Playing around...

[12bar]

True words!
But - I haven't found "my" tone yet...

[VikingBlues]

When I spent a few months last year trying out software amp sims I found that many were very horribly noisy. Unfortunately those that could be tamed for that just usually sounded very unrealistic and very fizzy. I got fed up with wrestling to make them work at all in the first place. Plus I also got fed up being chained to my computer for playing as well as recording - the latter I can take as a necessary evil. So my enthusiasm rapidly disappeared.

With hardware multi-fx units so many that I have tried needed to be continually adjusted to reduce the level of the damn distortion. I do mean distortion rather than overdrive. Not that overdrive in a lot of them was very good either, particularly at the lower levels. An honourable exception was the Vox Tonelab LE - a big heavy beast that could do decent cleaner slightly driven tones and didn't know what a computer was ... lucky thing. Then whenever I've looked at official demos of these units the demonstrators are very nearly always cranking up the gain so that they all sound alike - aka horrible.

I did have a couple of second hand higher spec Boss machines and they were better than the usual for sound, but just too complicated for l'il old me. I needed a DVD training disc to get to grips with one of them. Like with you Jokron, I tended to fiddle around with the various possibilities insted of just playing .... so away they went. Seems Boss have maybe cracked it for ease of use now with the GT100 and GT001, but no use to me I'm afraid unless my electrics have a revival. Maybe one day. You certainly have the gear working well for you.

[jokron]

Well, the main reason that I use my computer is of course that I like to write and record songs. But I also need to play "silent", I often play early in the mornings when my wife is still asleep and we don't have the same taste of music so 90% of my playing is by headphones. That's also why I've tried several software based sims. In an ideal world from my point of view I probably have had a Marshall stack, a Roland JC-120 and a Fender amplifier in my music room. I haven't played in a band either due to family situation, so the options has narrowed to computer and amp sims.

I agree with that the Vox Tonelab...it was a fantastic piece of gear, the reason I sold that one was just that it didn't know what a computer was and by then I had a bad soundcard, think it was the bulit in Creative one with som KX-drivers or what it was called, don't really remember...so at that point i bought the Guitar Port.

The GT-100 is the best I've tried so far so I'll probably stick to that for a while.

Another issue is that I seem to change music style now and then...folk songs, jazz, pop, rock, blues, metallic, I play almost everything from clean to heavy distorted and in that case the GT-100 suites me perfectly...

Last but not least, I'm soon turning 60 som my future as a guitarist is behind me and now I just play around without any specicfic goal more than to try to get better and learn new things and have fun. Maybe when I retire in 3-6 years I will serarch for som other greyhaired oldies that want to play some rock and blues from the 60's and 70's...

/Jokron