Dynatube's vs. others..

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Miikka
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Dynatube's vs. others..

Post by Miikka »

Hello fellas!

I would like to hear some opinions bout how the CW's Dynatube's compete with those other intresting guitar Vst-plugins like NI's Guitar Rig or Line 6's Gearbox.

Both Gear Box and Guitar Rig has lot's of intresting stuff stuffed in, but i guess with Flexor's modules, i could get quite freaky sounds out of dynatube's too. But how 'bout the overall sound quality against the others?

Thanks!
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Post by CarvinGuitarFreak »

Hi,

I use dynatube and guitarRig2. Both are excellent sounding but dynatube needs some work... GuitarRig is more immediate.

Dont know about Gear Box but my friend uses Waves GTR which is also very good imho and a lot easier than both dynatube and guitarRig. All 3 can change the guitar sound beyond recognition, if thats what you want....

Dynatube sims are problable the most realistic imho and I end up using this for final recordings and mix downs. Its all swings and roundabouts.

Laters
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astroman
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Post by astroman »

I've installed the Guitar Rig demos a couple of times.
It spreads the old Reaktor soundprint on everything that's connected to it.
In fact it's quite interesting and useful for an FX-guitar in a dance track (or similiar), but it's lightyears from 'real gear'.

Celmos' stuff does a much better job in this domain, not that fancy but much closer to the analog world with just more FAT :D
Dynatube is most likely at least on par... hopefully
never used it myself as I'm more on the bass side of things currently, and even find myself preferring the pure preamp signal with just the standard comp (!) and (occasionally) Transient Designer. Admittedly I'm not much into distorted bass sounds.

I have a Boss ME50B Bass pedal, which is a pretty good input stage to a real stack (or better powered box) for live use. It has a convenient handling of user presets, some interesting sound settings and the pedal itself drives 2 different wahs and a steplessly adjustable octaver up/down.

But even this specialized and well regarded device fails in pure sound quality if I compare it (for example) with a Yamaha BP1 preamp. :o
the sound seems to come from behind a veil, it's not exactly bad - but the difference is clearly noticable.

Regarding the Line-6 stuff I cannot figure out what of their stuff runs in the red (or black) box and what is running on the CPU. I've read they used Sharcs in their 'classic' beans - but I've absolutely no idea about the current devices, in particular the 'affordable' ones
Maybe someone has a few details...

cheers, Tom
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Post by voidar »

Dynatube is a nice addition to the Scope system. On its own it's a bit lacking I feel, but the arcitechture of Scope really helps in tweaking.

Think of it as a GutiarRig system. You combine what modules you want.
Recently I discovered that SpaceF's Dragon distortion pairs up with Dynatube in a good way, kind of like a TubeScreamer pedal would.

The sounds is pretty realistic in terms of how a microphone would capture an amp. I can't really tell the difference. You just tweak the controlls and the mic position to get the basic sound you want. Then go on from there to make real professional results.

I like Vinco and De-Vice' ISON on it for final mix.
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dante
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Im impressed with Dynatube

Post by dante »

I must say Im impressed with Dynatube JM. After years of wondering why I could never get my guitar tracks to sound as good as some records by direct injecting via my Digitech Valve FX into Pulsar/Cubase, Dynatube comes to the rescue. I'm thinking of also getting Amplitube LE as a Cubase plugin not just for the extra variety of sound, but also to load balance as stereo dynatubes in Pulsay is using quit a bit of DSP but I still have plenty of native CPU left according to the Cubase performance monitor.

I find Dynatube works great both while recording or as an insert to re-process some previously recorded guitar tracks.

I'm interested to hear how others are going with the Dynatube or Amplitube range ?
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Post by MCCY »

I can only compare to Line6 PodII & Pod x3. When I came from PodII to Dynatube it took not too long to disconnect my pod from my recording-setup, although I had some sounds I could not get with dynatube. Dynatube was just 1000% more realistic & tweakable.
Now with X3 it's just cool to push the button and play when I come home from work. It's much much much more tweakable than PodII & has endlessly more sound-possibilities. Still I haven't worked enough with it to have the effect "going- back-to-dynatube" with ears that were used to x3.

My impression still is:
- Microphone-placement is GIGANTIC in DYNATUBE. Makes X3 look really weak.
- Dynamic behaviour is better with dynatube. You can play it more like a real amp.
- of course I like the Scope routing 1000X better than X3.
- X3 is real hardware with pedal & knobs which is just nice to have it all in one box. I like having other interfaces than a mouse.
- some sounds are very easy to dial in with x3. It just has them out-of-the-box.

