Its 11:30 at night and I’m about 2 hours into an urgent trip to Chattanooga TN to pick up a new monitoring system for the studio. My wife is driving as I’m sorting emails on my laptop (which is plugged into a power inverter and tethered to my cellphone) and what do I see? PRS and Waves in the same sentence. I was like dude!! Then I took a listen. Sounded real nice on this here laptop!! I can’t wait to try this out when I get home. I get 'em free because they’re in the Mercury bundle and my W-up is current. But if anyone else gets a chance to demo them, I would LOVE to hear any of your thoughts on how they compare to the Scuffham bundle (which is included with the Slate subscription for those of you guys who have Slate).
I hope some of you get a chance to demo them Keep us posted!
…and a quick look inside Paul’s home studio in Maryland. Cool little place!
I’ll have to check it out. I have an Archon around at the moment and have used some of those others, so I could probably pretty easily tell how accurate they are. I’m pretty skeptical of how they do the Archon. Although it’s known as a high gain amp, the surprising beauty of that amp is how good the clean channel is on it.
I got the email with the $29 dollar deal because I’ve got GTR (through the platinum bundle). Bought it approximately 6 seconds after opening the email.
Messed with these at NAMM briefly and thought they sounded great. Looking forward to firing them up for myself!
Ok I finally got the chance to noodle a bit with these today.
Gear rundown: Ibanez RGIF7 with Fishman Fluence Tosin Abasi pickups and a PRS 277 Baritone with stock P90s/Mad Hatter electronics into a DI box running into my interface. Bear in mind I’m looking at these mostly from a metal player’s perspective.
Started with the Archon 50 model. I tried re-amping with it last week and wasn’t impressed, but I didn’t spend much time with it. Today I started with my Ibanez, and used one of the Devin Townsend presets. Holy shit, once that thing is dialed in properly it sounds monstrous. Same with the PRS. I messed with some other presets that were hit or miss, but that DT one at least proves that the sim can sound great. I’ll get more into dialing in my own stuff at some point. I haven’t used a “real” Archon, so I can’t directly compare, but from what I’ve heard of the actual Archon, those looking for a super-accurate sim will probably be disappointed.
Onto the PRS Dallas. Wasn’t as excited about this one, it was more mid-range-y Marshall-y type stuff. I’ll need to hear it in a mix to see what it can do and give it a proper torture test.
Finally onto the Blue Sierra/V9. Honestly I think this one alone is easily worth the price I paid, and it doesn’t even do metal type tones. Amazing clean tone, and really nice drive and crunch. On my Ibanez there’s a “mode 3” on the Fluence pickups which I think splits the coils and outputs a single-coil tone (people who know more about this than me can correct me). The single-coil pickup tone into this sim was amazing. I found myself noodling the longest on this one, because it was easily the most versatile and had the widest range of quality tones.
At the end of the day, they won’t replace any of my tube heads, but I also don’t have an amp that will do what the Blue Sierra does, so for un-metal that could wind up being my go-to for now.
During the recent round of Black Friday sales I was tempted by the PRS SuperModels… but just before purchasing outright I grabbed the demo. I just dropped them into a track in Reaper and OMG were they noisy.
Sorry… apparently I’ve got a ‘tape to mix’ switch going bad on my UB1202 mixer… with the switch disengaged it cleared right up. It’s a function I rarely use anyway, but it was engaged… and after further investigation I realized that there was noise creeping into EVERYTHING because of it. So… I think I’ll grab the PRS SuperModels after all. Apologies for the dumbass question!
Yeah, well this time it was ME that ‘did wrong’… just didn’t realize it. I must have engaged that send and didn’t realize I hit the button. The only thing I KNEW I changed was installing the demo. The ‘buffered pedal’ warning had me wondering if I just didn’t set things up right. Was trying to evaluate the demo quickly and didn’t do what I should have… check the whole signal chain and check other plugins.
So what’s up with that? I read it in the manual that they recommend a buffered guitar pedal (non true-bypass) before the interface. Something to do with converting the high impedance signal to low impedance, but the interface DI should handle that just fine (direct from guitar) shouldn’t it? I find that all a bit confusing. I’m curious if it really makes a significant difference.
Keep us posted!
