AmpliTube 5 & Guitar Rig 7: Are Plugin Suites the Best Option for Beginners?
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The popularity of home recording just keeps on growing and growing. Not only are resources like YouTube helping to shallow out the learning curve for newcomers to the hobby, but the price of quality equipment also keeps getting lower and lower, while still increasing in quality. In fact, we’re pretty much now at the point where, with a simple USB interface, a DAW, some plugins, and a bit of practice, it’s totally possible to create studio quality recordings at home.
The biggest issue we find with this kind of setup, though, is that standalone and boutique plugins tend to be quite limiting, particularly for beginners. We’d argue the best thing to come from the digital recording revolution is how good amp sims and models have gotten, which begs the question, why limit yourself to just one or two, when for the same money (or less in some cases), you could have yourself a whole suite of amp and effects?
In this KillerGuitarRigs Guide, we’re going to be making the case for classic amp and effects suites, with a particular focus on our favorites – IK Multimedia’s AmpliTube 5, and Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig 7 Pro. Keep on reading as we highlight the use cases for these fantastic suites, and why they might be the perfect option for you.
Contents
The Problem with Standalone Plugins
If you’re just getting into home recording, there’s a good chance you’ve seen ads from the likes of Neural DSP for their boutique plugins, which admittedly, are almost all fantastic, and offer a great way to get a particular tone, especially if you’re trying to replicate one of their signature artist’s exact sounds. Again, these standalone plugins do offer some incredible tones, but we’d argue that for the majority of beginners, you’ll find them more limiting than useful.
The most obvious drawback is that these standalone plugins offer a much narrower range of tones. Sure, the Archetype Rabea package offers some incredible synth tones, and a Tom Morello plugin package will help you nail the Rage Against The Machine sound, but for anything outside of those niches, you’re left sort of high and dry. You’ll end up needing to add more and more plugins to your collection, and this can get very expensive, very quickly.
Another big drawback of this path is that your recording workflow is going to become much more fragmented, and as such you’ll need to jump back and forth between different plugins to build your sound. This also means you’ll need to load each amp, pedal, and cab separately in your DAW. This is commonplace with pro producers and experienced players, but it can be both intimidating and time consuming for newer players, not to mention much harder to build the exact signal chain you’re looking for.
For beginners, we always like to stress that simplicity is absolutely key, and juggling multiple plugins is usually far from simple.
The Plugin Suite Solution
For all the reasons we listed above and more, we really can’t recommend enough the use of a full digital amp and effects suite like AmpliTube 5 or Guitar Rig 7 Pro. These programs eliminate almost all of the downsides of using single suite plugins, and still offer a way around most the other challenges that newcomers to recordings face.
Cost Effectiveness and Versatility
As we mentioned earlier, one of the biggest disadvantages of standalone plugins is how few tones they offer for how much they cost. Think of these boutique products like shortcuts – if you want to sound like a specific player with little to no effort or experimentation, these are a great solution. However, with a bit of research and tinkering, there’s almost no reason that you can’t recreate that same sound using a signal chain built in a full amp and effects suite, then immediately switch to an entirely different simulated rig within the same piece of software. Not only that, but some bundles (AT5 and GR7 included) even come pre loaded with some of these signature plugins and presets.
Both AmpliTube 5 and Guitar Rig 7 Pro offer massive libraries of everything from vintage amps and cabs to ultra modern pedals and effects, giving you the option to truly build a tone from the ground up, whether that’s by copying the exact gear used by your favorite players, or creating your own sound from scratch. With hundreds of models available across these specific suites alone, it’s not hard to see that they offer incredible value for money.
Of course, the single biggest advantage of running one of these suites is that you’ll have access to some of the most iconic and sought after equipment in the world, including amps so rare and expensive that the vast majority of us could only dream of being in the same room as them, let alone owning them!
User Friendly and Intuitive Interfaces
We talk to a lot of guitarists who might not be new to playing, but who are definitely new to recording, and the thing we hear most when it comes to why they didn’t go digital sooner, is a perception that this kind of software is difficult to navigate, and not as intuitive as the physical controls on their amps and pedals. However, almost every one of these players responds in almost the exact same way – “why didn’t I try this sooner?”.
Why was this their response? Well, not only is the tone that can be achieved with one of these suites so similar to the analog gear that the vast majority of listeners could never tell the difference, but how that tone is dialed in also closely mirrors the original equipment. Even though most of the amp sims aren’t labeled the same as the gear they’re trying to replicate, they have visual interfaces that look suspiciously similar to the equipment they’re emulating, right down to the controls. In short, this means that if you can dial in a tone on a real amp, you can do it in AmpliTube 5 or Guitar Rig 7 Pro.
In many cases, it’s even easier than it is in the real world, for example, in AmpliTube 5 you can build your signal chain by simply dragging and dropping the units you want onto the virtual board. Guitar Rig 7 offers similar functionality, making it easy to experiment by adding elements one by one, and taking them away if they weren’t what you were looking for
No Need for Acoustic Knowledge or Room Treatment
Another challenge for players getting started in recording, particularly those who haven’t made the jump to digital simulations, is getting poor audio quality resulting from miking amps in the wrong place, or a lack of room treatment. Every room has its own sound, and this can easily affect the quality of a recording.
Plugin suites completely eliminate this challenge, letting you record directly into a DAW through your interface, and recording (or even just practicing) with the rig of your choice. Now if you’re thinking that this doesn’t help, because you wanted to replicate the sound of a specific amp, through a specific cab, recorded using a specific microphone, placed in a specific position, you’d be wrong. Suites like Amplitube 5 and Guitar Rig 7 Pro make use of impulse responses (IRs), that capture the exact way certain room characteristics, mics and speakers impact the tone, delivering incredibly authentic recordings that sound just like the real thing.
