IK Multimedia Amplitube 2.1

I've been playing guitar for 16 years and have been gigging with bands since college. I'm not a professional musician or producer but I love making music and make enough money at it to buy nice gear.

I have a modest home studio setup and use Pro Tools 7. I plug into an Mbox 2 which is connected to an Intel quad core PC with 4 gigs of RAM running Window XP. I use Samsom Rubicon active studio monitors for listening and mixing.

The learning curve for this application was the easiest out of all the music programs I have ever used. If you know how to tweak an amp and pedals you shouldn't have any problems finding your way around. The manual is easy to understand as well. The installation was a bit time consuming due to copyright protection but the process wasn't anymore difficult compared to other plug ins. I did have some technical issues using the standalone portion of the application. Whenever I launched the application in standalone mode I would get terrible feedback and was unable to use it at all. I finally discovered it was due to my input/output settings. Once I fixed the settings it worked just fine. No fault of the product, just my oversite. I never had any issues with the plug in portion.

You do need to spend some time tweaking the input settings to avoid clipping. Especially if you are consistently swapping out rig setups. This was the most time consuming thing for me. It just won't sound good unless you dedicate some time adjusting the signal from guitar to the preamp and through all the settings in the program to find the sweet spot. The optimal setup is to be able to roll back the volume knob on the guitar for rhythm and then roll it to 10 for lead work. When setup correctly it will respond like an amp and clean up somewhat when the volume is reduced on the guitar.

The sound quality is very good and the tonal options are endless. I don't even use a practice amp anymore because I get better tone at bedroom levels with amplitube2 when i am practicing at home. The guitar tones sound great on recordings and are certainly realistic enough for any demo recordings. Unless you have thousands of dollars to invest in music gear and room treatments, this is your best option for home recording. One cool feature I like is the ability to change the amp and effect settings after tracking. Since Amplitube2 is just a plug in, it doesn't color the dry track recording. So you recorded with a fender amp setting and decided you would rather have a Marshall setting. No problem, just dial up a Marshall stack setting and you are golden. There is no need to re-record.

One thing I really wanted to point out is the standalone part of Amplitube2. It is my go to piece of gear that I use everyday along with the Mbox2. I use it as a practice amp which I play through my studio monitors. I has killer tone at very low volume levels. I can play with Marshall tone at the volume level of a television set. It also has an audio player with easy to use looping, pitch change, and tempo change capabilities. There is a built in metronome as well that I use for practicing scales. All the features are very easy to use and it doesn't alter the audio file. My playing has greatly improved since I started using Amp2 as a practice tool.

I paid $200 for this which came in a bundle that included Ampeg, T-Racks standard, Classik Reverb, and Amp2. I would pay that much for Amp2 alone, it is that good in my opinion. If you are into home recording and/or a guitar player looking for digital amp software to get great tones playing at home without bothering your spouse or the neighbors, then this would be a great purchase for you.

I've been making music for over 20 years, as a bass player, guitarist and sometime keyboard player. For most of that time I've played a Fender Stratocaster with Seymour Duncan Alnico II pickups and a beat up old Ibanez Destroyer, so I'm really familiar with the ins and outs of these particular guitars. I've been using Amplitube 2 as a plug-in for my DAW with Cubase, monitoring through Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones and some mid-level Altec-Lansing computer speakers.

This software is incredibly easy to use. You can start wailing with the presets as soon as it's installed. I was a little annoyed by the copy protection, but once I carried the codes to another computer (my DAW isn't connected to the Internet), registering the software was a breeze. And I live the way IK MultiMedia handles the registration, requiring you to create an account on their web site, through which your registration keys are always available.

As for the software itself, if you can use an amp, you can use this software. You'll get more out of it if you learn to use particular features, but it's ready to go right out of the box. Switching, mixing and matching different pre-amps, amplifers, cabinets, mics and effects is incredibly easy to do. So you can be creating your own amp set-ups in moments.

