John Nathan Cordy: Can Digital Modeling REALLY Get Much Better? - A look back over 25 years of modeling

Hard to believe its been nearly 25 yrs now since the original POD came out. I remember when i first bought mine back around 2000. I was blown away > fast forward to now with Fractal! L6 turned me on to modelling. I"ve had a number of their products over the years....Pod, Pod xt, pod x3 live, and stopped before the HD stuff came out. That got me all curious about the Digitech line. I had the 2101 and then the 1101. I quite liked the 1101...at that time had it running through a mesa simul 2:90 (later an atomic 50/50) and various cabinets. It was monstrous sounding. Then it was circa 2011 i think when I somehow discovered Fractal. They seemed so obscure at the time and i got the Ultra. That was it for me for any other modeller. fractal was fam immediately since.
 
Yes. There’s always room for improvement with modeling. But I think the more important question is, “can the overall user experience get better?”
 
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sprint said:
Consensus here, judging by reactions to the latest FW beta, seems to be: YES, it can get much better. (a repeating cycle for many years now).
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Really? I’m on the FM3 so haven’t had a chance yet to hear X3. I haven’t been paying attention to posts about it and just waiting patiently for the beta. As is it’s really good, very close. The FRFR thing makes direct comparisons to the real deal tough to discern. Jamming along with recorded music my guitar sounds very much like the recorded guitars. I rarely run my tube amps now. Is there a touch of sarcasm in your post? I’m hoping it is improved but it’s to the point where there isn’t a lot of room left for improvement.
 
In time, they should sound better than real amps. Although I'm not sure what that would exactly sound like.
 
Got me a bit interested in the POD Express, for when I'm thinking I want something I can bring to stores to play guitars through.
 
Chewie5150 said:
Hard to believe its been nearly 25 yrs now since the original POD came out. I remember when i first bought mine back around 2000. I was blown away > fast forward to now with Fractal! L6 turned me on to modelling. I"ve had a number of their products over the years....Pod, Pod xt, pod x3 live, and stopped before the HD stuff came out. That got me all curious about the Digitech line. I had the 2101 and then the 1101. I quite liked the 1101...at that time had it running through a mesa simul 2:90 (later an atomic 50/50) and various cabinets. It was monstrous sounding. Then it was circa 2011 i think when I somehow discovered Fractal. They seemed so obscure at the time and i got the Ultra. That was it for me for any other modeller. fractal was fam immediately since.
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I think it was 1994 when I bought a Digitech 2101 (along with the extra DSP expansion). It did have a tube pre-amp so it was sort of a hybrid but it really shifted my thinking about what was possible for recording.

What really changed things for me was Line 6 Amp Farm on a loaded Pro Tools TDM system. It was at that point that I was fully onboard with amp modeling and what it meant for music production. Myself along with other engineers and clients were very enthusiastic when we fully understood that we could stop for the day and everything would be exactly how we left it even if we came back a month later. The modeling was primitive but impacted the workflow to the point that some producer's used it exclusively. On a side note I recently dusted off the POD 2.0 for kicks. I remembered it sounding pretty good when it came out, today not so great! ;)

Fractal took modeling to the point that I will never go back to dragging amps around.

My Fractal wish now is for a AU or VST version of Axe-Edit so I can use the Axe the same way we did Amp Farm back in the day but with the advantage of being in a portable box that I can take anywhere rather than being locked to a computer system.
 
skolacki said:
Really? . Is there a touch of sarcasm in your post? I’m hoping it is improved but it’s to the point where there isn’t a lot of room left for improvement.
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If it's to the point where there isn't a lot of room left for improvement in accuracy, how do we explain all the posts in the FW 25 beta thread indicating a significant difference is heard. In fact, take any Axfx fw update in the past decade that included a modelling engine change: we can always find a number of posts before the update saying "no room left for improvement" and with/after the update, posts perceiving "significant improvement" or "difference" 🤔 (not to mention the actual factual technical changes described by Fractal with each successive modelling engine update). Dunno, maybe the crux of this is our (with a few exceptions maybe - but mostly) inability to accurately guage the magnitude of such differences - I tend to take such comments / vids with a grain of salt, but pay a bit more attention when, in the odd rare instance, there's actually some rigor, science, and/or oooh charts and graphs involved (aka elbow grease).
 
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Let's also not forget that Cliff is likely using several simplified algorithms that he can unleash more on a better system.
These may add up to, say, another +1%? ;) Maybe more... Guessing it depends on there being aspects that could really use the power.
 
