Imagine you live in a house or apartment and are getting ready to record one of your own songs, which will require you to really crank up your high powered amplifier to get the proper tone for a song. For many people, doing so might be an invitation to being evicted from your house. Instead, try out one of the growing number of excellent virtual guitar systems that can provide literally hundreds of guitar, speaker, and stomp box options without ever assaulting the ears of your neighbors. We tested three turnkey virtual guitar systems, including an amazing program that helps you sound exactly like Jimi Hendrix, then share the low-down on how each program performed.

The contenders for the virtual guitar rig throw down: AmpliTube Fender Studio SE, Stomp IO, and Guitar Rig 3 KONTROL.

At last January’s NAMM Show, I took some time to test out a number of virtual guitar systems and felt that the offerings of Native Instruments (Guitar Rig) and IK Multimedia (AmpliTube 2, Fender Studio, etc.) were the best-sounding. Each company graciously provided systems to use for this article. I enlisted the help of a neighboring band that has its own recording studio in their basement so that I could play through the systems, and also hear the opinions of a few other guitarists. Ian Keighley, Andy Landgraf, and Hunter Steers provided invaluable assistance and their own perspectives throughout the multiple sessions spent testing the various systems.

AmpliTube Fender Studio SE
First out of the gate was the AmpliTube Fender Studio SE, an entry-level product, perfect for a musician who may not already have a home recording set up. With its plug-and-play guitar jack-to-USB cable, all you need is a guitar and a computer with the AmpliTube Fender Studio installed and you’re in business. We tested it on a PC running an Intel Core 2 Duo with 6 GB RAM.

The Fender SuperSonic head and cabinet set up. Note the mic which can be adjusted to provide a close up or distant sound.

The engineers from IK Multimedia partnered with Fender’s engineers and the resultant sounds are eerily like those of a classic Fender amp. I zeroed in on the legendary Twin Reverb amp, and found the sound coming out of our studio monitors rich and shimmering with a touch of that amp’s spring reverb. The other three amp choices are the Super Sonic, which has cascading gain stages allowing for loads of overdrive possibilities, the MetalHead MH-500, and the TBP-1 tube bass preamp.

Once you pick your amp head, you can choose from a range of open- and closed-back speaker cabinets, as well as Fender’s vintage Vibra-Tone rotary speaker. Mix and match heads and cabinets to customize your sound with just a click of your mouse. You can also choose the mic used to pick up the sound of the cabinet and jockey its position around to get more or less ambience in your tone. Toss in two virtual pedals, a tuner, a plug in called Speed Trainer (that allows you to record a popular song, then slow it down to learn the licks), plus a couple of rack mounted effects units, and the AmpliTube Fender Studio SE delivers a lot of bang for the buck.

We started out simply plugging the guitar right into the PC using the custom cable, but as we cycled through the various presets, there was a noticeable delay (called latency) between the time we played the note and when the computer finished processing it. After a quick email exchange with a rep at IK Multimedia, we learned that the program defaults to 256 samples which can result in such latency. By adjusting the sample size to 64 samples, the latency issue was solved. With a street price of $99, this product is a steal.

Guitar Rig 3 KONTROL Edition
Next up was Guitar Rig 3 (GR3) from Native Instruments, which shipped to us with their KONTROL pedal board, a sophisticated controller that allows many of the parameters of the program to be controlled and adjusted on the fly while you keep playing. It has all the necessary input and output connections to mate with your computer (which must have the GR3 program installed). I first got a taste of Guitar Rig 3 at the NAMM show when I visited the Gibson suite, and tried out an Epiphone Les Paul through GR3. Suffice to say, that to a guitarist who grew up on the classic blues and rock tones of Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Michael Bloomfield, I got lost in the tones that it provided with just the click of a mouse, spending nearly an hour and half giving myself a “headphone concert” courtesy of Gibson. Native Instruments is known around the world for their virtual instruments, so it was no surprise that their virtual guitar rig would be top-notch.

The Plex is one of the GR3 amps available that nicely emulates the actual sound of a Marshall amp.