This is the real reason I wanted to write a review. It seems to me that the people who whine loudest about the sound quality of this software are a bunch of spoiled brats. You're going to buy software for around $250 that gives you access to 14 guitar amps, 7 power amps, 16 cabinets, 6 microphones, 21 stomp effects, 11 rack effects and a tuner, and you're going to complain because some of the sounds are a little off? Have you priced a Marshall guitar head lately? Have you ever had to carry a 30 year old Ampeg V4 guitar head? This software costs the same as a couple of effects pedals, and you're complaining it doesn't make breakfast for you?

I think the sounds are great. If I have a complaint, it's about the effects. I just don't think they're all that great. But the amps are wonderful. I think most of the guys who think this software doesn't measure up have a great amp sitting in their bedrooms. All I know is that my cousin, who plays through a rig consisting of twin Marshall heads and four total speaker cabinets, wrote me recently asking me how I got that terrific guitar sound on a song I'd just recorded. He couldn't believe that the screaming Marshall sound I got on a lead break was computer software.

The appeal of this software to me is that I play two dramatically different guitars, in my Strat and my Ibanez Destroyer. I can't afford to buy multiple amps. But Ampltibue 2 gives me a room full of amps that sound just as good as the real thing, so I can mix and match which amps sound best with which guitar. I'd recommend skipping some of the built-in effects and using other plug-ins (like I said, I use mine through Cubase, so adding effects is not problem), but the actual TONE of the amps is amazing. Maybe not amazing enough to fool the guy who's played the same boutique amp for 20 years that's loaded with tubes that were crafted by monks in Tibet and were brought across the mountains to America by journeyman traders... but most of the rest of us would have a hard time telling the real deal from the software on a recording.

I've never had any trouble with this software. I've heard some complain that it's a CPU hog, but I've never noticed a problem. Of course, I use GigaStudio, so our perceptions on what constitutes a CPU hog might be slightly different. While I'm sure better software will come along eventually (the new Peavey software is amazing, I'm told), Amplitube 2 will do. I notice they just came out with a Fender version, which I'm thinking of picking up. I'm that impressed.

The only real complaint I have about Amplitube 2 is that it's practically impossible to use it live. To use it live you'd have to have a controller such as IK's Stomp IO. But I have a hard time justifying $800 for a footboard. I'll just stick to my usual rig live and reserve the Amplitube 2 software for the studio.

This software is definitely worth the price you pay. Walking around in a music store pricing some of the amps it emulates will prove that to you.

Ive been making music as a musician for about 6 or so years. Ive recently got into the music production/engineering detail for about 2 years. Mainly a guitarist, i also dabble in bass and keyboard duties.

Im running A2 in my home studio which im currently building up, running a Pentium 4 PC, a Digidesign Mbox 2 audio interface and Pro Tools 7.4 where i host all my plug-ins.

Yeah the thing is pretty straight forward. Comparing it to guitar rig I thought even a retarded monkey could figure it out. The interface is more geared towards rig mindset guitarists (i.e. stomp box, amp, cab, sound) but added you also get to meddle A LITTLE BIT with micing adjustments and rack gear which is nice but not incredible.

Basically easy for guitarists, not complex or powerful enough for producing individuals.

If you cant afford a true tube mesa or a marshall then get this thing.

Actually ill put it this way, if you want to get some really proper metal sounds approximating killswitch engage standard tones but cant afford a framus, peavey or mesa heads (or all together) then get this thing. Dont bother with hi-gain presets they are awful, the true potential of this software comes with tweaking the hell out of it. You can combine up to 12 stomp boxes, with a wonderful recreation of the TS9 Ibanez Tubescreamer, and you can get several signal combinations some of which allow you to run two different amps at the same time through one or two cabs at a time if you wish

Amplitube 2 also has this amazing ability of making your signal sound warm specially running through the mMrshall models. Dont expect true life marshall sound it will never happen digitally, however it sounds damn good, specially if you know how to get a good tone out of a valve amp. Brilliant for hard rock stuff

For bluesy, earlier rock sounds i personally wasnt satisfied. Fair enough my backline of guitars isnt the greatest for amazing neck pickup tone (i.e. i dont have a gibson lp). But yeah generally guitar rig 2 is miles ahead of the game. Unless you pick up Amplitube hendrix of course and thats a completely different game.