Martin
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hubird

Post by hubird »

sounds perfect! :-)
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garyb
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Post by garyb »

Dynatube is extremely good, usually as good as a real amp(or better in some cases), especially when the signal comes from a great mic pre...
MCCY
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Post by MCCY »

Happy new year!
As one could see from my activity in the device-forum I'm taking a break from SDK. I begin to have some ideas for new stuff in the morning, construct new effects while driving a longer route... O.K., I write down some best ideas, but I will conentrate again on other things for a while.

What I wanted to say:
I had lots more time with POD X3 live now & have gone to my "very old" first setup:

I connected my Hughes & Kettner TUBEMAN to my new POD as I did it with POD I & guess what: This is the best way to get a living guitar sound & real tube feeling. To my ears those tube emulations in X3 sound absolutely DEAD. Sorry, Line6, but thats what my ears tell me. Nothing to worry about, when you want to have a quick sound for putting it live in an amp, but for recording I absolutely prefer the sound of the real tube routed through X3. It's unbelievable, what sounds I can get out of that "3-amping"-strategy (TUBEMAN+PODs dualamping). + it's really easy to do now with X3. I even connected it via loop in/out. I don't need any extra EQ or hardware - just X3 & Tubeman.

Funny thing is, that I disconnected my TUBEMAN 2 days after I bought dynatube long time ago, because it sounded better without that tubeman for me...
I finally compared dynatube & my POD X3 setup again and have to underline:

For me Dynatube seems to be the best digital guitar amp emulation out there. It is unbelivable how you can variate the sound with master-gain & mic-placement. It sounds so dynamic and living... Dynatube is abolutely great & I wish they'd make a deal with Line6 to implement their algos (both run on SHARCS, so why no?) I may prefer the tubeman now in some cases again & I'll get some super sounds with x3 combined with it, but If I had to choose I'd take dynatube for sure... & if I had one wish free I'd chose those new tiny standalone scope-hardware with a dynatube inside. Hope something like that will come - I'd buy it immediately!!!

Martin
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krizrox
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Post by krizrox »

I sort of have a lukewarm attitidude about Dynatube. I wanted to love it when I first got it (it's not the cheapest amp plug-in out there). But over time I found out what it's good for and what it's not good for. It's not the end-all of amp simulators, that's for sure. But, in context to a particular song, it can be perfect. I guess it depends on what you're trying to achieve. The Celmo stuff is also good. I'd easily put them on the same pedestal.

I've tried to get a few of my clients to embrace Dynatube for various projects (as opposed to whatever amp they brought in) and almost none of them liked it which surprised me right off the bat. More often than not, they would prefer the Line6 Pod to Dynatube - or a regular amp.

I just bought a Vox Valvetronix combo amp and this thing sings like no tomorrow. Affordable too. If you haven't checked out Vox in a long time, definitely take a look. There's just something about a really good amp and speakers moving air that can't be simulated.
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Post by MCCY »

"There's just something about a really good amp and speakers moving air that can't be simulated."

Oh yes!!!!!! Supported in every point.
I think that's something with those analogue studio-stuff too. As I heard a direct comparison between Neve Originals & same settings on UAD I thought: O.K. they got what the EQ is doing, but nut HOW it does that with all those sideeffects. They sounded identical to me comparing how they change the frequencies of the sound but there was NO LIFE IN IT.

Sadly I have not the place anymore to use a real amp, but If I'll have no more neighbours anymore one day, I'll be back on a real amp for sure. It will of course NEVER be the same with digital stuff compared to a real amp & ROOM!!! I hear that in all my old recordings I have done with simple and cheap amps. In the end they have much more life and character compared to sims.

Therefore I recorded once every single note in 3 different dynamics from a boesendorfer piano, to have my own living piano-sample. That is (& people which hear it say that it's the best piano sample they've ever heard) the same with all those ugly clean and dead commercial samples. They just have no personality. ... and my sample has of course less personality than a real piano.

That's - that living sound - somehow something I find 1000% more in Dynatube than in POD. I had to shake myself when comparing POD to that real tube preamp because pod was so damn ugly cold and sterile... In another way it was extremely punchy, transparent & direct in your face what I couldn't get with dynatube so far - yes, that's right... I imagine that many people would prefere POD, yes.

