11. Sound

Amps and cabinets

The Amp is a guitar amplifier modelled from the circuits, not captured from one: a preamp, a tone stack, a power amp that sags as you play harder, then a cabinet. It goes on any track’s chain, and on an audio track it turns a dry recording into an amped one, which you can change after recording.

Amps

Available on every platform.

Putting an amp on a track

• From the track’s menu (right-click its header), under Sound: No Amp, or one of the amp presets. The one the track has is checked.
• In the Sound pane: Amp from a + or from Add.

New songs and imports start with an amp on each electric guitar, chosen by its instrument. A Guitar Pro 6–8 file brings the amp its tracks were set to, and a Guitar Pro 5 file its sound presets.

An amp shapes any track, a SoundFont one included, but it is voiced for a guitar’s pickup: for an electric guitar’s sound, play the track on Stab Strings (The guitar synth).

Presets

An amp device’s menu (right-click it) has Preset, and its full face in Patch mode a preset button (Custom once you’ve turned a knob): Clean, Jazz, Chime, Crunch, Blues Lead, Rock Rhythm, Lead, Hi-Gain Rhythm, Metal, Metal Tight, Metal Boosted, Djent, Djent Open, Metalcore, Metalcore Open, Bass Drive, and six with a miked cabinet: Clean, Miked, Chime, Miked, Crunch, Miked, Rock Rhythm, Miked, Metal, Miked and Metalcore, Miked.

The controls

Open the Amp’s full face (⌄ on its head in a rack; in Patch mode, the panel on the right; an Inspector pane shows it too) to see them, or open its editor (below).

• Voicing: the circuit. Clean, an American combo with lots of headroom; Crunch, a British amp of the 1980s; Chime, a British combo that breaks up early; High Gain, a modern four-stage amp.
• Preamp: Gain, Bass, Middle, Treble, Presence and Master, 0 to 10, as on the amp.
• Response: Tight, how much low end goes before the gain (10 is the voicing’s own; lower keeps more lows in the distortion), and Depth, the power amp’s low resonance.
• Input: Pickup, Humbucker or Single Coil (the guitar’s, as the amp hears it); Boost, an overdrive pedal in front; Gate, the noise gate’s threshold (all the way down: off).
• Cabinet, Mic, Position and Ribbon Mic: below.
• Output: Low Cut and High Cut after the cabinet, for the mix, and the Level.
• Gate Timing: how the gate moves. Release, how fast it closes; Hold, how long it stays open after the sound falls; Hysteresis, how far under its threshold it closes, so a fading note doesn’t chatter; Lookahead, how early it hears the pick, so the attack is never clipped.

Stab’s guitars reach the amp hotter than a real guitar’s cable, so a gate sits higher than you may be used to: around −26 dB on the Metalcore preset.

The editor

Open Amp Editor, at the foot of the Amp’s full face, opens it laid out as the amp: the faceplate (the voicing and the knobs in a line), the cabinet drawn with its mics, its response, and the gate. In Patch mode, double-click the Amp.

Cabinets and mics

Available on every platform.

The cabinet is half of an amp’s sound. Cabinet chooses it:

• No Cabinet: the amp’s line out, with no speaker (the editor draws a DI box). Use it before an Impulse Response of your own.
• 1x12 Open Back, 2x12 Blue, 4x12 Greenback and 4x12 V30: speakers drawn from their published responses.
• Miked 4x12 Modern, Miked 4x12 Greenback, Miked 2x12 Blue and Miked 1x12 Open Back: a cabinet heard through a mic. Stab builds these responses itself when it starts, from each speaker’s published response; no recording of a cabinet is shipped.

On a miked cabinet, Mic and Position choose how it’s heard:

• Mic: Dynamic, Dynamic, Large, Broadcast, Condenser or Condenser, Vintage.
• Position: Cap (brightest), Edge, Cone, Cone Far, then further back: 1 ft Back, 2 ft Back, 4 ft Back, and Room or Room, Small.

The other cabinets ignore Mic and Position.

Ribbon Mic blends in a second mic on the same speaker, a ribbon a little further back: warmer and darker. At 0 % you hear the first mic alone.

The response curve under the cabinet shows how it shapes the sound, from 60 Hz to 10 kHz, as you change it.