Totally brilliant for recording/mixing due to the fact that it gives you about 10 grands worth of guitar rig equipment modelled digitally for hardly anything in comparison. I havent used it live yet but you bet i will be.

The last reason why i didnt give this a full ten was because this plug-in isnt perfect. When you run your perfect rectified metal tone out of this thing you will notice a bit of digital crackle artifacts come up here and then.

Its definitely value for money. It will sort you out till you saved up enough or won the lottery to get your 3 or 4 stacks of wonderful tube amps

Be warned however
The rack gear bundled with it is absolutely rubbish, youre much better off using effects on your DAW. However if you wanna avoid clipping on metal high gain you have to use the rack compressor to limit the signal and give you a bit more headroom. But the problem is the thing has a maximum ratio of 5:1 (no joke) so if you wanna crank the hell out of your digital rig for a bit more power then youre screwed unless youre into some sort of electro avant garde crackle pop metal aberration.

The tuner is brilliant. Even if you think you dont need to tune up with amplitube. Always tune up with amplitube. Its accurate.

running with pro tools7.X on the new silver imac 2Ghz intel core 2 duo with 2 gigs of ram. been using pro tools and nearly every other plugin that'll run on pro tools since 2000. been playing guitar since 1983.

points deducted only out of the inconvenience of having to have to go through different screens to tweak your sound. i realize this is a tradeoff for flexibility. guess i'm just being a bit critical but it would be nice if everything was on one screen and you could just scroll down the window like on a text document to get to where you want to be. other than that, a monkey could figure it out.

when you remove the veil of delays, reverbs, and other "rack" enhancements- strip it all down to the bare naked tones, it sounds no better than the Sansamp PSA-1 (much older technology, BTW) plugin which is actually easier to tweak because you only have one screen. (ampliturd has an amp screen, stomp screen, rack screen, etc.) one thing i noticed is that on some of the high gain settings, there is some digital "squelch" for lack of a better word. to hear what i'm talking about, hit a single note and bend it a bit and then let it fade out- you'll hear these strange digital artifacts. i've experienced this with line 6 crap too. i first noticed this on the THD high gain preset. speaking of presets, they're pretty good as far as presets go. although, as mentioned below by another reviewer, the brian may pre is terrible. they should have kept it out. if not for the strange noises at high gain, i'd have given it a 9 like my sansamp plugin.

my main issue with this thing is that it is SO cpu hungy! it eats cpu like a hum-v sucks up gasoline. i can forget about tracking with it because due to it's cpu appetite, i am forced to increase my HW buffer size, thereby inducing latency. useless in this situation! so it's kind have become my "practice amp" as i use it to play through headphones late at night when my wife and new born are sleeping. for the money, i much prefer the sansamp psa-1 plugin. i can track with it, and run a bunch at once- no issues, no bull. and it sounds every bit as good. i have plenty of other plugins to use for delays, modulation, filtering, etc. and even running these multiple plugins, i'm still not coming close to using all the cpu that ampliturd would be using. if you don't have many other plugins such as reverbs, delays, phasers and so on, this is a good one-stop solution for guitar/bass recording...as long as you have a VERY powerful computer. my computer more than exceeds the basic requirements for this plugin by quite a bit, and it's still not enough when it comes time to cut tracks. so to me, it's just something to quitely practice on late at night. without a super computer, it's a toy. a nice toy, but still a toy nonetheless. i almost forgot- it also tends to let out pops and crackles quite a bit. the solution? increase the HW buffer size and induce some latency...uuugh! i'm glad i only payed $180 for it because it's barely worth that to me. thanks, but i'll stick w/my PSA-1.

