There are no presets for any stomp boxes or amp heads or rack modules or master effects units. Speaking of individual model settings… there are none.
In fact, I’m yet to find a function in Amplitube that the Undo command actually undoes. Annoyingly, the standard Undo command doesn’t help you here and once you return the correct model to its rightful place in your signal chain, it won’t recall the settings you’d previously dialled in. This is localised to model type thankfully: you can’t accidentally swap out an amp head for a flange or the stereo enhancer for instance. If you accidentally click on a model in the Custom Shop panel on the right-hand side of the app whilst browsing, it will instantly replace whatever you had previously selected in your rig. This was all easily recreated in Amplitube 5 in just minutes with its new drag & drop function, but before I could save my work I hit my first snag. In my case, my “real” live rig consists of a Fender 65 Twin Reverb, a bunch of pedals old and new, and a rack reverb. When I say building your own rig, I genuinely mean YOUR rig. You can either do that and get lost for hours in all the fun and fireworks it has to offer, or you can do what I tend to do with new amp sims to test their capabilities: build your own rig from scratch and see if it holds up, sonically speaking.
So where do you start with such wonders? Normally you’d just plug in your axe and begin scrolling through the hundreds of included presets with knowing names (Sultans of Clean! Cliffs of Eric! There’s even the very subtly named Comfortably Gilmour Solo patch included here) and start jamming along to your favourite numbers. You can stick your amp in a graffitied subway tunnel if that’s your thing, or for the more conservative of us there’s a superlative studio live room complete with a Clapton/Mayer/Lukather/everyone-these-days carpet under your feet. Top-end gear that you can chain any which way you like and put in virtually any recording environment you like. The quality of each of the models (which includes amps, pedals, rack modules, cabinets, rooms and outboard units) is outstanding and, depending on which of the four available versions you go for, there’s just an insane amount of gear to choose from all immediately accessible from within the newly redesigned Custom Shop panel. The new freely resizable interface is easy on the eye and easy to navigate. Nearly two decades on from that genuinely pivotal moment, and having personally tried pretty much every contender in the now over-saturated market, it’s time to see and hear what IK Multimedia bring to this crowded amp sim table with version 5: according to them an all new, built from the ground up, 2.5GB behemoth ready to stomp(box) all over the competition. The few remaining “unofficial” models included are easily identifiable by their looks as much as their sound. Ampeg and Fender were first out of the gate, whilst the Jimi Hendrix collection was the first foray into official artist collaborations, and it hasn’t stopped since with a bountiful number of brands and guitarists alike endorsing official emulations of their most sought-after hardware. Being able to choose from and record through that array of amps without having to shell out for the real thing was nothing short of wizardry.įive years later, the manufacturers of some of the emulated amps and pedals started coming on board with the release of Amplitube X-Gear. For the rest of that summer, and indeed since, not one of our band’s recordings would feature a mic’d guitar amp: it was all in-the-box from then on. I took delivery of the box that contained the first ever version on CD and the bright red USB dongle that authorised it back in July 2003. When the review licence for the latest incarnation of IK Multimedia’s Amplitube landed in my inbox, I scrolled all the way down through my IK User Account to check when it actually was that I’d started using this innovative amp modelling software. Production Expert's Mark Thompson takes a look AmpliTube 5 MAX and gives his conclusion. IK Multimedia AmpliTube 5 MAX comes bundled with over 400 gear models, including a virtual collection of meticulously rendered models of some of the most coveted gear on the planet.
Now in its 5th incarnation, it has yet another full-scale update. AmpliTube was one of the original modelling plugins.