Vai saying Modeling is not there yet :)

Of course Vai says "Modeling is not there yet...."

:eek:
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When I started to play guitar in the 80'ies I wanted to copy the sound I knew from songs. That was my target. But I didn't get there.
I had to learn that amps don't sound like that and got used to how they really sound, at least over time. And I didn't like that something else than what I heard was giong out of the PA, I never knew if that what I heard translated well into that different sound that the audience heard....even worse when you use some more sounds.

Now we have a tool that gives us the sounds we know from songs, we can hear the same sound that we send to the console. OMG, perfect conditions!

If Steve Vai don't cares for that, then be it. I guess they have separate consoles for the audience and for the monitoring, so it don't matters for him if he gets a ready signal from his modeller or from the monitoring console.
 
I don't have anything against such discussions, but I'm honestly asking myself, why do so many people here care about what *famous guitar player* has to say about the Axes or modellers / profilers in general? Letting aside that he clearly talks in favour of those who pay him (others do so for the Axes or other modellers / profilers aswell, don't be naive!) and that e.g. his latency argument is pure bullshit, let the guy play his tube amp and listen to his music, whether or not you like it or not. I mostly like what he does and I never really cared about what equipment he plays. I'm pretty sure he sounds good even with the cheapest stuff ;)

Sure, it's fun to discuss such things, I just want to remember you guys: It doesn't really matter!!! Every faction (tube, model, profile) is both wrong and right.
 
I agree with the above - Vai (whilst not to my taste) is clearly an extraordinary talent, but let's face it - he really does like the sound of his own voice and likes to talk like he's the holder of some higher/hidden truth.

Plus he's clearly paid for this (as many others are).

What amazes me about lots of what he says is it just doesn't tally with reality, he certainly has a sound - but it's a heavily compressed, heavily effected sound - always has been.

If you listen to him talk, he's plugging straight into an old tweed amp with the shortest, highest quality cable.

He's not - not by a long way.

And in terms of latency, he's playing on stage sometimes very large stages - the latency due to the speed of sound (his amp to him) is far greater than anything any modern DSP introduces.

What I know is - for fun last night I priced up a nice pedalboard, just in case I wanted a grab and go rig.

That came up as scarily close to the price of the III without including an amp, and had 1% of the possibilities - so I would far rather have my latency introducing III sitting at home sounding exactly as I like - reproducing real amps that I know very well, with scary accuracy.

Than worry about what Mr Vai claims for a few 1000 bucks
 
If “there” is 100% amp in the room, no difference at all, feels and responds exactly like a tube amp, then I agree with Vai. I use the Axe Fx because my collection of effects, switching options, amps and cabs isn’t “there” yet. It’s always a compromise. For the foreseeable future, the Axe FX is much closer to my ideal combo than my tube amps and effects box options ever were.
 
As far as I know Steve Vai still uses an Axe FXII live for his effects. That's the way he has ways used his Axe FXII live. Who cares if he uses it for modeling or not. I use it myself just for effects with real amps sometimes and direct for recording other times. It works great for either.

 
Forgive me if I'm wrong here, but wouldn't he experience about the same latency using only the effects in the II or III? And, isn't that latency on the order of 1.5 ms, about the same as being 18 inches from your cab? Turning on the amp block might add about, what, 6 virtual inches (for a total of about 2 ms)?

The latency argument is a non-starter. Endorsements can make a fool of genius.
 
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Steve Vai is operating on a whole different level than most other guitar players.
 
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From time to time regular "JOEs" on this forum claims modeling is not there yet and its not their cup of tea. Its gets massively debated of course. Now Mr Vai says the same thing and almost nobody argues that :D

Way off topic, I always get scared when older seasoned musicians start endorsing new things, thinking they probably got cancer and having a massive hospital bill coming up, thats how my weird mind works...
 
What's funny is that some famous guitarist says something dismissive about modeling, and everybody here takes it as a personal affront. Me too. And we then proceed to dismiss that guitarist as some old has been tube hound. Or point to the discrepancies in what he says and what he does. Are we that insecure when it comes to our Axe FX's? I too should really learn to just shrug when somebody keeps saying tubes are still superior, modeling is not quite there yet. Yeah, whatever floats your boat. It works for me.

Why can't I do that? Why do I still feel the need to defend modeling and diss tubes?

Or at least he likes to think he is.

He's playing notes just like anyone else, with more delay and compression - but hey he's an 80's guy!

He may be an 80's guy, but he was one of the originals, one who pushed the boundaries and redefined the instrument in his time. That puts him head and shoulders above 99% of all the guitarists you say were 80's guys'. There's the original, and there's the imitators. He's an original.
 
Forgive me if I'm wrong here, but wouldn't he experience about the same latency using only the effects in the II or III? And, isn't that latency on the order of 1.5 ms, about the same as being 18 inches from your cab? Turning on the amp block might add about, what, 6 virtual inches (for a total of about 2 ms)?

