jjguitar wrote:I agree. The cabinet choice with its micing is very important to achieve a very good sound. It makes the difference between an average to a superb tone.
I can recommand to buy Amplitube presets made by "choptones". I own several packs because they are very good starting points for creating your own presets.You can store his mic settings and use it with other cabinets for example. I like the "Panther Vol. 1" very much. It´s great for Hardrock / Heavy Metal.
It's also no bad thing to go find some YouTube videos about mic'ing (real) guitar cabs; I find it all works very much the same way in AmpliTube (except that you're never really sure how far back from the modeled cab you are -- you just have to "use your ears" there.
I have a few little "test" projects in my DAW where I've just recorded some short passage of rhythm-guitar riffing that I can loop, with simple accompanying bass and MIDI drums (so I can hear things in a "mix" or "band" context), and then can mess around with AmpliTube etc. and see how things sound. One could set up something like that for one's self, pop your favorite amp and cab in there as starters, and then simply use one Dynamic 57 mic model crammed up against the speaker model's virtual cone or very slightly off the center of the cone. That replicates probably the most basic cab/speaker/mic set up in the last few decades of any music using electric guitars.
Then, you just playback your looped riff through AmpliTube and the rest of whatever chain you have, and move that mic around to see what happens in different positions. Compare how that works to what you see/hear in online videos about mic'ing guitar cabs.
Then you can move to the next level: try the Dynamic 57 crammed against the cone, and a Dynamic 421 off at the edge of the modeled speaker. That's probably the
next most common guitar cab/speaker/mic configuration of recent decades. Now there are additional things to try besides just moving either of those mics around in relation to the speaker, like balancing their relative levels. Now things are becoming more complicated -- and we've only just scratched the surface!
Anyway, in lieu of piles of tutorial videos on the Cab Room from IKM, people could do worse than spending some time learning about mics and their placement when mic'ing cabs. A lot of "real world" tips transfer over to AmpliTube's Cab Room reasonably well (assuming you make the obvious allowances). Even if you end using IRs, you'll still be better off, since those all have particular mics and positions "baked into" them, and they often tell you what those mics and positions were. A little knowledge here can go a long way.
jjguitar wrote:Another huge factor is of course the guitar and the input volume of your audio interface. I like to keep the input very low ( 0 - 3 ) even with PAF pickups for high distortion sounds.
Gain staging matters! One has to watch levels from guitar into the interface, and then from the interface into the DAW and/or into AmpliTube.
If you are in a DAW, you also have to watch the levels coming
out of AmpliTube into the rest of your chain. Assuming that you often want to be hovering around that -18 dBFS mark when hitting other plugins downstream, I often find I need to dial back the output from AmpliTube in my DAW fairly considerably. Of course, the output level is directly affected by what you are doing within AmpliTube as well; cranking volume and gain is going to lead to higher output. For some of the "louder" models in AmpliTube (I'm looking at
you, Thunderverb 200!
), I sometimes have to bring down the levels from the mixer in the Cab Room section, as well as the master output knob, to keep things from blowing up.