GR3’s Citrus set up gives an authentic tube growl reminiscent of many of the great Brit Pop bands

The sheer number of virtual toys in GR3 is staggering: 12 heads, 17 guitar and six bass speaker cabs, four rotary speakers, nine microphones with adjustable positioning, and enough effects (44) to keep you up late night for quite a while. You can control all these parameters through the KONTROL board, which includes an on-board audio card with 192K 24-bit A-to-D converters, eight programmable foot switches, an expression pedal, and input and output metering. The street price for the whole systems is $499.

Opening up the box, we were a little intimidated by the sheer number of choices, but Native made it easy to start shredding by providing newbies with their “matched cabinet” option which pairs a classic head and cabinet to instantly deliver an identifiable sound. We noticed a setting named “Zep Breaker” and clicked on it. Voila! Instantly, there was the sound of Jimmy Page’s classic intro to the “Immigrant Song.” After having fun copping that lick for a moment, we dug down to see how Native built that sound. They programmed the “Plex” head (a nod to Marshall’s revered Plexi amp) with a matching 4x12 cab and a classic spring reverb.

Similarly, “Box” heads sound like classic Vox amps, while a “Citrus” growls like an Orange tube amp. Unlike the AmpliTube Fender Studio SE that offered up virtual stomp boxes you see on your computer screen, GR 3 gives you access to 44 rack-mounted effects units that you can add and subtract in your signal chain to create whatever sound you are hearing.

For instance, “Psychedelay” offers a wide range of delay effects, including a startling backwards echo that sounds like the Beatles’ experiments with reverse tape loops. With GR3, no tape loops are needed for that classic sound. There are a wide range of delays, reverbs, equalizers, wahs, overdrive units, octave boxes, doublers, and many more processors, each of which is intuitive to use with front panel buttons and knobs that allow quick adjustment using your mouse.

“I like that you can plug any part of the system into any other part,” says Ian Keighley (one of our guitar-evaluators). “It’s like having a big rack of gear right here in our studio and then experimenting with different components to find what sounds best for a particular song. The sensitivity between the gain stage and output stage works exactly like a real amp, so it’s easy to fine-tune the tone and overdrive it just the right amount — without disturbing the neighbors. And it’s really great how it reacts to your technique — when I hit the strings a little harder, I get just a bit more crunch, exactly as I would from my own Marshall.”

The pedal board controller is very straightforward. Across the top is a four-numeral LED display showing what patch is currently chosen. Next to that are input and output meters. On the right is an expression pedal that can be used for volume or wah effects. Finally, there are eight assignable foot switches which would normally be used to turn individual devices or components (fuzz box, echo, overdrive pedal, etc.) on or off. They can also be used to quickly jump from one preset to another. It’s worth mentioning that the KONTROL unit is very ruggedly built and should stand up easily to the hard knocks that come with live gigging.

We flipped through a few more of the factory presets, finding many were perfect right out of the box. For example, one labeled “Rhythm Guitar” gave us a clean rich tone perfect for chording on a ballad or pop song, using the “AC-Box” head and matching cabinet. The “Twang Reverb” emulates the classic Fender tones that scream “Beach Boys” with a Strat plugged in. Ian then started to work his way through the banks of effects, landing on “Fuzz” which offered unlimited, synth-like sustain reminiscent of 60’s rock band Steppenwolf’s use on their track “The Pusher.” Next, he tried out the “Plex” delay, which nicely simulated a tape echo box, before adding in the Oktaver, which offered very precise tracking of a line one octave below the notes played, or even two octaves below the original note! We were getting a very thick guitar sound with these effects.

By using the foot board’s expression pedal, we could fine-tune the Oktaver, which made it unique-sounding and very massive — perfect for enhancing Ian’s solo. GR3 gave precise articulation and pitch on the extra octave(s), no matter how fast he was playing. Guitar Rig 3 had me wondering if spending a few grand on a vintage amp made any sense at all, considering the realism and control that virtual guitar rigs like GR3 provided.

