Rather than do a ‘best of’ style post, every year I’m doing a rundown of what home studio gear I’ve used this year, and why.
Previous years: [2019] [2020] [2021][2022][2023]
tl;dr
I’m still using LUNA for all the audio demos you’ve heard on the blog this year. I finally decided on Logic Pro as the new DAW for shared projects (like the band), replacing both Reaper and Studio One.
Every year, I say I’m going to move my Kemper on (I’ve had one since 2017). Every year, I don’t. This year is no different.
That’s partly because I tried ToneX. It comes with some truly astonishing captures, including a 5e3 Tweed Deluxe that could well become my future reference tone. But (for my needs) ToneX One is a disappointment, and I’ve yet to make a single ToneX capture that I would use.
Expect me to try out the NeuralDSP Nano Cortex at some point in 2025.
For cabs, I still haven’t made my own impulse responses. Instead, I’ve been using a mixture of the Fractal Audio DynaCabs (which are fantastic, but limited in choice), the official Celestion impulse responses that I bought years ago, and some of the new impulse responses from Origin Effects.
I wasn’t able to buy the new Boss guitar synth; you need three separate components, and I couldn’t find them all in stock at the same time. So I’ve gone down the MIDI keyboard route instead. And man, I wish I’d had the opportunity to learn to play piano as a child.
The main thing I need to do next year is look into room correction software.
I Finally Picked A DAW …
… and then Universal Audio threw me a curveball shortly afterwards.
I’ve been looking for a replacement for both Reaper and Universal Audio LUNA for (at least) over a year now. While immensely capable, I’m now at that age where Reaper’s tiny and sometimes lower-contrast buttons and labels are not for me. And LUNA? It didn’t support multi-channel virtual instruments, making it useless for drum plugins. Operative word there being “didn’t” …
This year, I cancelled the Presonus Studio One subscription that I took out last year. I couldn’t get used to its quirks, and (for what I do) the workflow in LUNA is just far faster and easier. It didn’t help that Studio One’s pricing just isn’t competitive for home hobbyists who want to collaborate with their bandmates.
With that decision made, I went out and bought Apple Logic Pro, and immediately felt right at home using it. The UI is kind to older eyes like mine, it has all the stock plugins I need for collaborating with my band mate, and (so far at least) it has none of the quirks that plagued Studio One.
So why am I still using LUNA all the time?
Well, I bought Logic Pro to use for recording full songs – both mine, and the covers that we do in our band. And I haven’t done any of that.
On top of that, Universal Audio surprised me (and, I suspect, their whole community) by unexpectedly adding multi-channel plugin support to LUNA. Finally! It’s such a fundamental feature, I really don’t know how they went all this time without it.
It doesn’t change anything for me, though. I’ll be using Logic Pro on anything where I’ll be collaborating with other people.
LUNA’s best used with Universal Audio’s own plugins. And, while those are plugins are amazing in my opinion, they’re prohibitively expensive if you want to share DAW sessions with other band members. UAD’s ecosystem is priced for traditional studio workflows (and that includes us home hobbyists), not for modern remote-collaboration workflows amongst hobbyists.
I’ll try and write a lot more about Universal Audio next year.
The Kemper Is Still Here
Last year, I said that I needed to make a decision about my Kemper Profiler. I made that decision this summer. Even bought some packaging for it (my Kemper’s original box has gone missing, no idea how that happened), so that I could put it up for sale.
So why is it still here? ToneX is the reason why …
ToneX Was A Disappointment For Home Studio Use
I got one of those nifty new IK Multimedia ToneX One pedals to try. I’ve already talked about how great it can sound in my Pedals annual review (and how immature their desktop software is).
As a piece of gear for home studio use, though, I was deeply disappointed.
Let me get this point out of the way first: ToneX One is a great way to find out if the ToneX system is for you. It’s small, it’s affordable, it can run off a decent pedal power supply, and you get the desktop-based profiling software included in the price.
