Portable Sound

Right now I'm not going to get into a debate about amps and how valve amps are the only real amps. That's a different topic entirely and one which I don't really want to stir up. I mention it just so you know I believe nothing can legitimately replace an awesome valve amp.

That said, while I've been songwriting, I haven't had the luxury of being able to blast my amp up to 10 due to not having the benefits of an isolation booth in a studio. But an electric guitar plugged straight into an audio interface is somewhat disgusting to listen to and software amp simulators are almost worse. I was trying to find a way around this by having a load resistor replace my speaker cabinet so I could go straight from my amp head into the audio interface. But apparently no one really makes anything like that and even if there was something like it on the market the speakers add a lot of the character to the sound so going direct from the head wouldn't have helped all that much anyway.

Then the Sansamp GT2 was brought to my attention - an analogue guitar amp simulator. Like I said I'd never replace my amp in an ideal situation but when I need to record straight from my guitar this thing was brilliant. I was able to tweak the dials to get a nice warm clean sound that could run with my effects board. I was really really surprised. The sound in headphones was actually decent. Something I wasn't expecting from a simulator.

I got back to Brisbane for rehearsal the other day though and plugged back into my amp, and yeah, the Sansamp is a good thing for the portable studio when demoing, but please don't substitute out the real thing.