So you may or may not have caught these hints I've been dropping about a new non-cars & trains project I've been working on lately. It's very electric guitar centric, and so it can be interesting demoing out tracks that I can work with.

One of the hardest parts of working on new material is working with placeholder content, i.e. putting in an instrument that doesn't sound ideal, or sounds fake, in lieu of recording the real thing. It can be a big leap to get past a guitar that sounds like crap, or a cheesy sounding cello synthesizer while you're working on something.

Guitar amp simulation has gotten crazy in the past couple of years. I had tried the built in simulator in Logic Studio a few times here and there, but it's alright at best. It had apparently been a couple of years since I had tried any of them, because when I tried Amplitube and Positive Grid BIAS out a few months ago I was blown away.

They both have pretty damned impressive tones to them, and feel very real. BIAS in particular I was really impressed with.

In a lot of ways it boils down to the impulse responses the simulators use for their cabinet emulation—when I took out the cabinet emulation on the cheesier sounding Logic amp simulator and put in some great 3rd party ones it actually sounded passable.

Positive Grid BIAS was what really blew me away. Some of the tones you can get from it are really impressive. I probably would end up using it for the final recordings aside from the absence of being able to create feedback. But the quality of the simulation, and the way it faithfully reproduces that tube feel is astounding. You can even swap out tubes in the preamp, power amp, and transformer stages. It's got that much pliability to it.

There are a lot more features to it but I just wanted to share it, because it's made the sketching aspect of my writing process a lot smoother. It's much easier to visualize a song when the guitar in it sounds pretty decent out the gate.