In the modern age of guitar playing, we are completely spoilt for choice when it comes to recording guitars or mic’ing them up for live use. The modern player has options for silent recording and cab simulation from software plugins such as Native Instruments GuitarRig 6, Neural DSP and TwoNotes Wall of Sound; digital modelling devices such as Line 6 Helix and Fractal Axe-FX, through to load boxes like the UA OxBox and Boss WAZA Tube Amp expander. There are also instances of cab simulation being built into traditional tube amps like the Revv D20, Blackstar St. James and the Victory series. All these options have benefits when using them live too, as a sound engineer can get a very clean guitar signal with no bleed from other instruments with no chance of unwanted feedback!
As much as we guitarists all romanticise pure volume from vintage technology; yes, it truly is an experience to stand in front of 100W Marshall at full tilt, the truth is technology is there to be embraced by us in order to do the main thing we play the guitar for, making music!
In this video, we use the Blackstar St. James guitar amp and cab with real mics and compare them to the equivalent digital emulation using Blackstar’s Cab Rig DSP reactive load outputs.
Can you tell the difference? It’s getting harder and harder to tell as technology gets better and better! While we all love real loud vintage amps pushing real air, and vintage mics into real vintage preamps onto a real vintage desk recording to ‘new old stock’ tape on a real (reel?) vintage tape machine… it’s not economic or practical for the vast majority of us.
The combination of mic or cab sim that you use always comes a distant second after the performance and the song itself!
Today we have an amazing set of tools available to us as guitar players – more than the guitar players of 50 or even 20 years ago could have dreamed of. I’m sure Pete Townshend would take his hearing back for the ability to play quieter and get that same tone. I’m sure Jimi Hendrix would have been using every available piece of technology at his disposal were he still alive (just like he was doing in his day).
At the end of the day once your guitar is recorded down and placed in a track and treated with some post-production processing like EQ, reverb and compression, no one, and I mean no one, will tell whether you recorded it with a cab sim, a mic, a plugin or a modeller!
So make use of whatever you can to make great music and get that great guitar tone!