AmpliTube 5 Max Deep Dive
AmpliTube 5 is one of the world’s best loved plugin suites, with more than 430 gear models for both guitar and bass. It’s beginner friendly, and yet, it offers the kind of high end tech that more experienced players and producers demand. We personally loved the fact that this is truly a turn key solution, coming bundled with its own DAW – even further increasing the value for money.
There are few things in the guitar space more disappointing than models or sims that sound nothing like what they’re intended to, or worse still, totally artificial. IK Multimedia did a great job with AmpliTube 5 in this respect thanks to their VIR (Volumetric Impulse Response) technology, which makes use of 600 IRs per speaker. Between the huge number of IRs and the ability to change everything from the speakers and cabinet, to the mic placement and even the floor, we thought it really lived up to the claims. We found that the amps all sounded pretty much indistinguishable from the originals – at least through our monitors, which is about all any amateur can ask for.
One of the other cool things about the AmpliTube 5 suite is that it comes bundled with artist signature(Slash, Jimi Hendrix, and Dimebag Darrell to name a few), and even branded gear plugins (Fender, Orange, Mesa Boogie, and more), all of which seamlessly integrate into the ecosystem.
Especially for beginners, visuals can make a huge difference. Being able to interact with gear in a manner that feels like you’re actually using analog equipment makes a big difference in terms of ease of use, and the skeuomorphic (big word, we know) graphics mean that amps and pedals behave in the exact same way as their physical counterparts.
AmpliTube 5 allows for up to 57 models per signal chain, which to a seasoned pro, allows for an impressive range of tones, but for a beginner could potentially be a bit overwhelming. Of course, it’s better to have this kind of feature and not need it, than need it and not have it, but we do think it’s something you should be aware of. Thankfully, IK Multimedia made things extremely clear within the software, so while it might feel like overkill at first, it’s a feature that will grow with you as your skills develop.
If you couldn’t already tell, we really do think that AmpliTube 5 is a solid choice for those newer to recording, but, it’s still a great option for anybody with more experience, as evidenced by the inclusion of the Studio Section, which gave us access to some of the tools from the T-RackS suite for mixdowns. There is an extra cost if you want the whole T-rackS suite, but the bundled tools were a really nice touch and gave us exactly what we needed to do a quick mix without having to load any other programs up.
Guitar Rig 7 Deep Dive
Guitar Rig 7 Pro is another extremely popular option when it comes to easy to use amplifier sim bundles. Like AmpliTube 5, we were able to run it as a standalone app, so if you’re concerned about not having a dedicated DAW, you don’t need to worry.
One of the most unique things about GR7, is that rather than having pedals or amp heads as the visual interface, it had a virtual rack. The immediate downside to this is that if you’re newer to recording and digital rigs, there’s very good chance you’re not familiar with gear racks, so you’re not getting that immediately familiar feel you get from AmpliTube with its more classic signal chain visuals. We do encourage you to look a way past this, though, as once you get used to the rack layout, it’s actually extremely easy to follow and use, and particularly for beginners, will feel less “busy” than a sprawling signal chain diagram.
A particular highlight for us was the inclusion of a set of 3 lo-fi effects, which delivered some fantastic, almost ethereal soundscapes. Of course, it featured the usual array of Fender, Marshall, and Orange emulators, all with names that gently skirt around copyright infringement, while still being obvious enough to figure out.
If you’re really trying to dial in a signature sound, you’ll be pleased to know that it came with over 100 presets from a number of big name artists, too. We have to commend Native Instruments for the way they set up the filters for these presets within GR7 – with almost no familiarization, we found it absurdly easy to find the exact sound we wanted.
Now, if there’s a tone you’re looking for and you can’t seem to dial it in yourself, the massive online community of Guitar Rig users has you covered thanks to all the 3rd party sites that offering thousands upon thousands of presets for download.
Versatility is another strong point for Guitar Rig 7 Pro. Of course it supports guitars, but it’s also got you covered for bass, synths, drums, and even vocals.
One of the things we would caution, however, is making sure your computer is up to the task. Even with a newer Macbook Pro we found Guitar Rig 7 to be fairly resource heavy, so anybody with an older computer may not get the performance they’re hoping for from this software, and the more components you add to the chain, the more apparent it becomes.
Final Thoughts on Amp Sim and Plugin Suites
There’s no doubt in our minds that for the vast majority of newcomers to recording and digital rigs, full suites of amp sims are the way to go. They offer so much compared to boutique and standalone plugins, and still come in at an incredibly reasonable price point. You’ll be able to play through an authentic sounding ’59 Marshall Plexi or ’58 Fender Twin emulation and you’ll still spend less than you would for a decent quality 20 watt practice combo – it just makes sense!
When it comes to choosing a software suite, we’d really recommend looking to either AmpliTube 5 Max, or Guitar Rig 7 Pro. Both of these programs offer tons of versatility and incredible audio quality. If you prefer your interface to look more like a traditional guitar rig, we think AmpliTube 5 Max is the best bet, but if you prefer a simpler layout, the virtual rack interface in Guitar Rig 7 Pro is hard to beat. Ultimately, it’s hard to go wrong with either, so no matter which direction you go, we’re pretty sure you’ll join the scores of players who wished they’d jumped on digital rigs sooner.
