emusician.com have organised a fascinating experiment a year ago by lining up a panel of professional guitarists with years of experience (see below) to listen to examples played through vintage guitar amps and amp modelling software to see if they could tell which was which. Because it was a year ago the software chosen were obviously earlier versions which makes the findings even more interesting to me as amp modelling software has come a long way in a year with much more realism in the most recent versions. The products selected were Digidesign Eleven, IK Multimedia AmpliTube 2 and AmpliTube Jimi Hendrix, Line 6 Amp Farm 3.0, Native Instruments Guitar Rig 3, Peavey ReValver MK III, and Waves GTR3. The amps used for comparison were a 1963 Vox AC30, a 1980 Marshall JCM 800 and a 1964 Blackface Fender Twin Reverb.

The panel comprised of D. James Goodwin (Thursday, Parliament-Funkadelic, Motion Picture Demise), John Holbrook (B.B. King, the Brian Setzer Orchestra, the Isley Brothers, Fountains of Wayne), Pete Moshay (Hall and Oates, Daryl Hall, Paula Abdul, B.B. King, Barbra Streisand, Fishbone), Paul Orofino (John Petrucci, Blue Oyster Cult, Anthrax), and Tozzoli (Al Di Meola, the Marsalis Family, David Bowie).

“All of the panelists had lots of experience recording guitars through vintage amps in commercial-studio environments. Most also had experience with amp modelers, especially the tried-and-true Digidesign Pro Tools HD standby, Line 6 Amp Farm.”

The results as you will have probably guessed were not as clear cut as most people would like to think, although the initial example with the Fender Twin only fooled 1 of the 5 panelists, the second Fender Twin example only had 2 of the 5 guessing correctly. Moving on to the first AC30 example only 1 of the panelists guessed correctly and in the second example none of them did! Moving on to the JCM800 examples and in the first two of the four panelists correctly guessed the real amp, but apparently none of them chose it as their favorite. In the second test only 1 guessed correctly.

For a full rundown of the test results check out the following pages, results 1 & results 2.

In total, the panelists were able to tell the real amp from the modelers only 38.5 percent of the time. Although this wasn’t a huge sample, I think it’s fairly safe to conclude that given the right conditions, modelers can sound as good as the amps they emulate. The fact that these panelists, who work with amped guitar sounds virtually every day, couldn’t distinguish the amps from the modelers in so many instances presents a very strong case in favor of amp modelers.

There were times when the simulated amp sounds were more obvious, especially with the clean-sounding Twin examples. That jibed with my own observations over the years that modelers have a much tougher time getting realistic clean sounds (in the Twin examples, the panelists picked the real amp 60 percent of the time). But on the crunchy and distorted sounds, the modelers were able to fool the experts 75 percent of the time.

As I mentioned these tests were run with older versions of modelling software and I think Amplitube 3 and Guitar Rig 4 have improved massively over their previous versions which would make a test like this even more difficult today for the panelists.

Check out my review of Native Instruments Guitar Rig 4 and IK Multimedia’s Amplitube 3. Both are amazing examples of amp-modelling software and for a fraction of the price of the real deal amps that they emulate so effectively.