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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

It’s surprising how many albums are made in home studios these days. Most of David Byrne’s stuff, Jagged Little Pill...

Another thing I find pretty amazing is how much guitar work is 100% digital these days. The progress in DSP technology has allowed thousands of sounds available to the masses. $500 goes a long way these days which wasn’t true a decade ago.

And those digital units are not only "legit" sounding, but also much more flexible and hassle-free. Lighter, with instant preset recall, different input/output routing.

I love this tech, really, and the fact that it brings people closer to making music.

Can both of you share what is now used for guitar sounds?

The Strymon Iridium is fantastic, if you have more to spend and want more flexibility Kemper profilers are hard to beat. AxeFX also gets a lot of love.

On the more budget end most audio interfaces these days will have a Hi-Z input for guitar, there are many great amp/stompbox emulation plugins these days.

I adorrrrre my Iridium. I have Guitar Rig & Bias FX and a bunch of other sims, but the Iridium is really special. The sound is _inspiring_ - in that it makes me want to just sit and play guitar for hours on end because it sounds so damn good. It's expensive and I try to not be a gear addict, but imo investing that much in my joy was money well spent.

Sibling posted some good stuff people are using. AxeFX and Kemper is pretty much the standard stuff. Line6 has been in the digital game forever and even their budget stuff is worthy (pod HD500, pod studio, Helix). Hell, I record a ton of stuff with guitar amp modeling in GarageBand and even some of those sound pretty awesome.

If you're ok with plugins https://neuraldsp.com/ and https://www.stltones.com/ are often recommended. I demoed them all and ended up buying Nolly and Plini (nice clean Fender sounds).

I like Line 6 helix (native) and I also like the UAD amp sim plugs (plexi classic and others).

IMHO GarageBand’s amp sims are brilliant and organic-sounding.

For professionals, Kemper and the AX8 amp modellers. The Kemper has a huge community of professional users sharing their profiles.

There are also various plugins that emulate a single kind of amp, but they're not quite as convincing, or as popular.

The Kemper was designed by the same dude who designed the Access Virus, which is more than two decades old now and still considered a classic pseudo-analog synth implemented with DSP.

Jagged Little Pill was cut a quarter century ago. "These days" have been going on a while, I guess.

Burzum pretty much invented "bedroom black metal" in 1991.

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