Plugins vs Fractal

Jim Amsden

Jim Amsden

Inspired
I've been working with Paradise Guitar Studio and Archetype John Mayer for the last couple of weeks to evolve my DAW plugin from S-Gear/Helix Native to something new. Both plugins are great. I find Paradise Guitar Studio fit my use case a bit better because of the choice of effects (I use a chorus sometimes), and more flexible and controllable black box amp models. Archetype John Mayer sounds great too. But its amp models have a lot of overlap, all three being a variant of a Fender clean tone, and there's not much options for power amp distortion. It's also missing some common effects.

To setup my plugin tones, I used an A/B switch to switch between FM9 and the plugins and tried to match my FM9 patch for clean, crunch and drive tones. I could get pretty close. And different is ok. So if figured so far so goo.

I've been forcing myself to use these plugins every day for rehearsal and practice to get some experience with them, the MC8 MIDI controls I created, and to dial them in. So today, Christmas Eve, I thought I'd go back to my usual FM9 patches for practice. What a difference! The FM9 sounded and felt so much better, more alive, greater headroom, smoother transition into distortion. Perhaps the difference is I get a lot of my saturation from Vox and Marshall models on FM9, same with Paradise Guitar Studio.

It seems the Fractal models just sound a feel a lot better in a manner that is very difficult to explain but easy to experience. Dialing them in they don't sound that different. But playing them in a mix was a different experience.
 
I’ve been messing with the John Mayer plug too and it does sound good, we are just spoiled with Fractal. Going back to it just feels and sounds better than anything else. They all sound really great although, I was a bit underwhelmed by the John Mayer amps. I prefer the Cory Wong archetype for the clean platform tone. But the Fractal stuff is just the best.
 
Did you use the FM9 as soundcard?
Fractal gear are in another league than most soundcards when it comes to guitar input, and this has a huge impact of the feel and sound.
(Fractals analog outputs is also outstanding)
Their USB I/O is also very capable of running low latency. There's always "hidden" buffers in a soundcard not only the buffersize you set in UI.
RME is also capable of extremely low latency, but I don't think their analog input sounds as good for guitar as Fractal.

When people go crazy about Plug-ins or review them, they tend to forget these important factors 🙂
 
Jim Amsden said:
I've been forcing myself to use these plugins every day for rehearsal and practice to get some experience with them, the MC8 MIDI controls I created, and to dial them in. So today, Christmas Eve, I thought I'd go back to my usual FM9 patches for practice. What a difference! The FM9 sounded and felt so much better, more alive, greater headroom, smoother transition into distortion.
Click to expand...
Happy you're happy, and honestly not surprised.
 
Aja said:
I’ve been messing with the John Mayer plug too and it does sound good, we are just spoiled with Fractal. Going back to it just feels and sounds better than anythin, else. They all sound really great although, I was a bit underwhelmed by the John Mayer amps. I prefer the Cory Wong archetype for the clean platform tone. But the Fractal stuff is just the best.
Click to expand...
Yes, there's really no comparing but there's so much more conveience in plugins, especially to listen to DI tracks when playing back or editing before a reamp. I wish FAS would design a plugin even if it required a unit connected as a dongle, then I wouild buy a FM3 for this purpose (portability). The closest I have gotten it the NAM but its been hogging my CPU lately.

I used to use other plugins for listening back but what I learned is that something may sound ok on an inferior plugin (Helix Native or STL Tonehub for example) but when you reamp through the FM9 some of the things you didnt hear in the plugins start to pop out.
 
Dave Merrill said:
r2r?
Click to expand...
Theres been a team of hackers (R2R) who have managed to crack all of the Neural DSP archetypes. Probably a huge reason why Cliff will not do a plugin version of Fractal. The John Mayer one was cracked in literally 1 or 2 days.
 
Ugh. This is why we can't have nice things.

Much as i detest copy protection, it's clearly war out there. Developers deserve to get paid for their work, and for some reason, some people seem not to understand that if they make it so that work product is available for nothing, it will cease to exist.
 