I'm using A2 in my home studio, Mackie 624's, Macbook Pro, Logic 8, Mackie Onyx, and a Studio Projects VTB 1 pre for added color. Very simple set-up, I add in a few other "secret ingredient" plug-ins, and I can get results that floor everyone that listen to my tracks. I've waited 20 years to have this level of power in a home studio environment.

With Amplitube 2 and Ampeg SVX (both IK Multimedia), I can track my electric parts without amps and outboard gear. Add in how easy it is to get a great drum sound with either BFD or EZDrummer, and I can build tracks of a caliber you'd have to do in a studio just a few years ago, all at home.

Its easy to use. It does chew up CPU, but the sound makes it worth the trouble of freezing other tracks if processing gets too intensive.

The main feature of A2 is the ability to record in real-time over monitors and then, in playback and mixing, to be able to go in and tweak the guitar's signal chain. This is worth its weight in gold.

Its very easy to get a great sound out of it.

Only issue (and the reason for the 8 score) is that A2 will sporadically drop out all sound on my set-up of Logic, or worse, will make a very loud sound like a pipe wrench dropped on a plate reverb. I hope they can work this out in future revisions. It doesn't happen that often, and resetting the sound is easy. Compared to maintaining a studio full of gear to cop a good sound, its more than a great trade-off, but for now an "8" for these two flaws.

It sounds awesome in a mix. Its much, faster, easier, and more tweakable on the back-end than mic'ing an amp.

This plug-in is for creating tracks in context of a mix. Sometimes I wonder how other people review sounds. You hear stand-alone amp tracks on the web, supposedly "great" sounds, but if you mix in context of a band, you realize those tracks would turn to mush or you'd have to cut them all to hell to get them to work in any kind of mix context. A2 drops in very quickly, and what's killer is, it is so easy to go back and tweak your amp setttings or outright change your desired amp after you've laid tracks. I use this feature all the time. I've gotten insane lead tracks changing speaker combo/mic settings to things I'd never use before, but sound awesome at those particular points in a song. You just go back after you've recorded your part and tweak your amp/speaker/mic/effects settings until you get the results you want. Double or triple up heavier parts, and you'll see how great this thing sounds. Talk about a guitar army! And you can lay your tracks so fast, it will make your head spin.

A2 is very expressive. The cleans are fantastic. And it gets the in-between sounds real good, especially in a mix context. The dirty sounds are great as well.

As posted above, it is processor intensive, especially if you're running drums such as BFD or EZD as well to create a song layout. Just freeze earlier tracks as needed.

Its an insane value. Plugs like this put the little guy in contender status with the bigger studios and producers. Combine Amplitube 2 with Ampeg SVX (also IK Multimedia), add in great drum software like BFD or even EZD works great and is simple (I have both, EZD actually sounds awesome with a little mastering f/x in play), and you can track killer instruments in a closed environment with just your axes into the interface. As long as you can set-up to do your vocals well, you've got usable tracks, and now, with the newer laptops, you can carry your entire system with you wherever you go.

As far as creating and recording music that involves electric guitar, Amplitube 2 is fantastic. A2 frees me up to sit down with Logic, open up a new song, and start creating in a spontaneous, free-flowing manner.

I've been playing guitar for about ten years now and I've been in the digital recording game for the past year. I use a Presonus Firepod as my interface and am curently working with Sonar 6. As far as recording guitar goes, I've tried everything from Line-6 Pods to a good old fashion sm57 on an all-tube Peavey.

Simply stated, this is one of the easiest to use programs I have ever come across and is hands down the easiest to use guitar amp software out there. The interface is absolutely beautiful with detailed artwork and "real" knobs to dial in your sound. My personal favirite is the fact that you can hide part of the amp head and watch the tubes glow brighter and brighter as you turn up the volume. Brilliant! The only problem here is the copy protection IK Multimedia put on this product. I know that you want to protect your product but come on IK! This is pretty barbaric as you need 2 different codes, and God help you if you have trouble with this. I personally had no serious problems, but I have heard some horror stories about trying to install this product.

