Audio Assault Sigma v2 review (with video sample)

 

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to review the version 2 of a virtual amp which has already been reviewed on these pages, the Audio Assault Sigma!

Sigma is a plugin which is a bit special in the Audio Assault lineup, I think it started a new course in terms of interface, features and overall sound quality, and this version 2.0 adds a new interface, more channels (now they are 3), 2 more knobs (2 independent gain controls for low and high frequencies), a booster, more impulse responses by Seacow Cabs, a Delay and a Reverb. 

The amp structure is basically the same, but these extra features allows you to fine tune your tone much more, adding a lot of versatility, especially in the low gain territories.

The new impulses are also quite usable, as you can hear from the sample (I have used the Sigma 4x12 one), and all in all I think it's a great upgrade which makes it, in its price range, one of the best virtual amps on the market.

Now Sigma comes also with an array of presets which have the function of showcasing the amp's versatility, although I would have preferred to have them called with a name that describes them, instead of a number.

My only suggestion is to add a tuner and to optimize a bit the stereo version: usually one puts the stereo version of a guitar plugin in the guitars stereo buss to save some cpu, but in the case of this plugin it's less cpu hungry if used in 2 mono instances, in the individual guitar tracks. 

This is a really good plugin, especially for metal tones but also for clean ones, and I suggest everyone to download the demo version and try it out!

Thumbs up!

Specs:

- 3 channels: Clean, Crunch and Lead

- 3 stompboxes: Gate, Boost and Drive

- Rack Fx: 9 band equalizer, Delay, Reverb

- Dual cab IR loader with dozens of Seacow Cabs IRs

- Preset manager

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How to remove fizziness from distorted guitars using a multiband compressor

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to tackle a problem that is typical of distorted guitars, but that can be applied to anything distorted, from a bass to a synth: the excessive high-end fizz, which often can be very bothering, especially if we're using an amp simulator with a lot of gain.

The problem with fizz, that buzzing, harsh part of the sound that hides between the presence area (2k to 8k) and the high end (10k to 12k) is the fact that it's quite hard to pinpoint exactly by doing frequency hunting, because we can can take down some notch here and there, but the fizz can remain pervasively a bit everywhere, and if we take down the whole area the tone loses presence and bite, disappearing in the mix.

How do we solve? The ideal is to change tone until we find one that gets us 80% there, so that we are happy also without doing acrobacies, but this is a privilege that not all mix engineers can have, and sometimes we're forced to work with guitar tracks which are already processed, and sounds super fizzy.

First the highest part of the fizz we can roll it off with a low pass filter set to 10-12k to taste, until we get rid only of the useless part, but then when we arrive to the part from 2k to 8/10k we need to adopt a different strategy, or we'll murder the good part of our tone trying to clean it.

Then when it's time to find the fizz in the presence area, we need to take a Multiband compressor and create just a band between 2k and 3k, just to start, and in this it would be VERY useful if we had a solo function to hear only the affected part, then we start move this band left and right listening to the band in solo until we find exactly the part in which there is the "bulk" of the harshness.

Once the area is perfectly set, we need to set the comp with a fast attack and fast release, and then just take down the threshold until we hear some gain reduction in that area; now we need to hear it in context, so listen to the tone (not just to the compressed band) and raise or lower the threshold according to how much fizziness you want to remove. 

Finally, if we have a lot of palm mutes we can also create a band between 65hz and 250hz to tame the low end recoil (thus freeing up headroom), so that we'll clean up the guitar even more with just one plugin.

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Audio Assault AHM 5050 (with video sample)

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to review a new amp simulator which emulates the most famous metal amplifier in the world: the EVH 5150, both in 6L6 and EL34 version: the Audio Assault AHM 5050!

This amp sim enters a very crowded arena, since this is the most used amp for many genres of metal (from thrash to the most extreme ones), and there are already many contenders to the throne of the best 5150 simulator, like the STL Andy James, the Peavey Revalver, the TSE X50 and the Neural DSP Nolly (although I think this one emulates a customized version).

This Audio Assault take on the legendary 5150 has some ace up its sleeve: it lets you blend between the 6L6 and el34 power tubes seamlessly with the turn of a knob, which is a very cool idea and recreates well the character of the two versions (and all the shades in between), it comes loaded with a wealthy amount of presets and impulse responses, which lets you have fun right away, it has several effects, booster, drive, gate, delay, reverb and so on, and basically the only thing missing to make it a real Swiss army knife is a chorus (in the rack section). 

Tone-wise it has its own character (to be noted that you can also switch between the standard version and the "My Amp" one, which alterates some value, because every amp sounds a little different since all electronic components have a certain tolerance), and the "my amp" function slightly alterates randomly some value, different for each version, to make each instance of the plugin unique.

How does it sound? This is one of the best sounding Audio Assault amps, because, besides the fact that the original hardware is one of the most balanced, tight and ductile amps in the world, the plugin manages to recreate that midrange, that can go easily from honky to scooped but never muddy, that tightness in the low end and the clear attack which are the trademarks of the EVH 5150.
The only thing I would still work on are the impulse responses, which sometimes sound a bit boxy and too mid rangey (in this video sample I'm using an external IR).
Impulse responses are today the single most important thing in an virtual amplifier, they can make or break a tone, and in this the competitors (especially STL Tones and Neural Dsp) are a bit forward.
Nevertheless this plugin is one of the best bang for the buck around and will give you a tons of fun, and good tones in the studio!

Thumbs up!

Specs:

- 3 channels: Clean, Crunch and Lead

- Balance Knob: it lets you dial precisely the tone between the 6L6 and the EL34 version

- 3 stompboxes: Gate, Boost and Drive

- Dual Cab Loader with numerous IRs

- FX Rack with Eq, Delay and Reverb

- Standard amp / My amp function

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What's the difference between a limiter and a clipper?

Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are going to talk about a topic that has been the center of a lot of discussions in the world of audio engineers online: is it better to use a Clipper or a Limiter?

The limiter as we know works as a Compressor, only with extreme settings (a fast attack and a ratio of 20:1 up to infinity): the part of the wave that surpasses the threshold is dragged down, producing the classic "squashed" tone.

The Clipper instead doesn't drag the sound down, it choppes it off like it used to do (unwanted) when back in the hardware era a signal was hitting an analog-to-digital converter too hard.
This as we have seen in our article about clippers creates a double edge sword: it doesn't sound as squashed and it allows us usually to raise the volume more than with a limiter, but one single 0.1% too much and it will create aliasing and distortion so bad that we will be sorely missing the limiter.

Using a clipper on a master allows us to raise the volume more than with a limiter, because this "shaving off" part of the tone forces the converter to overshoot and try to recreate the missing part of the sound, and if it's reasonably small, it manages.

My opinion is that if we have our dynamic range under control (meaning that there are no instruments that randomly peak like 6db above the rest here and there through the track), for example we have been good with clip gain, buss compression etc, it's better to use a clipper, it will allow us to reach the same levels of volume of a limiter if not more, avoiding the usual squashed effect.
If instead we have a quite dynamic mix and we want to preserve the dynamic excursion maybe it's better to go for a limiter, because the eventual peaks will be brought down without introducing heavy crackling.

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