What exactly is the great convenience of plugins compared to recording your DI on one track and hardware-sending it through a Fractal for re-Fractaling and monitoring / recording to another track? Sure there's a few more steps (tracks) and not 100% convenient but I don't see why that's such a huge dealbreaker that people are willing to spend hunders of extra dollars on something they (apparently) don't enjoy as much.
 
kvik said:
What exactly is the great convenience of plugins compared to recording your DI on one track and hardware-sending it through a Fractal for re-Fractaling and monitoring / recording to another track? Sure there's a few more steps (tracks) and not 100% convenient but I don't see why that's such a huge dealbreaker that people are willing to spend hunders of extra dollars on something they (apparently) don't enjoy as much.
Click to expand...
Some people just want presets, especially if they’re deep into a genre / artist. Presets usually sound great to me but I much prefer the flexibility to tweak in the fractal.
 
kvik said:
What exactly is the great convenience of plugins compared to recording your DI on one track and hardware-sending it through a Fractal for re-Fractaling and monitoring / recording to another track? Sure there's a few more steps (tracks) and not 100% convenient but I don't see why that's such a huge dealbreaker that people are willing to spend hunders of extra dollars on something they (apparently) don't enjoy as much.
Click to expand...
In my experience, it's 10x quicker to dial in tones when using a plugin with DI's. You record the DI, you tweak the VST while playing, once you're happy, copy the settings to your dual/quad tracked takes, then it's done and you're ready to move on. Fractal is a little more complicated, I have to set up a looper and then tweak the settings while it's playing, sometimes if I change too many settings (or rather SPECIFIC settings) it can glitch out and I have to start the process again. Then when you reamp, you have to sit and let the whole thing play through. Way more time consuming.

I also find that I get less latency with plugins, my ONLY bugbear with my FM9 is the latency, I love everything else about it.
 
MetalLizardJesus said:
In my experience, it's 10x quicker to dial in tones when using a plugin with DI's. You record the DI, you tweak the VST while playing, once you're happy, copy the settings to your dual/quad tracked takes, then it's done and you're ready to move on. Fractal is a little more complicated, I have to set up a looper and then tweak the settings while it's playing, sometimes if I change too many settings (or rather SPECIFIC settings) it can glitch out and I have to start the process again. Then when you reamp, you have to sit and let the whole thing play through. Way more time consuming.

I also find that I get less latency with plugins, my ONLY bugbear with my FM9 is the latency, I love everything else about it.
Click to expand...
I record with my FM9 every day and have not felt any latency whatsoever, using 128 or 64 buffer.
Your point about reamping is a good one. That would be time consuming for the FM9. Everything else I find FM edit and my FM9 as an input interface is everything I would ever need to track guitar for any project.
 
Paradise was underwhelming and I could not get into it at all. NDSP Mayer over that any day if those are the tones you are looking for. We are indeed so spoiled with options now. The only reason why I am using NDSP plugins more and more on my DAW is the saving of the settings for each track where if I use my FM9 or AM4, I have to remember what settings I did on that track for any effect or volume etc. Fractal will always be my live go-to though hands down. The day we get a Fractal plugin with the core models, game over.
 
TaylorU said:
Paradise was underwhelming and I could not get into it at all. NDSP Mayer over that any day if those are the tones you are looking for. We are indeed so spoiled with options now. The only reason why I am using NDSP plugins more and more on my DAW is the saving of the settings for each track where if I use my FM9 or AM4, I have to remember what settings I did on that track for any effect or volume etc. Fractal will always be my live go-to though hands down. The day we get a Fractal plugin with the core models, game over.
Click to expand...
Someone did make a plugin that supposedly remembers settings for Fractal devices. I havent used it but its out there.