I have a secret weapon here, by the way, I think nobody knows about that... O.K. it won't be secret anymore in a few minutes :) :
It's a magnetic recorder with which you can record your voice for a secretary on a "vinyl". These scratching-effects with it (with own sounds) top every digital scratch simulation by far & there come out really cool, nasty & personal sounds out of it, which could never be simulated.

I once worked in a studio with some of the real analogue synthesizers available & as I heard minimax first I thought: Yeah, cool, but where is all those bruzzel, brizzel, knizzel, ssspffffrf- Stuff??? It sounds like a minimoog, yes, but it does not live like a minimoog.

Martin
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krizrox
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Post by krizrox »

You might find this interesting (or maybe not).

This band recorded a demo here not too long ago. Two guitarists. One playing through my Marshall amp (miked) and the other playing through my Pod. One guitar track is panned left, the other right. Can you tell the difference?

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fu ... =265139410
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Post by MCCY »

Ough... That's difficult with lots of data-compression, different other sounds on L&R, completely different overall guitar sounds, my Laptop-headphones... + these are by far not the gutitar sounds I would dial in...
but ... I like to support such hearing-quests, as I allways claimed them.
So I take the risk and make a guess:

Generally both (very very different) sounds could be achieved with pod (for this reduced playback quality). With some mixing-tricks you can get that pod more living...

Although the left (brighter side) sounds a bit thinner it has a more compact basis distortion sound to me & I bet with a little EQ damping the brightness it would have been audibly less clinical than the right side. That compact basis-distortion seems to be also the result of some phasing going on with mic placement... but you could create that digitally too. (Also: Is there some overspeaking from snare/cymbals Overspeaking headphone/monitor/livesound? Or is that pure imagination? )
In the end a feeling decides that this (left brighter) sound is more "living" as I stated that adjective above I have to use it to classify the difference ;) : The brighter (left) guitar seems to be the amp-recorded.

The right one is more in your face & more transparent but has a more boring distortion. It sounds the same within its dynamical range. It sounds more digital to my ears. This one seems to be the POD-recorded guitar for me.

As I said, it's extremely difficult with all those other things going on saying a guitar sound under all that other "living" sounds sound less vital especially with that data-reduction. I bet with min. 256 kbit compression and both guitars seperated from other instruments the difference would be very clear.

Martin
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astroman
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Post by astroman »

trying not to peek at Martin's comments I'd say the left channel is miked and the right one is the Pod.

The latter is a more direct and slightly metallic sound I wouldn't expect from a real amp/mic combination, but without the one-to-one comparison it would be (admittedly) hard to tell.
Not to mention you'd rather appreciate this kind of tone in some situations - be it real or artificial ;) :D

cheers, Tom
ps: if I've been telling rubbish, at least I wasn't the only one :lol:
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Post by garyb »

i prefer dynatube to the pod. the pod is more "all in one", however. the dynatube is just an amp.
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Post by krizrox »

MCCY wrote:Ough... That's difficult with lots of data-compression, different other sounds on L&R, completely different overall guitar sounds, my Laptop-headphones... + these are by far not the gutitar sounds I would dial in...
but ... I like to support such hearing-quests, as I allways claimed them.
So I take the risk and make a guess:

Generally both (very very different) sounds could be achieved with pod (for this reduced playback quality). With some mixing-tricks you can get that pod more living...

Although the left (brighter side) sounds a bit thinner it has a more compact basis distortion sound to me & I bet with a little EQ damping the brightness it would have been audibly less clinical than the right side. That compact basis-distortion seems to be also the result of some phasing going on with mic placement... but you could create that digitally too. (Also: Is there some overspeaking from snare/cymbals Overspeaking headphone/monitor/livesound? Or is that pure imagination? )
In the end a feeling decides that this (left brighter) sound is more "living" as I stated that adjective above I have to use it to classify the difference ;) : The brighter (left) guitar seems to be the amp-recorded.

The right one is more in your face & more transparent but has a more boring distortion. It sounds the same within its dynamical range. It sounds more digital to my ears. This one seems to be the POD-recorded guitar for me.

As I said, it's extremely difficult with all those other things going on saying a guitar sound under all that other "living" sounds sound less vital especially with that data-reduction. I bet with min. 256 kbit compression and both guitars seperated from other instruments the difference would be very clear.