IK Multimedia Stomp IO
The Stomp IO (street price $899) makes it easy to use the whole suite of AmpliTube virtual guitar rigs on stage or in the studio, replacing the mouse and keyboard control functions with the buttons and switches laid out on the mega-pedal board. For this test, we switched to a Macbook with 4 GB RAM. Set up is relatively straightforward, but more time-consuming than the previous systems.

We started by loading the AmpliTube X-Gear software shell, which includes a minimal number of stomps, heads, and amps, but enough to see the basic set up and hear a few sounds. We then proceeded to install the four additional programs that the Stomp IO ships with: AmpliTube 2, Ampeg SVX (bass modeling), AmpliTube Metal, and AmpliTube Jimi Hendrix. This took about a half hour of the usual re-entering serial numbers, providing registration info, etc. After finishing this very repetitive process, we finally plugged in the AC power to the Stomp IO, connected it via USB to the computer, and started making music. As with any digital audio system, properly setting the sampling rate and buffer size is essential to getting reliable, good-sounding performance. The factory default for the Mac, a 48K sampling rate with a 128-sample buffer proved to be ideal for our use. We never experienced the clicks or pops sometimes heard. All four of us used the system extensively and the consensus was that the very minimal amount of latency we experienced was well within the acceptable range.

A closer look at the Stomp IO.

Stomp IO’s display allows you to see the input level and adjust it to the optimum range using a knob next to the input display. Next to the input level display is the main screen which shows the patch number currently in use, and next to that, a modest sized two-line LCD display. The top line displays the patch name, mode, and screen name. The bottom line shows the six patch macro settings that can easily be adjusted by the six knobs directly below each setting. Using a typical patch, those might correspond to your amp’s Gain; Bass; Treble; Midrange; Reverb and Volume. To fatten up your tone, simply reach down and crank a little more bass into your patch. Too much reverb? Just kick it back a few notches to get a more in-your-face sound.

One of the features we liked on the Stomp was that from any screen, we could easily get back to the tuner by tapping the tuner’s dedicated footswitch. This was especially handy when we were using one of Ian’s guitars tuned down two whole steps to C. You can also choose to have the tuner automatically mute the guitar output so you don’t annoy your audience.

Another useful feature is the Stomp’s quick input level setting feature. This is particularly handy for live situations where you may be playing a guitar with active, high output pickups, then switch to a classic guitar, like a vintage ‘60s Strat. Each of the four lower bank foot switches (marked A-B-C-D) correspond to different input levels from 0 dB boost which you’d use with high output, active pickups; up to 11 dB boost which would match the very low output vintage pickups found on an old Strat. That way you won’t experience a huge drop off in volume when you plug in a new guitar. That’s typical of the level of thought and detail that has been put into the Stomp IO system.

“If I were going to use one of these systems for a live situation,” remarked Ian, “I’d prefer the Stomp IO because it seems to offer the most flexibility and options of the units we tested. I switch guitars during our set, so having all the various amps, cabinets, and stomp boxes assigned to the various switches would make it much easier to keep the set flowing.”

We also liked the level of detail and the many illustrations found in the 80-plus page Stomp owner’s manual. While the GR3 KONTROL manual provided enough information to get started using the controller, the Stomp manual provided detailed, step-by-step instructions for patch editing, chain and rack editing (the order you put pedal effects in, which can alter their sound a great deal), and sequence editing, where you can create up to 16 custom sequences, each containing up to 999 different patches. One problem we ran into was that the expression pedal didn’t seem to control the various wah effects that were showing on the computer screen. After a quick call to the IK team, we learned that our demo unit had mistakenly shipped with a two-conductor ¼” cable to connect the expression pedal to the Stomp, but that a three-conductor cable was required for it to function properly. We dug one up and immediately found that the expression pedal worked as advertised. As an example, the wah in the Jimi Hendrix application seemed to beautifully emulate the classic analog wah growl he got on some of his most famous songs such as “All Along the Watchtower” and “Voodoo Child.”

