The Guitar Amp effect emulates three vintage guitar amps: Combo USA, Combo UK and Stack. It emulates the amp, its speaker and the microphone recording it. In addition up to three stompbox effects can be used.
![]() Guitar Amp window |
The lights are just a way to make it easy to set up the amp to work just like the hardware version. You can ignore them if you like. You can, for example, use a higher setting to get more distortion.
A guitar amp's 'Lo' input is typically 6 dB less sensitive than the 'Hi' input. You can turn the Input knob down by 6 dB in order to virtually plug your guitar in the Lo input.
Booster is a treble booster. A huge number of classic rock sounds were created using a device like this.
Pickup EQ can be used to change the characteristics of the guitar pickup. You can turn its Treble knob down to compensate for a shrill sound caused by a very short guitar cable, or to make a single coil pickup sound more like a humbucker. Turning Treble up can make a humbucker sound more like a single coil pickup.
The Combo US model features Volume, Treble, Mid and Bass knobs and a Bright switch. The Bright switch has no effect if the Volume knob is all the way up.
The Combo UK model features two channels. The Brilliant channel features Volume, Treble, Bass and Cut. The Cut knob attenuates high frequencies.
The Normal channels features Volume, Bass and Cut knobs. The Bass knob cuts a certain amount of bass, closely emulating the the bass response of various versions of this particular amp.
The Stack model features Volume, Treble, Mid and Bass knobs. In addition there are Bottom, Hot and Gain buttons. These buttons change certain components of the amp, and hence change the sound. All variations correspond to versions of the hardware amp being modeled.
You can use the box below the Cntr/Edge knob to load your own speaker impulse response file. The Cntr/Edge is not available in this case.
Note: the impulse responses are shared with the Convolutor effect.
The Output knob controls the output level. Typical values range from 0 dB (overdrive sounds) to approx. 10 dB (clean sounds). The horizontal meter shows the output level. It is important to stay out of the red section if the amp is played live, in order to avoid clipping.
To play the Guitar Amp live you should click the Track's Rec button, and turn on the Mon (Soft Monitoring) button (located at the top of the main window).
In addition to the two stompbox effects you can use effects in the track's effect slots. You can place them in a Multi Effect if need more slots.
The Guitar Amp's output signal is similar to the signal coming from a microphone placed close to a guitar cab. One will typically apply studio type effects like EQ, compression and reverb to it. Clean guitar sounds will benefit from a Compressor effect (turn up the Attack knob to approx. 25 ms.).
The Guitar Amp uses significantly more CPU power than most other effects because it runs at a higher sample rate internally. It is, however, much more efficient if the input is silent (because the guitar plays the chorus only, or it plays the solo and the outro only etc.). You can take advantage of this feature by using an Automated Fader effect before the Guitar Amp to mute the silent parts in recordings. This is necessary because the noise which is always present in recordings will be seen as a non-silent signal by the Guitar Amp.