The latency argument is a non-starter. Endorsements can make a fool of genius.
I'll add that even analog equipment has some latency, every capacitor and transistor in which the signal goes thru adds a few micro-seconds of latency, considering that you can easily find hundreds of them in a complex chain with various pedals, the total latency wouldn't be that far from a digital device.
 
What's funny is that some famous guitarist says something dismissive about modeling, and everybody here takes it as a personal affront. Me too. And we then proceed to dismiss that guitarist as some old has been tube hound. Or point to the discrepancies in what he says and what he does. Are we that insecure when it comes to our Axe FX's? I too should really learn to just shrug when somebody keeps saying tubes are still superior, modeling is not quite there yet. Yeah, whatever floats your boat. It works for me.

Why can't I do that? Why do I still feel the need to defend modeling and diss tubes?
I have a theory

We all know that when it comes to pure sound quality, tube amps are still on top of any modeller. Why? Well, e.g. there's no aliasing in the analog world. There's a smaller latency. Yes, the Axe's latency is small, but a tube amp reacts faster! Tube amps are more beautiful (subjective of course, but can be an argument). They feel better. And of course: They are, what modellers and especially profilers are based on, they are the original! They are consistent, don't change every month or so. They are simple to use.

We think we have to defend the digital world, because we are all very experienced with our black boxes. We know how good it sounds and that the arguments for tube amps are hardly audible and feelable. However the benefits are immense! All in all it's cheaper, it's more robust, it allows crazy layouts, you can modify / finetune your sound very easily.

But what if people simply don't want those digital advantages? They have every right!

There's a common ground to all of this: It's all technology. Technology isn't what nature offers, it's what human beings create. They don't create it just so it's created, no, it's to solve a problem. A tube amp + cab solves the same problem a modeller / profiler solves: How do I make my electric guitar sound awesome? The tube amp + cab combination has solved this problem for many years, in the digital world this hasn't been solved until just recently. Fractal Audio Systems LLC provides the state of the art with modellers, Kemper GmbH provides the state of the art with profilers.

So there are several approaches to solve this problem. That's very common in technology. What if somebody prefers a screwdriver over an electric drill? Start a forum post about it in a screwdriver forum?! That would be absolutely ridiculous!
 
Yeah, if I played at his level for as long as he has been playing, I’d be very, very reluctant to change anything major about my rig, no matter how good the alternatives are. Truth is, amps, speakers, guitars, pickups - they all represent a huge, multivariate search space. He has converged to what he believes is the optimum in that space very long time ago. It’s just not worth the effort for him to try and re-converge to something else in the digital domain. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But I’d be careful, if I were him, to pass judgment about modeling for the same reason: it might well be “better” for other people who haven’t invested 30 years of their life in the particular rig that Steve has arrived at, which pretty much describes anyone but Steve himself. People like to be “right” too much for some reason. A mature point of view is that what’s right for one person is not necessarily right for someone else most of the time. Only immature people think in absolutes. As a person in my 40s I’m quite OK with recognizing that there may be other correct opinions in the world besides mine.
 
I have a theory

We all know that when it comes to pure sound quality, tube amps are still on top of any modeller. Why? Well, e.g. there's no aliasing in the analog world. There's a smaller latency. Yes, the Axe's latency is small, but a tube amp reacts faster! Tube amps are more beautiful (subjective of course, but can be an argument). They feel better. And of course: They are, what modellers and especially profilers are based on, they are the original! They are consistent, don't change every month or so. They are simple to use.

Speed of sound being what it is, it doesn’t really matter if the amp “reacts faster” by a few milliseconds. You typically have to sit farther from a guitar cab in the studio, so the perceived latency is likely larger with an amp, and on stage it doesn’t matter one iota. I also strongly suspect that you will no longer be able to tell the difference in feel _or_ tone in double blind testing. And my Axe is more consistent tone-wise than my Mark V. In fact now that there aren’t any new firmware updates, it sounds the same every time I fire it up.
 
People like to be “right” too much for some reason. A mature point of view is that what’s right for one person is not necessarily right for someone else most of the time. Only immature people think in absolutes.
If only there were an effective way to teach that.


As a person in my 40s...
You're a kid. what do you know? :)
 
On a separate note, it’s remarkable how weird our perception of latency is. Our vision, for instance incurs some 100-150ms of latency, yet we perceive the world as being “in the present”, even though it’s 0.1 seconds in the past. Proprioceptive latency (how soon you feel something) is less, but still tens of milliseconds. Hearing latency in healthy adults is 60ms. Finally there’s also motor latency: how long it takes your muscles to react, and it also depends on how many movements you want to control per second. That’s why playing fast, where you can no longer control your muscles precisely is an entirely different ball game: your brain has to issue commands to the spinal cord to engage pre-trained “sequences” of motor response, much like when catching a ball, and you can no longer hear or control each individual note, the best you can hope for is that you’ll fit the chunks in the bars and make them sound even enough in aggregate. That’s also why we have such a hard time catching flies: they react _way_ faster than we do.
 
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