If you guys can’t make a plugin version of the Mark VII amp head I’d like to at least see a Mark V 90w plugin so that I at least have the Extreme mode to rely on if I’m still going to end up stuck with plugins. At least it’ll have the Depth knobs so I won’t have to fiddle with the low knob on the amp controls themselves.
The hope is that I get to buy the Mark VII amp head itself so I can use the VII mode for 90% of my studio tones non-stop so I don’t have to rely on plugins for tones anymore but access to the Extreme mode will at least soften the blow. I mean, even if I have the Mark VII amp head I’m probably going to silent-record everything and when I play live I’ll probably go direct but I’m sick of having to deal with CPU overload crackles all the time, these plugins take up way too much CPU and it’s all the more reason why I don’t want to have to rely on plugins or any DSP for tones anymore. I’ll take a solidstate Soldano mini head over an HX Stomp any day, all analogue hardware means I know exactly what to expect every time, DSPs are never consistent, regardless of brand.
This is a song my band and I quickly recorded the other night just to demonstrate our ideal scenario. We wound up renting a Mark V 25w head, which had internal load but there was no real way to get the dry amp signal out of it so we wound up renting a loadbox along with it to get the job done and these amps and loadboxes are hella expensive to rent each time. We used our own custom impulse response loaded on a IIC+ plugin with just the IR loader on and proceeded to silent-reamp the way we wanted. Again, it’s rather dreadful that we have to rent the amp each time to do this. Just to reiterate, this was, again, the Extreme mode we recorded the reamp signals on. We did try the IIC+ and IV modes in the past but those modes rarely gave us a sonically flat response so we never liked those modes. The Extreme mode was more malleable and was more sonically flat and full, so we swear by this mode.
It got us the main tone that we wanted, but in the mix we noticed that the notes were losing clarity a little bit, so we took the same DI signals and made dupe tracks where we loaded up a low-gain Nameless Suite tone and a clean Archetype Plini X tone for each side using the same impulse response. Then we used Waves InPhase to get all three tones phase-aligned so we could blend the three tones into a clangier heavy tone, much like how the first Jason Richardson record was done. Albeit we had to waste a good chunk of money for the rentals, this hopefully paints a picture of what our typical studio workflow would have been had we finally gotten to buy our Mark VII amp head.
Custom impulse response link will be provided upon request.
It would also be nice if you guys could also implement features where the pre sections and the power sections could be toggled separately. Upon doing immense research on the Mark V we noticed that what sets the Extreme mode apart is the actual poweramp where the feedback components featured in IIC+ and IV modes are completely bypassed, but reports suggest that the pre section of the Extreme mode is basically identical to that of the IIC+.