In depth Neural Captures

Quad Cortex
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Hello,

I’ve got an idea for better “realistic” captures. How about capturing the ranges from the amp knobs seperatly for example you set the gain to zero and set it in the QC, capture that, set it half way, set it in the QC again, set gain to full, set it in the QC, capture that again. That way you can capture how the amp responds with different bass, middle, treble, presence, resonance etc, settings. Also capturing dip switches like deep, bright etc. I know that this would make real tube amps kinda obsoletem but it’s just a thought.

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Good news, NDSP has been doing this for years.

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I believe that’s actually what a modeled amp is if I’m understanding you correctly. Captures are a snapshot that can’t be edited so the permutations of what I think you’re suggesting would result in hundreds of captures to try and get all the different options saved. A modeled amp results in an amp block that you can adjust for the different settings you mention.

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You do have some tone shaping with captures and even gain. The just don’t mimic exactly what the actual amp can do. When I captured mine yes I capture the settings I normally use. On my Mesa a clean channel capture and a burn channel (but with a low-mid gain). I also did a little above and below and can use scenes to switch to those. I also have a boost couple of OD’s a mod and an EQ to further shape. Modeling mimics the amp completely, or tries too. The controls for gain and tone do act like the actual amp, or are supposed too.

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So, I guess you could just use an amp model with the settings you’re using on the amp. Captures with the QC always feel a little bit off to me anyways, so I only use one capture of a pedal occasionally.

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When I gigged I was not an amp tweaker. I would have a clean channel and a dirty channel and then use pedals for anything else. Even Switching guitars, if I was going to have any tonal adjustments it was with an eq pedal not the amp controls.

So capturing my Mesa Express was pretty straight forward. Capture my clean channel then capture by dirty as they were already set on the amp. I also captured a couple of my pedals so that in fact I could recreated my exact pedalboard. That I used a Zoom G3 previously for my delays and modulation no problem with the built in QC effects. But I DID then do captures with the gains instead of 9 o’clock, one at 12 and one at about 2 and I do use them occasionally.

The tone controls and eq in the QC DO work on the captures but I generally just leave them at 12. In fact I can recreate the 5 band EQ on the Mesa with the EQ pedal in the QC.

That being said the Mesa Lonestar both the 50 and 100 watt QC models get LOTS of my play time as they are great models and those tone controls more like the ones on the actual amps. And since both my Mesa Express and the Lonestar models have cleans voiced and built like a Fender Blackface like those QC models too.

I do need to do a couple of captures of my Fender Blues Deluxe. Gigged it a little but the thing is LOUD, had to have a volume box in the effects loop just to make the master volume useful beyond 1 -2 on the thing. It has a great deep bluesy tone I need to get into my QC!!!

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Real tube amps obsolete? News for you friend… The QC goes in the trash long before one of my tube amps.

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That’s cool that you stick to some nostalgic gear. I sold my tube amps long ago (even before the QC was released)

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Nostalgic? Speechless.

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The captures are like a screenshot of a specific setting. With in-depth captures you would capture like the “soul” of the amp if you know what I mean.

So TINA is the technology they use for the amp blocks. Yes, something like that in the QC, but I guess the QC needs more processing power for that.

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I am skeptical that an “in-depth” neural capture process would ever be viable–not so much because of processing power in the QC, but rather because of human error.

We understand that amp knob functions are interrelated; turning a treble knob up or down affects bass response, turning the master knob up or down affects how the gain knob sounds, etc. Designing a capture process for the QC–where it’s up to the human user to manually dial in different knob settings–is bound for, at best, a misrepresentation of the amp.

QC captures do the “single snapshot at this particular setting” thing very well, but it’s probably best to leave it at that.

TINA is unique in that it can fine-tune every possible combination of amp settings. That’s why I think it’s worthwhile for us collectively to continue to request new amp models.

Side note: Tube amps are never going away… But tubes might, and along with them the amp techs who know how to work with them. There’s a liability component to tube amp ownership now that isn’t the same with a modeler like the QC.

