Tips to Make Your Virtual Guitar Amp Sound Real
Gibson, Fender, Marshall. These are the big three names in guitar amps, and with good reason – they make some of the best sounding products on the market. However, these amps can be quite expensive, which is why a lot of amateur and beginner guitar players turn to virtual guitar amp software instead. While virtual amps don’t quite have the same sound or feel like their real-life counterparts, there are certain tips you can use to help make them sound a little more realistic. In this blog post, we’ll go over those tips so that you can get the most out of your virtual amp!
How do I make my virtual guitar amp sound better?
When most people think about guitars, the first thing that comes to mind is the sound. Sure, you can appreciate a beautiful instrument or have fun with creative designs, but it’s all about how it sounds at the end of the day. If you’re not happy with the sound your virtual guitar amp is putting out, there are several things you can do to make it better.
Get an interface with at least two preamps. The more expensive interfaces will often have multiple preamps that provide additional routing and mixing options and improved sound quality and bit depth/sample rate (i.e., dynamic range). An interface with two preamps also lets you send one of them out to your computer’s line input while simultaneously recording a different one in your DAW. So, for example, you could record a DI’d clean signal and a mic’d overdriven/distorted signal at the same time with two tracks in your DAW.
Get a better sound card. Sound cards are like interfaces, except that they don’t have preamps or audio inputs. Instead, they connect to your computer via USB or firewire and let you send audio from your computer to an external device (e.g., interface). Of course, nothing is stopping you from using the soundcard that came with your computer as an interface, but there’s no reason not to pick up something higher quality and more versatile either.
Mix tips to make virtual guitar amp sound real
If you’re like me, then you like your music loud. And if you want your music to sound its best, you need a quality amp to power it. But what if you don’t have an amp? Or what if you want to practice without disturbing others? That’s where virtual guitar amps come in. These handy apps can give your music the power it needs without all the noise. But how do you get the most out of them?
A guitar amp simulator is a plugin that you can use in your DAW to make your guitar sound like a stack of amps and cabinets is amplifying it. While they don’t sound the same as the real thing, they come close, and with the right settings, they can be a great way to get realistic guitar tones without having to haul your gear around.
I like to keep things fairly simple and use a “less is more” approach to effects chains; you end up with a better, more usable sound that way. I also don’t limit myself to particular types of effects or amps — an amp modeler can be just as good at emulating the sound of a vintage tube combo as it can be for modeling a complete rack-mounted stack. The key when using any effect is to try not to add too many different kinds at once — instead, pick one type and add variations in post-processing. There are no hard rules here, so experiment!