My first ever guitar amp was a classic Fender Twin Reverb with Celestion speakers. It was big, it was heavy (as in weight, not sound), it was loud, it had tubes (or valves, if you’re European), and I had no clue how to use it. Oh sure, I could plug in my Japanese Fender Strat knock-off and make sound come out of the speakers, but I couldn’t make it sound like it did when the guy I bought it from played through it, or the way the great Twin ‘Verb players like Eric Clapton or Jeff Beck could. It wasn’t just my cheap guitar, and only partly due to my lack of chops. I knew the right notes and chords—mostly—and the right guitar-faces that went along with them. But like painting by numbers, playing rock ‘n’ roll well meant more than knowing what went where and when.

These things were part of the problem, but they were also a byproduct of not being able to make my classic mid-‘70s 100-watt tube amp sound like I knew it could. Most guitar players learn early on that from inspiration-to-fingers-to-guitar-to-amp-to-speakers-to-ears feeds right back to the inspirational source in an orgiastic masturbatory sonic biofeedback loop. This is why the first note is different from all the rest in that train of notes. If only I could unlock the secret held behind the silver mesh grill, and black and silver knobs…

Then I started using various FX pedals—wah-wahs, flangers, fuzz boxes, choruses, analog delays, etc. These only helped mask the problem, and were an awful lot of fun when accompanied by my stinky wizard bong.

So in the midst of my conniption and the angst of being unable to achieve rock ‘n’ roll coitus, I traded my Fender for a Yamaha solid state (no tubes!) 1 x 12 60-watt amp with more knobs, less tone, and a thing called a parametric EQ. This was like trading a vintage Les Paul for a cardboard cutout of one—well, perhaps not quite that bad—but it remains one of the lowest points in my rock ‘n’ roll anti-career. Much later I saw my old Fender Twin on stage at a local club and, naturally, it was poignantly singing the blues all the way to the back wall. Lucky for me, my band was a regular at the venue so I got enough free drinks to drown the misery associated with listening to the ecstatic screams and rapturous cries from the beautiful woman I traded away because I couldn’t make her do that. My Yamaha amp feigned rock ‘n’ roll pretty well—it lacked a certain dirtiness that I find attractive in women and guitar tones—but it sort of made up for it in its versatility. That parametric EQ and the Yamaha’s non-offensive distortion actually worked for me… so I keep telling myself.

I still see Fender Twins on stages big and small. John Mayer sure knows how to make his sing, but I can’t remember the last time I saw a Yamaha guitar amp on a rock ‘n’ roll stage. It might have been Rick Springfield. (It was in a video, I swear on my life I have never been to a Rick Springfield concert, or jamboree, or whatever it’s called!) Tube amps reign supreme today for sincere and insincere reasons, but over the past decade, amps with chips instead of tubes have found well-earned respect. Tube envy is definitely a thing of the past thanks to the digital age and a thing called “amp modeling.” My digital modeling amp not only looks very retro and cool, it sounds retro and cool too—unless I want it to sound contemporary and have ear-bleeding edge.

One of the things going against tube amps is that they pretty much give you one (great) sound—be it a Fender, a Marshall, or a Vox, to name a few. And to get that sound the tubes must get hot, which means you have to crank up the amp. Plus, they are heavy as hell to lug around, and tube amps aren’t the most inexpensive and stable of technologies. Digital amp modelers give you loads of great amp sounds in a single amp or pedal (or software).

In a nutshell, digital modeling goes something like this: engineers record the output of an infamous guitar or bass amp (like a Fender Twin Reverb); then they measure and pore over the sonic fingerprint from the recordings so they can make a digital replica (model) of it. Then they stick that model (algorithm) into a DSP chip and package it into an amp or effects pedal (or software). The results are obvious, accurate, and selling like hotcakes. Of course, it’s not as easy as it sounds. They have to take into account how the classic amp performs under a variety of circumstances, and in some cases with a variety of speaker cabinets. And modeling the tone isn’t enough, the modeling amp also has to behave like what it’s replicating. Every brand of classic amp behaves differently—from the sweep of the preamp knob to the corner frequency of the midrange knob (if it even has one). Knob twiddling on modeling amps need to feel and respond as if you were tweaking the original. And while that is an important part of the amp modeling experience, it also means that a single knob can behave radically different depending on what model you’ve called up. Yipes. Once again technology runs the risk of boggling the minds of those inspired to make honest music.

I was an early adopter of this technology, mostly because I was tired of lugging around my massive all tube Mesa Boogie rig that sounded brilliant as long as I turned it up. So I bought a modeling amp from one of the hallmark companies in this fast growing segment of music manufacturing—a Flextone II by Line 6. It has a whopping 16 different amp models in it, including my Mesa Boogie. Go figure that’s the sound I use the most. But it also has the previously unreachable Fender Twin sound, a Marshall Plexi (Jimi Hendrix), Marshall JCM (Eddie Van Halen), Vox (the Beatles, the Kinks, and most of the British Invasion), and newer amps like Soldano (Smashing Pumpkins), and Matchless, the high-end boutique amp. It also does some slick things, like give you simultaneous discreet clean and distorted channels, for some cool layered textures. All this in a single box for under a grand that also has a built-in FX array and a can opener too! Ahh, the bang of digital is easy on the buck.

The latest versions offer much more, but the technology is essentially the same, though refined considerably from my version 1.5 amp. Some models even include a tube or two in the preamp stage, though frankly I think they’re vanity tubes. And while big name rock guitarists can hire roadies and a truck to lug around six different tube amps for six different sounds, the technology works so well and the versatility is so attractive that artists from Green Day to Radiohead to Scissor Sisters use Line 6 amps or pedals on stage. And that’s just Line 6; there are at least half a dozen other companies making amp modeling hardware that holds true to the raucous sounds of rock ‘n’ roll.

It is not a perfect technology. In capturing the essence of a great amp, you are also capturing the room, the microphone, even the guitar and the guitar player. So, all by its lonesome, that ever-present problem inherent to digital rock is there—too perfect, too processed. But because everything runs through everything else, both live and to disc (tape), it gets resolved in the mix. I purchased mine never expecting to use it live, but I was pleasantly surprised when it performed wonderfully on stage. So it was no surprise when they started cropping up on the big stages. Of course, like so many other things digital touches, there is a question of ethics. I mean, the Vox AC30 sound is not copyrightable, and yet it’s an infamous sound that made Vox a lot of money, thanks to bands like the Beatles and the Kinks and dozens of others. Now many guitar players can own the Vox sound without owning a Vox amp. Interestingly enough, if you see a Vox on stage today, it is most likely a modeling amp too; the Vox Valvetronic series are quite popular modeling amps in their own right!

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