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Good point. You can service a tube amp potentially forever if you can get the parts. I hope that’s always the case… I hope the guitar community continues to value the benchmark from where all these tones originated, but time will tell…

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It will be a long time before tube amps go away. The market for tubes is probably the bigger problem. There are less tube manufacturers and tube quality isn’t what it use to be. But it may not be a long time before tube amps become too expensive and impractical for live or studio use. The modelers may be good enough and a lot more cost and workflow effective.

In the mean time, Neural DSP, Kemper, Tonex and NAM are doing a great job preserving the existing tube amps into the future, and making them available to more people at really low cost.

What’s missing though is the development of new guitar amps, perhaps completely in the digital domain that we can use to create new tones never heard before. scuffhamamps.com, Line6 and Fractal Audio are creating some of these digital amp models and they are quite interesting. Its nice that both capture and bespoke modeling are available and growing.

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I actually strongly agree with OP that a more in depth capture process would be very useful and I’m also hopeful that NDSP will develop some options for this in the near future. I disagree with you that these would be misrepresentations of the amps any more so than correct captures are misrepresentations.

There are many many variables involved in creating each capture as well as model. TINA is a cool device and I’m sure does a really great job of capturing all the variables for any amp recorded in that room, with those mics, on those cabinets, running those tubes, etc. Part of the fun of guitar is the infinite, subjective, tweakability of just about every variable in the signal chain (and then arguing over whether you can really hear those differences in a blind test.)

It is not crazy to hope that users could soon have access to a more in-depth capture process–in fact I’ve written notes asking for this as well, and I’m certain NDSP and all their competitors are hard at work considering how to provide this option to users in a way that’s both efficiently implemented and intuitive to use.

One way I’ve been playiing with attempting something like this is by creating captures of the same amp at separate settings, adjusting EQ\gain etc on those captures, and trying to sweep between them using expression pedals and\or blending them at different volumes.

It would be super helpful if the QC software allowed for the creation and editing of complex captures for the user to define their own parameters with more control. I’m sure the questions of how to do this are complex and difficult to integrate into a single usable format like a capture (i don’t even know if you would call a capture a “file” or what, I’m not savvy to computer programming and code,) but in my mind it would require taking 3-5 capture\snapshots from clean to the max drive you want from the amp, and from darkest to brightest eq you want from the amp. The clever, challenging part would be how to tell the software to combine this info into a single capture profile that transitioned between these snapshots in a way that felt and behaved close to the way we expect an amp to behave.

I’ve no doubt this would lead to some unexpected glitches and problems, however one other poster on this thread mentioned the desire for innovation in tube amp design with digital technology. This isn’t that exactly, but it does have the potential to create some new instrument sounds–since there’s nothing to stop a user from taking their multiple snapshots from completely different amps or ridiculously different settings on different channels or with different mics or speakers etc, however those captures were combined by the software into a single model, there would be bound to be some crazy artifacts and unusable translations of those different tones --but also probably some really cool and unusual results that one could never achieve through the natural behavior of an amp.

However the decisions are made about how to implement “complex captures,” surely there will be trade offs. It’s very possible that how different companies choose to do this will be a defining part of their “sound” and success in the future. I don’t know if there’s one “right” way to do it, but whoever figures it out in a way that makes the most users happy will be winning the modeler wars.

Often the same model of amp can sound so different, I’d love to be able to make my own and not be bound to the model created from an example the company has decided was their favorite. It would also be wonderful to be able to create more in-depth captures of less popular or unique or modified amps that didn’t require you sitting in front of said amp and making separate captures of every setting you would like to have available. Someone will be doing it soon, whether it’s NDSP or a competitor, and i hope it’s neural and the QC is able to support it, at least through some kind of offline (computer editor-based?) process.

Meanwhile i also hope that developing such options for captures would also get us closer to being able to create user captures\models of delays, where not only are the tones of the units often special, but the mechanics, artifacts, and behaviors at certain settings…