I learned two things that are relevant to how I would use it in my home studio:
- the larger ToneX pedal is a better choice for me for studio use, because it’s possible to note down the settings for future recall, and
- making accurate captures using the ToneX software is maddeningly difficult and painfully slow.
And that’s why I’ve still got the Kemper: it’s quick and easy to make usable Kemper profiles. I have spent hours trying to make a ToneX capture, only to end up with a result that’s unusable.
Maybe next year will be the year where I finally embrace the Kemper? Or maybe I’ll just get the nifty-looking NeuralDSP NanoCortex as my profiling tool for my home studio?
Fractal Audio DynaCabs Are So Good, I Haven’t Made My Own Impulse Responses
Last year, I had plans to buy a DynaMount X2-R robot microphone arm, so that I could make impulse responses of my own cabs. That hasn’t happened.
I’d love to make my own impulse responses (IRs for short). A lot of the pedals I write about aren’t just second-hand; they’re no longer being made. If I had my own IRs, I could then publish profiles/captures of my signal chain to go with some of the blog posts.
I’m simply not comfortable publishing profiles/captures that include IRs that aren’t in the public domain. I know that lots of people do it anyway, but that’s not for me. Equally, I don’t see the point of publishing profiles/captures without any sort of speaker emulation. I’ve tried a few, and I’ve found that they rarely work well with the IRs that I own.
The main thing stopping me is quality.
I’ve spent most of the year doing a deep dive into Fractal Audio’s Axe-FX 3, after realising that I needed to improve my pedal platform preset. The DynaCab IRs in the Axe-FX 3 are just so good – and so useful – they’ve left me seriously doubting whether I could make IRs that would be good enough for me to actually use.
That said, I’m still interested in trying.
None of my real speakers and cabs currently aren’t covered by the DynaCab IRs, and I’m not always a fan of their IRs captured with their condenser mic of choice. Plus, there’s a few speakers that are common in enthusiast-level amps (especially the Celestion V-Type) which I can’t imagine Fractal Audio ever adding DynaCab IRs for.
Unfortunately, both DynaCab and DynaMount are closed ecosystems. I can’t just buy a DynaMount and attempt to make my own DynaCab pack. The software needed for this is controlled by Fractal Audio and DynaMount, and isn’t available for just anyone to purchase and download.
So I ended up turning to the official Celestion Impulse Response packs that I bought years ago. I don’t know what’s different in my approach, but I’ve had a lot of success using them with the Axe-FX 3.
The Origin Effects Impulse Responses Are Amazing
Did you know that Origin Effects (makers of high-end guitar and bass pedals) publish their own library of impulse responses? And that the library is available as a free download from their website?
I found out from the reviews and demos of the new Origin Effects Deluxe55 tweed pedal. They’d just updated the library to add impulse responses from their reference Tweed Deluxe amp. I went and grabbed them, and instantly fell in love with them.
I’ve tried other Tweed Deluxe impulse responses over years (including ones made by professional session players) with little success. It might have been my signal chain as much as the impulse responses themselves? Whatever the cause, even when I’ve found tones I’ve enjoyed, I’ve never had that iconic 5e3 tone from my amp.
When I dropped in the impulse responses from Origin Effects, it didn’t take long at all for me to find the sound that I wanted.
I Went Synth … But Not The Way I Thought I Would
I finally got a synth! But it wasn’t the Boss GM-800.
When I went to order myself a Boss GM-800, I ran into a big problem: I couldn’t get all the parts for it. The system has three components, and they’re all sold separately: the synth unit itself, the MIDI pickup to put on the guitar, and the proprietary cable to connect the MIDI pickup to the synth unit.
For some reason, shops had the synth unit and the pickup, but they didn’t have the cable required to connect the two. (I’ve just checked, and at the time of writing, shops currently have the cable but don’t have the synth unit or the pickup.) What a strange situation!