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sprint said:
If it's to the point where there isn't a lot of room left for improvement in accuracy, how do we explain all the posts in the FW 25 beta thread indicating a significant difference is heard. In fact, take any Axfx fw update in the past decade that included a modelling engine change: we can always find a number of posts before the update saying "no room left for improvement" and with/after the update, posts perceiving "significant improvement" or "difference" 🤔 (not to mention the actual factual technical changes described by Fractal with each successive modelling engine update). Dunno, maybe the crux of this is our (with a few exceptions maybe - but mostly) inability to accurately guage the magnitude of such differences - I tend to take such comments / vids with a grain of salt, but pay a bit more attention when, in the odd rare instance, there's actually some rigor, science, and/or oooh charts and graphs involved (aka elbow grease).
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Does the new firmware sound better? For me, Ares to Cygnus was a big change. I hated it at first. X1 to X2 sounded better but not a wow thing like me yelling holy shit this is great! Sounds good though. It keeps improving but a lot of this is subtle. To me anyhow. My old ears aren’t what they used to be.
 
Beautiful intro piece!

A common misconception that the pod was the first modeller. Roland already had a device (called the VG8 I think) that modelled guitars as well as the usual amps, cabs and mics.

I used a later version, the GP 100 that didn’t have guitar modelling but had the amps and cabs along with a great selection of Boss stomp pedals and powerful real time parameter control.
 
Yes. And the release of the Fender unit was a case in point as different models are playing catch up or playing lowest common denominator cost savings spoiler.
 
skolacki said:
Does the new firmware sound better?
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25 sounds a bit "different" to me, not really "better". "Better" and "more accurate" are not necessarily the same thing: ie a significant improvement in accuracy might result in a previously glorious tone sounding like utter shite after the change (or, an amp model change designed to make it sound more "pleasing" might also make it totally inaccurate to its reference). I tend to think of accuracy improvements as not necessarily sounding "better" to one'a ear, but closer in alignment to the tone, feel and behavior of the real world reference amp, therefore yielding more in terms of benefits like:
  • predictability of tone - a step more aligned to the real world equivilent.
  • greater predicitability of how the amp interacts with other gear - modelled or rl (guirars, driives, cabs ...) - a step more aligned to the real world equivilent.
  • predicitability of how the amp sounds, feels, behaves at various settings - a step more aligned to real world equivilent.
  • getting closer to the reference amp's recognizable "signature" tonal characteristics...
  • Making it more like what we understand the reference to be (complete with warts n whatever frustrating aspects, as well as the magic waiting to be brought out by the right hands / guitar / preset).
i feel like these are the benefits that have ratcheted up over time in Axfx to yield amp models that rival the real world references. Each one is becoming a deep tonal palette like the actual amp would be for me in whatever dream world I could afford it.
 
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I completely forgot about the Roland GP-16 that I got in maybe 1988? The FX were pretty good and the amp models were serviceable. The thing that was cool for the time was being to move the Amp and FX blocks around.

I still have it somewhere. It had been put away long before I discovered the dead battery that is soldered to the main board that I never got around to getting replaced.
 
ruso said:
Yes. There’s always room for improvement with modeling. But I think the more important question is, “can the overall user experience get better?”
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With current FAS FW I cannot find anything negative with my tone or the tone the crowd hears. Always positive feedback. So…
 
NY Guitarist said:
I completely forgot about the Roland GP-16 that I got in maybe 1988? The FX were pretty good and the amp models were serviceable. The thing that was cool for the time was being to move the Amp and FX blocks around.

I still have it somewhere. It had been put away long before I discovered the dead battery that is soldered to the main board that I never got around to getting replaced.
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I think the GP-8 and later digital version GP-16 were just effect processiors, no modelling. I had both and preferred the GP-8, although I did a small mod to the delay effect.
 
When people ask me about modellers, I'm always tempted to say: "If you can't make good music with a POD, the problem isn't the POD".

I'll probably accidentally say it out loud one day :)
 
GM Arts said:
Beautiful intro piece!

A common misconception that the pod was the first modeller. Roland already had a device (called the VG8 I think) that modelled guitars as well as the usual amps, cabs and mics.

I used a later version, the GP 100 that didn’t have guitar modelling but had the amps and cabs along with a great selection of Boss stomp pedals and powerful real time parameter control.
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Definitely not the first modeler.

I had a Johnson Millennium 150 in the mid 90s and there was also the Line6 AxSys which was released in 1996.
 
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