This post will probably not be interesting to anyone except those who obsess over electric guitar tones. Even then, it’s a bit esoteric. You have been warned.
I’ve been trading around guitar gear for years. The search for the perfect tone is an obsession few understand, comparable to an audiophile spending large amounts of money chasing the “perfect” sound system. Arriving would be boring (and impossible) – it’s all about the journey. Many times have I waited for the latest overpriced gadget to be delivered, like a puppy in the window, only to be heartbroken when it didn’t sound the way I expected.
For many years now I’ve actually used one piece of gear almost continuously. It’s been a mainstay in my rigs since 2012. The Ethos Overdrive fits me extremely well. It’s compact and sounds the way I want. I like that it’s invented and made by one guy in New England rather than a big corporation.
The Ethos is modeled on the Dumble sound. The real amps go for nearly $100,000. There are less than 300 in existence. As you can guess, lots of players try to chase this sound, and gear manufacturers are happy to facilitate that.
What has fascinated me lately is WHY I like that sound. Can the same sound be achieved with extremely cheap gear, or am I just biased? Could I, or anyone else, tell the difference between the “real thing” and a cheap copy? What are the individual components, and how important are each?
After playing through this gear for so many years, I’d like to think I could tell the difference between it and something else – especially if I was playing my guitar through it!
Recently I got a MOD Dwarf. I like it for a few reasons. It’s compact and works well with Linux – in fact the unit itself is just a Linux computer that runs LV2 plugins, many of them open source!
I made my own AIDA captures of all the Ethos settings I regularly use. This took many hours to get working locally – tweaking Python scripts and values, waiting all night for it to run them, and then extensively A/B testing each to make sure it was indistinguishable from the actual thing.
The end result is that I was able to craft a preset that allows me to sound pretty much the same as my Ethos for performances:
As a side note, I love the Dwarf editor. It’s browser-based, so it works on any OS. Very easy to use, no software to install.
I’m very impressed with the captures, but it got me thinking. Now that I had all these OD, EQ, IR, and amp models at my fingertips, could I make something that “sounded like me” with built-in, garden-variety LV2 plugins? And if they did differ a bit, might it be possible that I liked the sound *better* than my beloved Ethos? Scary questions.
So I did. As of today, this preset features a base Ethos model (my standard overdrive sound) and three different ways to sound “pretty close”:
So we have
- The base Ethos capture with cab sim
- SD-2 –> Mesa IR –> HP/LP filters
- SD-2 –> EQ based on Neo Creamback –> HP/LP filters
- SD-2 –> Built-in IR blend –> HP/LP filters
The thing with four buttons lets me toggle between these four. I’ve done this for hours, and sometimes the girls will help me blind test by clicking a random switch while I play guitar and try to guess. Despite my familiarity with my own gear, I have a bad track record of guessing. This feels both good (that I created the sounds to fool myself) and bad (my ears must be faulty).
The sounds can get uncannily close! Remember, there is no actual amp sim anywhere except the original capture. I’ve modeled the sound of a $100,000 amp with a few filters and a cheap overdrive pedal, and it’s darn close.
See if you can guess which is which! I used a looper to put the same exact thing through each chain. The first is my “reference” capture, my tweaked Ethos settings that I’ve gigged with for years, using the on-board cab sim. The rest are in random order.
Some things I’ve learned:
- Amount and character of overdrive is not hard to imitate
- Cab/IR makes biggest difference to overall sound
- The more distortion, the easier to imitate
- HP/LP filters are very important to my sounds
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