TL;DR A guitar player needs to think about two paths. One going to a guitar amp, with speaker emulation off, the other going to a PA system, with speaker emulation on. What are some ways to deal with it?
Generally, a guitar player, on stage, has two primary signal paths to worry about;
- The personal monitor path. Traditionally, the guitarists guitar rig, through a guitar amp, the very essence of “your sound”. What you will generally hear onstage at a smaller show, which you can turn up or move closer to to hear more of yourself. At a bigger show, this may be a feed taken in one form or another from your personal rig
- The Front Of House path. What the audience hears. At a small enough show, they may only be hearing your actual amp from #1 directly. At a larger show, the audience will mostly be hearing the PA system, which you will feed to the soundman either by micing your amp or various line output schemes.
#1 is usually, or traditionally a guitar amplifier of some kind. These tend to be narrow frequency range speakers, a number of 12″ speakers the vast majority of the time. For modelling systems like the Firehawk, the Axe FX, BIAS, The REAPER Live Pedalboard project, Headrush, all manner of old Digitech units, Boss, etc, you would feed this type of amplifier a full range signal, unmodified by any sort of speaker emulation, as the 12″ speaker in this rig will be doing all the speaker emulation the old fashioned way.
#2 Is where we usually get into trouble. In the dinosaur era, and still done by some Luddites today (or when a company makes an EXTREMELY boneheaded engineering mistake, like in the case of the Line 6 Amplifi 150, where they don’t stick a line output on a modelling amp), is to mic this rig and send the signal to the PA system. In modern times, we would normally take an “emulated output” from the rig and send that to the PA. This line output would necessarily need a speaker emulation of some sort, or you will just end up with a gross, fizzy mess.
Combo Amps compatible with The Two Path Philosophy on their own
Blackstar TVP 260 (can also function as a powered FRFR)
Fender Mustang III v2 – sort of
Pedalboards compatible with The Two Path Philosophy on their own
Line 6 HD500X – Seems to be able to do this by using a dual amp path. You’d give up a bit of DSP, but certainly looks doable
Line 6 Helix/Helix LT – This unit seems to be designed with this particular setup in mind, and actually seems to offer a few different ways to skin this cat
Standalone software compatible with The Two Path Philosophy
Tonestack (iOS) – Not exactly seemingly designed with this in mind, but there are ways to trick it into working
Bias FX (iPad, Windows, OSX[I think]) – With its dual path you can work it, though you will be giving up some abilities
Revalver (Windows, OSX) – Very complete way of dealing with this issue, additionally, being able to host 3rd party VST’s
TH3 – (Windows, OSX) Can do this with its dual path settings, though switching time will be severely compromised
Plugins compatible with The Two Path Philosophy
To be fair to plugins, once you get them in your favorite VST loader, there will be myriad ways to make this work, below describes only how they can do on their own. For the cost of a bit of CPU resources, you could run these in any series or parallel configuration and the sky’s the limit, hence the desire to create The REAPER Live Pedalboard Project
Bias FX (Windows, OSX[I think]) – With its dual path you can work it, though you will be giving up some abilities
Revalver (Windows, OSX) – Very complete way of dealing with this issue, additionally, being able to host 3rd party VST’s
TH3 – (Windows, OSX) Can do this with its dual path settings, though switching time will be severely compromised
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