The classic tone of the Ampeg B 15 tube studio bass amp is beautifully reproduced by the SVX software.

Stomp Tones
So what about the tones provided by the AmpliTube programs? We used the Ampeg SVX suite with Ian’s vintage Fender Precision Bass, and found the tones, especially of the classic Ampeg B15R tube amp and the SVT Classic 8x10, to be authentic-sounding, with just the right combination of girth and punch. The level of detail was great, as IK also provided us with emulations of a few interesting Ampeg stomp boxes including a great bass fuzz box. AmpliTube Metal had a very long list of presets, with a range of amps and cabinets to choose from that kept us busy for a couple hours testing them all.

One small complaint is that every time we wanted to go to a new preset, the program would return to the top of the scroll down list. It would have been nice if it returned to the last selection and let us choose the next one in order. (This may be solvable by using the Stomp’s footswitches to step to the next patch, but we didn’t have enough time to explore that option.) Among the range of sonic flavors, our guitarist-evaluators especially liked the range of effects devices including the octaves, delays, and extremely rich flangers. Similarly, AmpliTube 2 had the right array of well-known (but unbranded) amps that are reminiscent of classic models from Fender, Gibson, Marshall, Vox, HiWatt, THD, etc. The rack and pedal effects provided us with nearly limitless opportunities to experiment and dream up combinations that would make a nice addition to any guitarist’s arsenal.

A selection of some of Jimi Hendrix’s stomp boxes as emulated by the IK Multimedia team in collaboration with the Hendrix estate.

The high point of our Stomp IO session was digging through the AmpliTube Jimi Hendrix patches, which emulate the great guitarist’s parts from his three most famous albums: Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold as Love, and Electric Ladyland. For instance, on “All Along the Watchtower,” you can click between Jimi’s intro guitar, solo fuzz guitar, solo wah guitar, and the clean sound he used to play the signature fills during the verses. As we clicked through these emulations, we could look at what stomp boxes Hendrix used on each song and marvel at the uncanny similarity to those classic guitar tracks where were recorded more than 40 years ago. The Uni-vibe, octave box and distortion pedals he used are all shown on the computer monitor. It’s a bit like looking into the sonic DNA of something every guitarist knows by ear, but may never have really dissected.

Final Thoughts
It’s hard not be overwhelmed by the sheer range of choices that these types of virtual guitar rig systems offer to today’s guitarist. Collectively, in the 20+ hours we spent learning and testing these systems, we pretty much felt like we had only scratched the surface of what they were capable of delivering.

In our final assessment, we concluded that AmpliTube’s Fender Studio SE is a good introductory program for someone just starting out and who didn’t already have any type of digital audio app running on their computer.

With regard to the actual controllers themselves, our quartet of guitarist-evaluators favored the Stomp IO over the KONTROL, due to its more fully-featured design and in-depth guide to learning its functions. With respect to the actual tones provided by the two different products, Ian Keighley summed it up best: “For recording, I would favor the sound of Guitar Rig 3. I liked the tones a lot, and once I have a tone that works for a particular song, I stick with it. If I were playing in a live setting, the flexibility and programmability of the Stomp IO would probably win me over. I could really see the Stomp’s value if I was playing in a cover band and had to quickly get a few dozen classic signature sounds over the course of a set. However, I’m not sure I’m ready to use my computer on stage instead of a traditional amp. If I had a crash, I’d hate to have to stop the set while I re-booted by computer. Personally, I would be more comfortable using the GR3 or the Stomp system as a studio tool.”

As we talked through our impressions of each of the systems, the one thing each guitarist kept coming back to was being able to perform using the AmpliTube Jimi Hendrix patches, which resulted in each one of us attempted with varying degrees of success to reproduce some of the master guitarist’s best known licks. We may not have the chops that Hendrix shared with the world, but with this program, we could match the tone and effects that are etched into pop music history. If programs like this are the wave of the future of virtual instruments that are powerful yet affordable, we are going to be having a lot of fun making music.

Special thanks to the staff at IK Multimedia and Native Instruments for their generous time and assistance!