Wow. Can I say that again? Wow. Amplitube 2 sounds absolutley incredible. As someone who has played through a number of Fenders and Marshalls, I have to say that this sounds just as good and dare I say in many ways sounds even better than "the real thing". What I mean by that is this. No amp simulator can ever capture the exact sound of say a typical Marshall JCM 800 because every JCM 800 is slightly different than the others. It is very difficult to tell the difference between this and the real thing when heard solo, and when heard in a mix it is near impossible. What really seperates Almplitube 2 from the rest of the pack is its responsiveness to dynamics. Any guitar player will tell you that some of the sweetest guitar sounds are produced at that point where the sound starts to break up and distort. Amplitube captures this prefectly as its amps are clean when played quietly, and as the signal increases in volume the "tubes" get that saturated tone. The diversity of Amplitube is also a knockout feature. Every style is encompassed here as you can choose from Fenders, Marshalls, a Vox, a Mesa-Boogie, and several others.

Looking at overall value, Amplitube 2 is probably one of the best pieces of software available today. This is truly a "must buy" for anyone with a decent interface. I say that because to truly use Amplitube, you need an interface with very low latency. One of the best things about this is that it is useful for the studio and for the stage. In the studio, don't worry about micing amps and having to redo guitar parts because the sound used doesn't fit in the mix. "Reamping" the guitar part is a producer/engineer's dream! As for the stage, there are a number of creative ways to use this product. You can choose to bring your DAW and interface to a show and plug directly into the board which avoids having to lug a heavy amp. Or you can do what I do. Run the guitar into Amplitube and disable Amplitube's speaker cab using only the amp head. Then take that signal into an insert or a line-in on a solid state guitar amp. (Solid state wont color the sound and will act only to power your own cab) Its just like hooking up a Marshall or Mesa head to your cab! Here's another tip, hide your DAW and interface somewhere out of sight on stage and watch as people come up to you and ask, "Dude how did you get that sound from that lowly Crate amp?" Much fun, much fun. All things considered though, Amplitube is worth shelling out $320 for.

have yet to be able to get it to work in standalone mode. tons of hiss and i can only hear my dry signal. works fine in pro tools.

tone is subjective. i DID get a laugh out of some of the presets, particularly the brian may one. how embarassing!! LOL i didn't buy it for the presets though. if i could go back in time, i think i would have gotten the sansamp psa 1 plugin and some stand alone mooger fooger effects because this thing is WAY cpu hungry. i can run upwards of 25 plugins from other software developers without my system giving so much as a hiccup whereas if i run just 4 of this plugin, my system starts choking. bit of a disappointment. a plugin doesn't have to require tons of cpu in order to sound good. the psa 1 is proof of that.

i got mine new (and cheap) on ebay for only $187 to my door. i'm sorry, but that's all i think it's worth.

I have been playing guitar since 1987. Played and owned most of the great tube amps. I have a Dell 2 Gig machine with an EMU 0404 soundcard. I run this through a PA. I use a guitar pod for a pre-amp most of the time. I use this mainly with Acid 5 or standalone.

Very easy, just go and find your sound.

I personally only like the clean tones of this. I compare it to Guitar Rig 2 and feel this has better more real sounding clean tones. I think the distortions are good too, but I find that they aren't necessarily as usable???

Anyway, when I want my strat to sound like a strat through a twin, and I don't want to get out the mics, this is very dreamy.

I really think that this and or Guitar Rig are completely awesome and kill all the amp modelers out there. I think that if you could find a great laptop that was not fragile and load this software, you could be a tone god at any of your gigs.

I've been playing for 15 years, blues and rockish sort of stuff.

