Guitar plugins - a journey (part 1)

A couple months ago I knew nothing about guitar plugins – how they worked or really even that they existed. I had a vague notion I could use GarageBand on my laptop to simulate a guitar amp as well as various effects, but because I’ve always used “physical” amps, I had never really experimented with that feature.

A few weeks ago, though, I came across a Black Friday sale for Helix Native, which allows you to use all the amps and effects the Helix hardware devices include. But, as I learned, with Helix Native you don’t need to buy any Helix hardware; you can just use your computer and whatever DAW you have (e.g., GarageBand in my case) and load Helix Native as a plugin. There are a lot of different companies that provide plugins, which, like Helix Native, can either be used with a DAW or in some cases can be used as a standalone app if you don’t want to record and just want to play.

Backing up a little…. I currently have a two amps: a Fender Mustang GTX100 and a Positive Grid Spark 2, both of which are modeling amps. In the past I’ve connected both of these to my laptop via USB and have messed around with recording some simple practice stuff using GarageBand, which has has worked well enough for my basic purposes. Whenever I did this always used the tone from the amp rather than any of the GarageBand amps or effects.

After I saw that Helix Native was on sale and learned a little more about guitar plugins, I got more curious about the GarageBand amps and effects and took another look at those. However, when I was using either of my amps as the audio interface (i.e., the connection from my guitar to my computer) it didn’t work that well due to the delay between when I plucked a string and actually heard it. This delay only seemed to happen when using my speakers, though; I couldn’t detect it when using headphones, which seems weird so perhaps I had something misconfigured. I was also having a hard time figuring out the best way to get an uncolored signal into GarageBand from either amp. I figured out some workarounds, but they weren’t great. Lastly, I’m not terribly crazy about using headphones all the time so using my amps for the audio interface to my computer was kind of a dead-end.

This led me to start looking into a proper audio interface and since it was the holiday season almost all of the various options were on sale. I settled on a Volt 1 from Universal Audio. I found this worked much better than the interfaces from my amps and I wasn’t getting any delay, even with speakers. I also discovered – and this was really the key to this whole experiment – that using the output from the audio interface I could use my GTX100 as a speaker. Specifically if I used the return of the effects loop on the GTX100 it would essentially act as a powered speaker and none of the “color” from the amp would be involved. So the amp, effects, and cabinet simulation from whatever I’m using in the plugin would be piped out through the 12-inch speaker in my GTX100. Normally if you use a guitar amp as your speaker the cabinet/microphone simulation from the plugin would be layered on top of the characteristics of the physical amp and speaker cabinet. It might still sound great, but wouldn’t be a true representation of the simulation the plugin is creating. Using the GTX100’s effect loop, though, avoided all of this.

I think most people use powered monitors (aka speakers) if they don’t want to use headphones with whatever modeling solution they’re using. This definitely works and provides some cool stereo sounds. However, if you’re used to playing with a guitar amp and like the sound and feel that provides, it’s definitely different than playing through stereo monitors. Both can be good, it just depends on what you’re looking for. Anyway, I tested this all out using the included GarageBand plugins and it worked really well. I then downloaded the Helix Native trial and started messing around with that.