Yes! Go check out the album "TigerWalk" or the live "Soul on Ten" for great guitar tones and playing by Robben Ford, or the DVD The Paris Concert. He's a master player and it's really a joy to hear what he coaxes out the equipment he uses, and still keeps the rig pretty simple.
I'm fond of a Lowell George quote from guitar player magazine about his Dumble: "It's my favorite amp, I love it, it's like a Fender made right." In the modern age, it might be better said "It's like a Fender on Steroids." The Bludotone skyline clean (non preamp boost) in my real life Ojai is the loveliest Fender-licious clean I know of. Put it with a good Tele neck pickup and you just want to play all day, every note and chord sounds awesome. The Dumble Clean in the AXE Fx is also really really great and close, it sound little tighter to my ears in another wonderful way.
I once got to play around at stage volume with a Dumble by a very "famous player" -- its was a Ripper model -- and the Clean was different than my Ojai, really beautiful; it was very fundamental note-focused and "beamy" in a positive rather than negative sense of the word - it really projected each note. The player mostly used that sound and then would click the pre-amp boost for crunching it up for a gritty lead tone. But I HATED the same amp's overdrive channel, it sounded horrible! I could not believe it.
As usual, Cliff has a really valid point:, there is too much over-the-top much hype or mysticism about these amps. I suppose I am guilty of some of that, given my enthusiasm for their sound. They are voiced to mids punching through yet somehow present an pretty even EQ response across bass/mid/treble, and sound great in certain kind of players hands. If you play with a lot of dynamics and touch sensitive, the ones I've played are very responsive to how to you attack/hit the amp, which is what sold me when I first heard and played a Bludotone Ojai at a guitar show in Austin. But I would not use them for power chord rock or most classic rock.
The main thing for me is, how great is it that we live in a time as guitar players that a genius can create an AXE Fx and then put in amp models that are rare and impossible to acquire, making those tones available to the playing masses? It's tone democracy, and I think it's a wonderful thing. That's why I did Cab Pack 17 "Buddy's Boutique," I just wanted to add the other elements - Cab IRs- necessary to get these tones many of us love, and can now get ourselves with a little tweaking. I'm not doing any other cab packs, this was just my little contribution to the greater cause, and it shows you how much Fractal Audio rocks that they see the big picture and this niche that needed to be filled, and let me play a little to do that.
