[duosonic]

Honest question: if you're a musician, what is the appeal of digital modeling? Is it purely affordability/accessibility, or are you drawn to it because it would create different sonic possibilities that you couldn't get from the original?

[humbledrone]

Speaking for myself, the accessibility and convenience is a huge part. Instead of lugging around a 60 pound fragile finnicky pedalboard, I just throw my Helix in a backpack and am good to go. It has way more pedals in it than I could fit on a real pedal board, and I can also switch presets with the tap of my foot (including rewiring all the connections between pedals, changing their order, swapping pedals, swapping amps, etc).

And yeah the sonic possibilities are endless. On a physical pedalboard, it's pretty involved to rewire everything to change the routing, or add/remove pedals, etc. With the digital modeling ones, this all becomes trivial and you can try all kinds of different setups much more quickly, save them and go back later, share them with friends, etc.

All that said, it's kind of like asking an acoustic guitarist in the 1950s why they would use an electric guitar. Electric guitars obviously have lots of advantages, but it's not like people stopped playing acoustic guitars. I still think real analog pedals are cool, they're fun to collect, in some cases they sound better, etc. And sometimes you don't need the mega-flexibility -- if you have a 4-pedal setup that does "your tone" maybe that's all you ever need.

[duosonic]

I think those are perfectly valid reasons for going with emulation.

[keyth72]

Flexibility and affordability. As a guitar player, if I walked into a room and on one side there’s a perfect digital emulation of a Marshall stack, and on the other side there’s and actual Marshall stack, I’d go for the real thing every time. But the reality for most musicians, myself included, is that I wouldn't be able to or wouldn’t be willing to pay that much for one. Now if I had a whole library of digital amps/pedals to try, then I could find something I like best and go get the real thing. I don’t see digital as replacing analog, only enhancing it. It’s also nice to be able to plug in headphones, and from a laptop or pedal that takes up much less space.

But as an engineer I just nerd out over all of it. Analog. Digital. If it makes good music it’s all cool to me.

[wintermutestwin]

>are you drawn to it because it would create different sonic possibilities that you couldn't get from the original

That's my primary motivation. On my AxeFx, I have signal chains that are impossible with real gear. If I want to tweak that chain, it is a couple clicks of a mouse. I have four expression controllers and 10 foot switches that are tied to different parameters. I can tweak this functionality on the fly. All in a single $2k box.

Beyond all, tube amps are stupid for bedroom players as they generally require gig level volume to get the killer tonez...

[lasftew]

I deliberately bought quite a limited but good sounding 4W tube amp for bedroom practice (Vox AC4). Having only a handful of easily understood knobs allow me to focus on my playing.

I have had modeler amps in the past, but every so often I'd just nerd away with the dozens of available amp models and the myriads of settings, and come out with the dissatisfied feeling of having just wasted a lot of time instead of engaging with music.

I find modelers have their place when it comes to replacing a set of analogue pedals, which is the reason I traded my three Boss pedals (compression, reverb, delay) for a Boss GT-1000Core. Overkill for my purpose, as I really never use any amp sims, cab sims, of any of the advanced signal chain stuff that the device is capable of. I just have one patch with my three pedals for practice, going into the AC4, occasionally turning the same knobs as on the analogue versions, but enjoying that I now have built-in a tuner as well :-)

[URSpider94]

You mean, besides the appeal, what is the appeal? As an artist and a musician, you can have access to close approximations of sounds that would require a warehouse full of amps and dozens of pedals, costing tens of thousands of dollars - all in a Pi project box. That’s not just a little bit of affordability and convenience.

[duosonic]

And I certainly don't mean to sound dismissive about the possibilities that creates! It's a huge factor and I would see it being akin to how the rise of "pro-sumer" home recording equipment played a huge role in underground punk music.

[ushakov]

portability is a big one

you can run the produced models in browsers, on mobile, on embedded hardware such as in this case and even on calculators (joking)