NOTE: This post isn't meant to speak negatively of anyone's product. It's simply meant to show different attributes found in two types of modeling.
All this talk about amp captures lately has made me curious about a couple things. Even though amps, models, and captures are all supposed to sound the same, Fractal has always had a "feel" that I haven't been able to get out of other modelers. People have said the Quad Cortex models aren't great, but the captures are amazing... so I (literally) dusted off my Quad Cortex and decided to make a capture of my '77 Marshall JMP to see how it stacked up.
Tonally, it's way better than the Kemper, but still has some excited frequencies. Not exactly apples to apples, but more like an apple vs a different kind of apple if that makes sense. It's not bad by any means... just a little different. I remember Cliff saying something a while back about hearing the quality of the modeling by rolling off the guitar's volume knob and comparing it to what a real amp does, so that's what I did.
It seems like captures can "sound" close when the guitar is on 10, but they still don't "feel" close in my opinion, so I played something on my looper pedal with the guitar's volume really low with a swell to 10 at the end and recorded it through my Marshall JMP with the LB-2 load box, the Fractal Brit 800 model with the LB-2 impedance curve, and a QC capture I made of the JMP through the LB-2. Disclaimer... I'm recovering from Covid, so my ears are still plugged up which made it a little tricky to match the Fractal with my amp by ear, but today it isn't about a direct "tone match," it's about what makes a digital recreation "feel" right or not. The capture was not changed or altered in any way, and I even captured it twice to make sure my results were consistent.
I'm going to do this in two parts. Part 1 is "Full Volume" where we hear all three examples with the guitar's volume all the way up. There's similar tonality and gain structure. They aren't identical, but that's what we're listening for here. The capture is a bit of an outlier, but it's still in the ballpark and would probably work well for some players. I notice the chord bloom with the amp and Fractal, but it's much more linear with the QC. This is when things should sound the closest.
Order: Marshall, Fractal, Capture
Part 2 is "Volume Rolloff" where we hear all three examples with the guitar's volume knob rolled off and turned up at the end. This is where the magic happens in my opinion. Even lightly picked with the volume rolled off, you hear this angry volatility in the amp like it can't wait to explode. The Fractal does a great job of replicating it; like you can hear the components in the amp working with and against each other as if it's trying to figure out what going to happen next. When we hear the capture, all of that chaos is gone. It's soft, polite, and doesn't really have any of those swirling elements we hear in the other two. I think this is why models and captures feel so different.
Order: Marshall, Fractal, Capture
All that to say, I think the crazy nonlinear behavior we hear in the Volume Rolloff clip ends up being the stuff that makes a model respond more accurately to our playing and what gives us an authentic playing experience. We may not hear it with our guitars on 10, but we can definitely feel it.
