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Amp Emulation that doesn't suck...Acme Bar Gig Head Case
So the last couple of weeks I've been working with Acme Bar Gig to get their amp emulation VST plug-in Head Case working in Pro Tools. Funny the esteemed DiamondJimi is friends with Ken, the main guy there, and had told me about it close to two years ago, so I joined their Facebook group. It basically sounded fantastic, and the emulations only got better as more beta-testers wrote more amp pre-sets.
Nice, but there was only one problem...it was only gonna be for Reaper and other DAWs. Not Pro Tools compatible. So, a few weeks back, me being me...
groused about it on the FB page. What good is an amazing sounding amp sim that doesn't work on the industry standard? What if it's so good you might WANT it to...? Lo and behold, Richard of Virtual Amp Skins who's working with HC reached out to me and indicated he thought there was a way to get it to run via a 3rd party VST to RTAS converter called FXpansion. Turns out that's an add-on IMO anybody using PT should have, as it allows you to use literally hundreds if not thousands of VST plug-ins otherwise incompatible (there's over 1000 freeware VSTs alone out there, not sure you'd wanna use them all). Installed that and BINGO - HC shows up in the "Unwrapped plug-ins" folder. Once you get into it, it's actually pretty involved in how you can manipulate the amp's parameters to fine-tune the tone. At first they shot me the "Lite" version that only allowed you to install 5 heads, but then last week I got the version 1.54 pre-release that lets you load as many amps as you want and got crackin'. I checked out a couple of tutorials first...
Downloaded a bunch of amps, all is going well. But of course, being a longtime PODfarm user, I did a few A/B test using similar amp mods - like both the HC and PF "Bogner" emulation, and identical Recabinet sims on each. Head Case basically pisses all over PODfarm, no contest. HUGE sounding, really impressive. Pretty much the same with the free version of Eleven that came with PT 10. I posted a quick clip on their forum to show that it worked. Really stoked to have helped get things set up for them (future versions may include full PT functionality now, who knows?), and I have a feeling I'm going to end up re-tracking or at least augmenting all the dirty tracks on my tunes (once the data's recovered off the HD) with HC. It's that good.
Nice, but there was only one problem...it was only gonna be for Reaper and other DAWs. Not Pro Tools compatible. So, a few weeks back, me being me...
groused about it on the FB page. What good is an amazing sounding amp sim that doesn't work on the industry standard? What if it's so good you might WANT it to...? Lo and behold, Richard of Virtual Amp Skins who's working with HC reached out to me and indicated he thought there was a way to get it to run via a 3rd party VST to RTAS converter called FXpansion. Turns out that's an add-on IMO anybody using PT should have, as it allows you to use literally hundreds if not thousands of VST plug-ins otherwise incompatible (there's over 1000 freeware VSTs alone out there, not sure you'd wanna use them all). Installed that and BINGO - HC shows up in the "Unwrapped plug-ins" folder. Once you get into it, it's actually pretty involved in how you can manipulate the amp's parameters to fine-tune the tone. At first they shot me the "Lite" version that only allowed you to install 5 heads, but then last week I got the version 1.54 pre-release that lets you load as many amps as you want and got crackin'. I checked out a couple of tutorials first...Downloaded a bunch of amps, all is going well. But of course, being a longtime PODfarm user, I did a few A/B test using similar amp mods - like both the HC and PF "Bogner" emulation, and identical Recabinet sims on each. Head Case basically pisses all over PODfarm, no contest. HUGE sounding, really impressive. Pretty much the same with the free version of Eleven that came with PT 10. I posted a quick clip on their forum to show that it worked. Really stoked to have helped get things set up for them (future versions may include full PT functionality now, who knows?), and I have a feeling I'm going to end up re-tracking or at least augmenting all the dirty tracks on my tunes (once the data's recovered off the HD) with HC. It's that good.
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