Guitar amp sims have gotten astonishingly good

Summary

Each amp comes with a specially selected set of cabinet and mic emulations, and in Paradise, you can use any amp with any set of mics and cabs. Want to pair a Fender Twin Reverb with a 4×12 Marshall cabinet miced by two SM57s? Go for it. You can have up to 10 effects units, five in front of the amp and five after it. The tone is astonishing. UA is well-known for its emulations of 1176 compressors, tape delays, and Lexicon reverb units, and all that gear has been shoved into Paradise. (Some of the controls are simplified, but this appears to be the “full-fat” version of these tools under the hood.) Plus, each amp allows you to control the amount of “room tone” captured by the mics, and this room simulation is terrifically convincing. Paradise hits the sweet spot—for me, at least—of offering options without overload. You can place five effects before the amp and cab and five after. The interface is large and clear, without chunky buttons and knobs, and it’s simple to create a new pedalboard and dial in a tone. It doesn’t hurt that Paradise comes with several hundred presets, which are very good indeed. While I think Paradise, Polychrome DSP, and NeuralDSP all edge out products like Amplitube on sound quality, they really win by being more fun to use. Amplitube is a mess of a bazillion amps and effects that you can arrange in complex routing chains: splitting signals, running DIs, maneuvering virtual mics near virtual speaker cones, selecting room tone, and twiddling a bajillion almost illegible knobs. It’s too much. At some point, all the choice works against creativity. I whipped up two short demos in Paradise in a couple of hours, just to show the kinds of tones on offer here. (You can listen below.) One uses lots of 80s-style rock tones, while the other showcases some edge-of-breakup tones on the Dumble. No fancy gear was used, just a cheap PRS guitar and a generic Craigslist bass plugged directly into an audio interface in my office. Rock ‘n roll will never die! (...