This is extremely easy to use if you generally know how to use computers. One thing however is that you should know how to tweak your sound card (and have a good one while you're at it). Also, this seems to work better using ASIO, on some settings and on one of my computers I just heard pops and heavily delayed sounds. Also the standalone seems to not work as well as when using it through some other program (I'm using it through adobe audition).

So setting it up can be a pain.

Sound quality is absolutely excellent. I actually also tried the jimi hendrix version and I was honestly blown away by exactly how realistic the sounds were (and it's basically the same software with just different amp models and different pedals). The capabilities are amazing, the voodo chile reverbed fuzz tone sounded exactly like what I've been trying to get for so many years... the clean castles made of sand present was just such a full and beautiful clean sound... the univibe pedal was instant machine gun...

but let me get back to amplitube. It recreates really well real tube sounds, and many other classic sounds. The models sound really great and you really can't tell the difference between them and miking a real amp once it's in the mix. I'm actually having more fun playing this than my real tube amps at the moment.

overall, it's great. If you have the computer and the sound card it requires (oh yes, and the money) it's definitely worth it.

I've been playing guitar since the early 70's, both professionally and as a hobby. I currently use a Fender Strat SSH and a Parker NiteFly Mojo as my main guitars (I own a few others that include a couple of Les Pauls and Ibanez). I have played through many amps over the years, but unlike the purists, I have never shied from trying everything that new technology has to offer. In recent years I have owned and tried just about every modeler that exists (Pod XT, Tonelab, Boss GT-8 being the most recent ones) and found them somewhat capable, but always lacking in true amp sound and/or dynamics. I also looked at software and actually own Native Instruments Guitar Rig 2 that came as part of the Komplete 4 package that I acquired about a year ago (I play around with keyboards and sequencers to create songs, in this department Native instruments is the best). I was fairly impressed with the clean sounds that Guitar Rig could produce, but felt that the high gain sounds were not much different than the modelers: still lacked that something that only a tube amp can produce. Then I heard about Amplitube 2.1 and downloaded the demo. I installed it into my #2 desktop which is a two year old Pentium 4 3GHZ machine that has an E-MU 1616M Microdoc connected to an E-MU 1010 PCI card (my #1 desktop is a recently self-built Core2Duo 2.4 GHZ machine with 2GB of RAM. I keep this machine pristine, which means I don't install demo's or even put it on the network because it is 100% dedicated to music production with Digidesign 003 Rack).

I did not read the manual but figured out just about everything in this program in about 10 minutes. So, it is very easy to use (once you have your computer and interface setup correctly, of course).

I did not use any presets, so I cannot comment on those. Instead I went directly into tweaking the sound. The clean based on a Fender Deluxe Reverb sounded superb, better than anything I had heard before. For this alone I decided that this plugin would be worth the bucks. Then I switched to the first Plexi model. Wow! it brought back memories of the 1968 Marshall that I used to own in my early days of playing. I had been craving this sound for a long time but never brought myself to buying another Marshall. Now I have finally found it in a software package. So, already very excited, I tried the modern high gain and again was blown away by the realistic sound. Compared to any of the modelers or Guitar Rig, this thing just blew them all away. Granted, it may not sound exactly like a Marshal or a Mesa, but this thing sounds as close as anything I have heard. I played around with the effects and most of them are also excellent (I did not try the Wah-Wah since i did not have my FCB1010 controller hooked up). Since nothing is perfect, I will give it a well deserved nine (I have not given any modeler or guitar plugin a nine before).

I went out to my local Guitar Center the very next day and bought this software. If you have a computer and an interface, go buy this thing. At least download the demo. You will not be disappointed. For $320 it is the biggest steal of all time. By the way, I compared the CPU usage of this and Guitar Rig and Amplitube seemed to generally use about 30% less than Guitar rig, staying below 30% of CPU at all times. Of course, this is not a real test since it will vary based on the effects and routings that you use. Nevertheless, it does pretty well.