Martin
Good analysis Good ears (in spite of the lo-fi MP3s) - the right channel is the Pod.

These were just quick and dirty demo recordings. We didn't put much effort into it. The band had limited resources and time and just wanted a quick demo to hand out to bar owners (and throw up on MySpace). Cover tunes recorded for the purpose of getting bar gigs don't normally deserve the same time and attention an album project of original tunes would get. I didn't spend much time with mic placement or tweaking the mix or anything. It was pretty much just throw mics up, dial in something good enough for the intended purpose and let er rip.

PS - for some odd reason they haven't put up the remixed versions of these songs. I'm not sure why. We remixed them and improved them a bit but they are still using the original roughs. I haven't asked them why. Most of the changes were to the vocals and fixing some timing issues with the guitar parts. Whatever.

I'm not sure what you mean by "overspeaking". I'm don't know how to interpret that word. Can you possibly rephrase the word or better describe what you are hearing?
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Post by MCCY »

8) O.K. my ears are working. That's good to know.
No critics meant in the above post b.t.w. As Tom pointed out: Taste is something which can't be judged and I bet many people will like that rough rock style. Not everything has to be polished to the end.

Overspeaking is the direct translation from "Übersprechen" in German. It means something is heard in another "channel" where it "shouldn't" be. Not in its own channel. E.g. tapes have that "overspeaking" (I'm curious whats the correct english word...) from one channel to the other. You can't seperate them 100%.

When I made live-mixes for bands which were not too important, I sometimes experimented with gate-sounds on the toms of the drum set. Setting low treshold kicked different noises than the toms. Sometimes that sounded funny or even cool. (So the other sounds were "overspeaking" to the tom-microphones.)

In your recording the crash sometimes seems to appear in the amp-guitar-channel. It might be drum-microphone placement as well, so I was not 100% sure about it.

Martin
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Post by borg »

MCCY wrote:"overspeaking" (I'm curious whats the correct english word...)
Some refer to it as 'bleeding'.
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Post by bill3107 »

For me , Dynatube = dynamic, living and real .... period.

I am really happy with the guitar and the bass models ! Sounds just "real " ...

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Post by krizrox »

MCCY wrote:8)

Overspeaking is the direct translation from "Übersprechen" in German. It means something is heard in another "channel" where it "shouldn't" be. Not in its own channel. E.g. tapes have that "overspeaking" (I'm curious whats the correct english word...) from one channel to the other. You can't seperate them 100%.

When I made live-mixes for bands which were not too important, I sometimes experimented with gate-sounds on the toms of the drum set. Setting low treshold kicked different noises than the toms. Sometimes that sounded funny or even cool. (So the other sounds were "overspeaking" to the tom-microphones.)

In your recording the crash sometimes seems to appear in the amp-guitar-channel. It might be drum-microphone placement as well, so I was not 100% sure about it.

Martin
Ahh ok - now I understand. I had a feeling maybe that's what you were talking about. As Borg pointed out, we generally refer to that as "bleed" or "bleed-over" (like you will bleed if you are cut with a knife). Sounds will bleed from one mic to the next. And that is true too. The Marshall amp was a live miked amp in the same room as the drums (baffled off aways from the drums enough to reduce the amount of bleed into the amp mike).

I didn't mean for this to turn into a dissection of the recording techniques behind the tunes (I know it's rough), just a funny simple look at how the POD stands up to an actual miked up amp. Most people wouldn't know the difference. If this had been an actual album project, we would have tracked everything individually (probably) to eliminate any possibility of bleed.

As far as how I usually treat the drums, for something like this I don't spend much time agonizing over gates and whatnot. The band didn't want to spend that much time on it. They just wanted a decent representation of how they sounded live so they could impress bar owners. Again, if it had been an album, I would have spent a lot more time gating and tweaking things (maybe even resampling bits and pieces).

You guys have really good ears though. I'm impressed. That scares me :lol: I see I can't bullshit anyone around here :lol: Gonna have to work harder.

PS - for tape, we call that crosstalk (I guess perhaps some would also call it bleed - the words tend to be interchangable). Like when the recorded signal is so hot on one channel that the tape head will leak some sound onto an adjacent channel. There is a third problem concerning tape when an audio signal on tape will imprint itself onto an adjacent layer of tape (when you wind the tape too tightly) and you hear an echo of sorts. We call that print-through.
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