuzz Face) and Crusher, which adds some Nine Inch Nails-style dig­i­tal grit and griz­zle to your sound. I’ve also found that you can use the graphic EQ to sim­u­late some of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of var­i­ous pickups.

Ampli­Tube 2 seems most at home with over­driven sounds, such as the THD and Vox AC30 mod­els. I recorded one par­tic­u­lar track using the for­mer for the lead part and the lat­ter for the rhythm, and it sounds nat­ural and respon­sive like a real amp. In fact the lead part is played solely with the fin­gers, Knopfler-style, a tech­nique which can eas­ily reveal any lit­tle defi­cien­cies in an amp sim’s abil­ity to sound like a real valve amp and mic’ed speaker cabinet.

For me the real fun in Ampli­Tube 2 is the abil­ity to mix and match the var­i­ous com­po­nents. I like to ‘vir­tu­ally’ change the Mesa Dual Rec­ti­fier model from 6L6 to EL34 out­put valves and sub­sti­tute its EQ sec­tion for that from the JCM900, while keep­ing the gain stage and speaker cab­i­net the same. This warms up the amp con­sid­er­ably while retain­ing much of its recog­nis­able char­ac­ter – it’s sur­pris­ing how much of each model’s sound is reliant on that first mod­ule. Another thing I really appre­ci­ate in Ampli­Tube is the micro­phone inter­face. Adding a lit­tle bit of dis­tance and depth to the AC30 or JCM800 mod­els (the lat­ter at a low gain set­ting) brings out a dis­tinc­tive Jimmy Page vibe, moreso than any other amp mod­el­ling pro­grams I’ve used. While flip­ping the On/Off Axis and Near/Far con­trols does have an effect on the sound, it’s a lit­tle bit more sub­tle and with less con­trol than actu­ally plac­ing a mic off axis or mov­ing it fur­ther from or closer to a speaker in the real world, so this is best used as just part of your gen­eral tone-tweaking rather than ago­niz­ing about exactly where your ‘vir­tual mic’ is placed.

It’s also almost crim­i­nally addic­tive to com­bine two amp mod­els, for instance pick any two of the Fender mod­els, add tweak the indi­vid­ual reverb lev­els to taste and throw in your favourite Ste­vie Ray Vaughan licks. Or set up the Mesa/Boogie Dual Rec­ti­fier and the JCM800 with the Tube Screamer model, then throw on some dig­i­tal cho­rus and tube com­pres­sion for a thick mod­ern FM rock type of rhythm gui­tar sound. Here’s another tip: mix together the bass amp model with a huge pile of com­pres­sion, and roll off the tre­ble. At the same time set up the JCM800 model, maybe with a lit­tle fuzz or over­drive, but def­i­nitely with some gritty pre­amp dis­tor­tion grind, and zap out the bass fre­quen­cies. Mix the Mar­shall model down so it’s just low enough to add some growl and roar to your bass track, and it will sit much more com­fort­ably with heavy rhythm gui­tars. This is espe­cially great for Tool or Billy Shee­han bass sounds.

One very impor­tant point: all of AmpliTube’s amp mod­els respond to changes to the guitar’s vol­ume con­trol in much the same way a real amp would – the valve amps respond like valve amps, and the solid state ones act like real solid state designs. As a chronic control-tweaker this point is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant for me when choos­ing an amp sim.I find that the key to get­ting the most out of Ampli­Tube though is to make sure you run it though a qual­ity EQ at the mix­ing desk. There’s a bit of midrange poke which sounds great when you’re play­ing by your­self or along with CDs, but in a mix it can be a lit­tle too stri­dent. I don’t see this as a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem though, as it’s com­pletely rea­son­able to apply a lit­tle EQ atten­u­a­tion to any recorded source, be it a rang­ing vin­tage Mar­shall stack or a dig­i­tal sim­u­la­tion of one, to make it sit nicely in the mix. I use the EQ of IK’s T-Racks mas­ter­ing soft­ware to do this and I’m con­sis­tently happy with the results.

If your appetite is whet by the Mar­shall and Mesa/Boogie mod­els and you need more metal power, IK Mul­ti­me­dia offers Ampli­Tube Metal, which includes mod­els based on the Peavey 5150, Mesa/Boogie Triple Rec­ti­fier, Ran­dall War­head and Mar­shall JMP1959 mkII, as well as a whole crate full of vir­tual ped­als based on stom­pers pitched at the heav­ier side of the fence. Or if you need more of the vin­tage tones or just dig the whole Fender vibe there’s Ampli­Tube Fender, an offi­cially licensed prod­uct which includes Fender-approved mod­els of the ’65 Twin Reverb, ’57 Deluxe, ’59 Bass­man LTD, ’64 Vibroverb Cus­tom, Super-Sonic, Met­al­head and many more, as well as mod­els of Fender effects includ­ing the Blender fuzz/distortion, Phaser, Fuzz Wah, ’63 Reverb, the Tape Echo sim­u­la­tion from the Cybe-Twin amp, and a clas­sic Fender vol­ume pedal. Any of these pro­grams also include, for free, X-Gear, a pro­gram which allows you to com­bine all of your Ampli­Tube pro­grams into one huge amp sim. Want to com­bine the Fender Super-Sonic’s pre­amp sec­tion with the THD’s power amp from Ampli­Tube 2, a cab based on the Peavey 5150 and the Mae­stro FuzzTone-based model from the Jimi Hen­drix pro­gram? You can do it within X-Gear.

TUBE BE OR NOT TUBE BE

Ampli­Tube 2 is the per­fect option for the all-round gui­tarist who needs tones rag­ing from the 50s to the present day. The user inter­face is log­i­cal if not down­right intu­itive, and while the mic posi­tion­ing options aren’t par­tic­u­larly inter­ac­tive and exhaus­tive, they are very musi­cal. I would con­sider this to be Ampli­Tube 2’s only real lim­i­ta­tion and I some­times wish you could actu­ally pick up, move and angle the vir­tual mic with the mouse. Oth­er­wise it’s an extra­or­di­nar­ily use­ful pro­gram which is great as a prac­tice tool, for jam­ming to your favourite tracks or, with a lit­tle care­ful EQ, as your main gui­tar tone on a record­ing.

By Peter Hodg­son
Dis­trib­u­tor: Sound and Music