I fondly remember the crazy days of the late 80s and 90s when guitarists were in an arms race to build the wildest rack rig. Mixing and matching preamps with power amps. Studio level processing and wet effects. Insane wet/dry/wet setups.
I know we have many more priorities, but I can only imagine the countless hours I would waste building out such presets in a “rack” GUI with models of Soldano X88-R, Mesa/Boogie Triaxis, Marshall 9200, Lexicon 480L, Etc.
It’s a little gimmicky, I admit. I would still enjoy it to no end.
The QC grid is a virtual rack rig builder. With the four rows, splits/merges, blend blocks, side-chain blocks, and stereo routing, you can build crazy rigs that combine pedals, amps, cabs, effects, etc. I think the rack units you mention are pretty similar to the amp heads from the same builders in terms of tone–more like a form factor thing. Does the X88-IR have voicings that are really distinct from the SLO-100? I would not think so… Imagination is not the limit in the QC, though, mostly because of DSP constraints. You can only include a few amp blocks without running out of CPU power. Therefore, you have to be creative and know some of the quirks to get the most out of the unit. For example, using (V1) neural captures uses much less resources than amp blocks, so you can create presets with more of those. Also, DSP is split between different rows, so often you can still put a CPU-intensive block in, say, row 3 when you would not be able to in row 1 and 2. Give it a try: find the amps/captures that are closer to the rack units you have in mind, and start experimenting with the grid. There might even be community-uploaded captures of your specific rack units on the cloud…
Not sure if this is a Quad Cortex request or a plug-in request…
The QC doesn’t have high enough resolution in its touchscreen to do extra fancy GUI stuff; that’s at least part of the reason why the grid and blocks look the way they do, including plug-in compatibility (plug-in devices formatted to look like QC blocks).
In the Plug-ins category in this forum, the idea has come up several times for “hub” software that would allow for plug-in owners to mix and match different amps, cabinets, pedals, etc., across all of the plug-ins, without the need for a Quad Cortex and without loading multiple instances of plug-ins to get one kind of processing each, inside of a DAW.
A very good read though @NoodleChamp . Oh man, the memories: Once drooled over such a Slayer rack, tall as a fridge, lights flashing mystically as in a sci-fi movie battleship control panel, ready to destroy.
I was thinking the QC. In my head, we would just makes the current colored blocks thinner rectangles. No change to total block limit and the QC could split blocks between the two cores in the background automatically for all I care. No need to graphically represent the look of the actual unit.
The meat of the request would come from the additional models I have in mind. The mixing and matching of pre and power amps would be the biggest value add.
. Oh man, the memories: Once drooled over such a Slayer rack, tall as a fridge, lights flashing mystically as in a sci-fi movie battleship control panel, ready to destroy.