Edit: here it is
https://forum.fractalaudio.com/thre...ve-axe-fx-presets-in-your-daw-project.195049/
 
Aja said:
I record with my FM9 every day and have not felt any latency whatsoever, using 128 or 64 buffer.
Your point about reamping is a good one. That would be time consuming for the FM9. Everything else I find FM edit and my FM9 as an input interface is everything I would ever need to track guitar for any project.
Click to expand...
Cool, we're all different. Maybe my FM9 is broken/dodgey or using the headphone jack adds some latency. Theres stuff I can play comfortably through Helix Native that I physically can't play on my FM9 because that slight latency just throws me off. Like this:

Can comfortably play it through Helix (used in the video) or my little combo amp, but just can't get my FM9 to respond as fast. I definitely prefer the sound of my FM9 though!
 
TaylorU said:
Man, I’ve used Fractal Audio products for years, and never knew that this existed.. unfortunately, I’m seeing that this is been discontinued. Would be great to have something like this in the future though.
Click to expand...
You can still find it out there if you dig. But Glenn doesn't host it anymore, and it might break at some point in the future.
 
MetalLizardJesus said:
Fractal is a little more complicated, I have to set up a looper and then tweak the settings while it's playing, sometimes if I change too many settings (or rather SPECIFIC settings) it can glitch out and I have to start the process again.
Click to expand...
You may be glad to hear that this arduous process is unnecessary and there's a relatively simple workflow you can use in any DAW (or a hardware mixer for that matter) to at least greatly improve the tone hunting part. Well, at least it's conceptually simple enough once you wrap your head around the signal paths you are creating. If I was able to figure it out with literally zero experience in audio production then someone who actually knows what they are doing should also be able to do it.

Proceed as follows (using Reaper, but I'm sure you can do the equivalent in anything better than Windows Sound Recorder):
  1. Create a Guitar DI track and set it to get input on In 1 L, i.e. from the Fractal Input 1 port,
  2. Turn off Record Monitoring so you don't hear the DI while recording takes,
  3. Set up a decent tone that you can use to record your take(s) and record to Guitar DI track,
  4. Once you have the DI takes set:
    • Setup - Input Config - Input 1 - Source to USB (Channels 3/4),
    • Change this back to Input 1 every time you want to record a new take
  5. This will rewire the Fractal so it will feed your In 1 block from the USB instead of the physical Input 1. I'm on FM3 so this seems to be the only option but I have a hunch that on FM9 or Axe you can instead use In 2 block or something else for the same purpose and not have to lose the regular In 1 function for the duration of reamping,
  6. Now add a Hardware Send to the Guitar DI track and set it to OUT 3, which will corespond to In 1 block as we configured it in step 4 above,
  7. Also configure the send to Pre-Fader (Post FX) and lower the track's main fader so you don't hear the DI while playing back the track,
And that's basically it. You can now playback the project and adjust the tone on your Fractal live while hearing the result. Once you're satisfied with the result you can create a regular track and record the Out1 Block (or whatever) as usual with the processed sound. Keep your DI if you want to come back to it later and re-amp again. Make sure to mute the DI send whenever you are done with recording as otherwise you're going to hear things twice.

I'll admit not entirely straightforward and certainly a hassle compared to the plugin workflow, but at least it's not involving a looper. Once you've done it a few times it really isn't that complicated as it might seem at first.

MetalLizardJesus said:
Then when you reamp, you have to sit and let the whole thing play through. Way more time consuming.
Click to expand...
Indeed, that doesn't sound so fun. I can also imagine the hassle when you have a whole bunch of different guitar parts requiring different settings and having to go through them all.

Anyway, I can definitely see how for most people the plugin workflow is way more attractive. Now, personally I'm into recording everything in a single take and only recording the DI so that I have something to experiment with later when I don't feel like playing the guitar so it's not as huge a hassle for me to do the above process. I also just do this as a hobby so I can do whatever I want and take however long I want, so there's that.
MetalLizardJesus said:
I also find that I get less latency with plugins, my ONLY bugbear with my FM9 is the latency, I love everything else about it.
Click to expand...
That sounds suspicous. You should perhaps look into it because AFAIK the FM9 should perform as good or better than anything else you might have tried latency wise.

Also, nice playing!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom