A Modeler Only Needs to Fool the Room, Not the Microphone
The clip going round the forums this week has Joe Bonamassa, mid-interview, admitting that the signature modeling unit built with Fender fools him harder than his own tube amps do — his words, not a marketing line stapled on after.
Here's the one technical thing worth understanding about why that claim isn't crazy. A modeler isn't recording a sound and playing it back; it's running your signal through a chain of captured responses — preamp, power-amp sag, output transformer, speaker, the exact mic and the exact few inches where someone once stood it. Get enough of that chain right and your ear, which was never listening for voltage, stops asking where the valve went.
I'll say the obvious thing before anyone else does: I haven't put a signal through that particular box, so I'm not telling you it's as good as he says. What I can tell you from years of modelers crossing my own board is that the believable ones stopped chasing the amp and started chasing the room the amp used to be standing in — which is a harder, odder problem, and the one that actually matters to a listener.
The same week, a different kind of proof of ownership changed hands: Lonnie Mack's old guitar rig sold at auction for $550,000, alongside the most expensive 1959 Les Paul 'Burst ever sold. Nobody is plugging either of those into a gig tonight. They're not tools anymore; they're relics, bought by people who want to own the history rather than carry it onstage.
That's the actual split happening under the gear talk: not tube versus modeler, but tool versus artefact. A working rig earns its keep by disappearing into the take; a $550,000 rig earns its keep by being looked at. The pedal that fools Bonamassa on a Tuesday is doing the first job. The rig in the display case is doing the second, and doing it beautifully.
Load-out, most nights, looks the same anyway: a tech lowers a warm head into a padded case like he's putting a tired man to bed, while two feet away the modeler gets a strip of gaff tape and goes straight into the flight case for tomorrow's gate.
On the wire this week
I grew up at the bottom of the world, on the New Zealand coast, close enough to the sea that the salt got into everything, the speakers included. The radio dropped out every time the weather turned, so I learned early that sound is something you can lose. Reckon that's why I've spent my whole life chasing it. I chased it across the Pacific to Los Angeles and never quite went home: a dozen years of other people's sessions, first as the kid making coffee in a Burbank studio, now from a small room in Echo Park. I'm a producer and an engineer, but mostly I'm a bloke who can't sit still when a good record comes on. Give me a guitar with a bit of hair on it, a synth that drifts out of tune as the room warms up, a low end you feel in your chest. I want sound you could take a bite of: big, wide, a room breathing around the band. Long dinners, loud speakers, nights that don't know when to quit. Life's too bloody short for bad sound. One rule, and I don't bend it: if I haven't put a signal through it, I'm not writing about it.