Oh, and the proprietary cable only comes in two lengths: far too long (4.5 metres) or ridiculously too long (9 metres). Ideal for stage use, I’m sure. Utterly ridiculous for playing at home.
(To be fair, the cable may not be proprietary after all. The cable uses standard 1/4-inch TRS jacks. The main question is whether cables from other brands have the right amount of shielding to carry the signal from the pickup to the synth unit without data loss.)
So I dropped that idea … and just never went back to it.
Then, in the summer, I really got into David Hilowitz’s videos and his work on Decent Sampler. While very different from the old Roland guitar synth sounds that I had in the 90s, I’m intrigued by the creative possibilities it has to offer.
In David’s videos, he often uses an Arturia Keystep MIDI keyboard. This is a small, very affordable keyboard for triggering virtual instruments and modular synths. Sounds perfect for someone like me who is dipping his toes into MIDI keyboards for the very first time.
I haven’t done much with it since I got mine. I’ve been too focused on guitar. That needs to change!
Any Plans For 2025?
Room Correction
The one glaring thing that I need to address is room correction for my studio monitors.
Sonarwork’s solution seems to be the industry standard, but it has never appealed to me. A plugin that only works on the master bus of my DAW doesn’t fit into my workflow. I don’t need to open my DAW to listen to my Axe-FX 3 through my studio monitors, so I rarely use my DAW. And, when I do, I’m not monitoring the signal from my DAW, I’m using direct monitoring from my audio interface.
Swapping out my analogue studio monitors for ones with built-in DSP room correction doesn’t appeal either. The DSP adds unavoidable latency on its own, and that’s before any latency added by their room correction software. Even if the latency is small as possible, it’ll get stacked on top of the latency I already have in my signal chain. (The downside of a hybrid rig!)
So I reckon I need a solution that I can use for course correction: something that I can use to help me dial in a tone before tracking guitar, and then disable during actual recording. Oh, and it can’t run on my computer; it needs to be a standalone hardware unit.
Two products fit that spec:
- IK Multimedia ARC Studio
- SonarWorks for Universal Audio Apollo X gen 2
The room correction feature of the new Apollo X gen2 units has been backported to the gen1 units (I have a gen1 unit). It’s … not cheap. And I haven’t yet seen any in-depth reviews since it came out (which has surprised me a bit). I’ve no idea how well it works, and how much latency it adds for real-time monitoring.
I’ll be looking into both options next year.
A Little Less Conversion, Please!
This brings up another point: I need to look at is reducing the amount of A/D and D/A conversions in the signal. I’m not worried about impact on tone; I’m only worried about the latency starting to stack up.
Because I choose to run a hybrid rig, I’ve currently got:
- guitar to Axe-FX 3 input 1 (A/D)
- Axe-FX 3 output 3 to pedalboard (D/A)
- pedalboard to Axe-FX 3 input 3 (A/D)
- Axe-FX 3 output 1 to audio interface (D/A)
- audio interface from Axe-FX 3 (A/D)
- audio interface to studio monitors (D/A)
That’s before adding any additional digital equipment (like the Kemper or ToneX One) to the signal chain.
The Axe-FX 3 supports digital out, and my audio interface supports digital in. The only reason I’m not already using this is because they use different types of cable, so I need to buy a converter box. (I’m sure both products have good reasons for using different cables.)
Would such a converter box reduce latency, keep it the same, or add latency? That’s a question that I need to research before making a purchase. There seems no point in buying anything if it won’t improve things.
More Mic Preamps
I feel like I made a mistake when I bought my Apollo x6 audio interface. I should have bought the Apollo x8p, so that I had 8 mic preamps instead of just 2.
Thing is, I can’t explain why this is bugging me. There’s only two circumstances when I want more mic preamps:
- recording acoustic guitar, or
- recording band rehearsal
I rarely do the first, and the band has largely been on hiatus for the last few years. I don’t have a real problem to solve here.
But I still want those extra mic preamps.